Nurse with a Dream (24 page)

“It was necessary. Diana Lovell was going to spread a funny story about it. Alan Broderick and his little blonde nurse. She was going to tease you about it at the Club—unmercifully, she said. She told me so, her own self. Getting engaged to Guy was the perfect way of killing that story stone dead.”

“Not the perfect way. The perfect way was getting engaged to me. And now you have. We are engaged, aren’t we? And I don’t intend to wait for you—at least not very long. I’m going to fly to France and ask your grandfather for your hand in marriage.”

Her eyes shone with happiness. “He’d appreciate that. How dear of you to think of it. It’s old-fashioned and charming, and makes me feel cherished and somehow precious.”

“So you are. And may I remind you we haven’t kissed properly yet.” He held her closely, kissed her deeply and long, and this time there was no interruption. Only the soft sigh of the wind in the tree-tops and the fluting of birds in spring.

“There will always be people,” he said at last. “Sick people, cruel people, demanding people—and, of course, our friends. We shall never belong to each other wholly, because we can’t put ourselves in a glass case like a French clock. But they will not destroy our love.”

Her voice was shaken with tenderness, with laughter and delight. “A glass case is for a princess in a fairy story. Our love is real, because we are real people. No, they will not destroy our love, my dearest heart.”

He took her hand and led her out of the wood; to whatever awaited them of happiness and grief, pain, joy and fulfilment, work and duty. And because they had the precious gift of love and trusted each other utterly, their hands clung together and they were not afraid of the future.