Three Little Secrets (33 page)

She smiled back, suddenly shy, and feeling very much as she had felt that day at the picnic, when Merrick had plucked her from the midst of her quarrelsome cousins and stolen her heart away. “I want to know, Merrick, if I might…if I might pay court to you? Now that you are…unattached?”

He laughed, straightened up, and came around to her side of the wall. “Well, I don’t know, lass,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest, and setting one bootheel back against the wall. “Would your intentions be honorable?”

Madeleine caught her hands behind her back. “Not…not especially, no,” she admitted. “They would be more or less like last night’s.”

Merrick’s smile widened to a grin. He looked quite breathtakingly handsome with his braces slipped off his shoulders, and his muscles aglow with the force of his exertions. His shirt hung from a tree limb in a little copse nearby, and the dusting of dark hair across his chest dwindled down his taut belly to vanish beneath the waist of his homespun trousers. He narrowed his silvery gaze and looked at her.

“Well, I’m a working man, Maddie,” he said, as if warning her off. “There’s no’ much pretty about me. I’ll have rough hands and sunburnt skin all the days of my life.”

“I…I was rather counting on it,” she said. “Besides, if it was pretty I wanted, I could always have courted your brother.”

At that, he bellowed with laughter. Then a moment of seriousness settled over them.

Madeleine began to wring her hands. “Oh, Merrick!” she said. “I wish—oh, I wish you had not burnt that paper!”

He shook his head a little sadly. “It was not a marriage we had, Maddie,” he said. “There was no use hanging on to something that never really was.”

She snagged her lip in her teeth. “Merrick, I lied,” she said. “I do not want to court you.”

His face fell. “Do you not?”

She shook her head. “No, though I will if that’s what it takes for me to prove myself to you.”

Again the narrowed eyes, the long, assessing look. “What is it, then, that you want, Maddie?”

“I want—I want to marry you,” she whispered. “I—I am asking you, Merrick, to marry me. To be my husband. To be Geoff’s father; to adopt him and give him the name he was meant to have. I am asking you to live with us, and to share our lives and our home forever. And if you will do it, I will be a good wife always. I will never falter. I…I will never let you down.”

He opened his arms, and she ran into them, hurling herself against the strong wall of his chest. “Be sure, Maddie,” he said into her hair. “Don’t throw yourself away on a stubborn, prideful man like me. You’re too fine a woman. Take your time, and be sure of what you want. Whatever it is, I’ll see you get it.”

“I
am
sure,” she cried. “I have been sure for thirteen years. I have never loved anyone but you, Merrick, and I never will. I—I need you. And Geoffrey needs you, too. If you want to wait, I will. I will wait another thirteen years.”

“Shush, Maddie.” And then he was kissing her, a long, languid kiss, infinite in its sweetness. Infinite in its promise. “And I have loved none but you,” he said when at last he lifted his lips from hers. “Aye, I’ll marry you, Maddie. You have only to name the day. Tomorrow would not be soon enough.”

“The twenty-second of July,” she said swiftly. “In the village church.”

He lifted both brows and looked down at her, his ice-blue eyes alight. “The twenty-second, eh?”

She looked up at him ruefully. “If we choose another day, Merrick, I’ll never get my mind round it,” she said. “For that’s the day I’ve always accounted my wedding day—and burnt paper or no, I’ll still be adding thirteen years to that anniversary every time we celebrate it.”

He kissed her again, swift and hard. “The twenty-second it is, lass,” he said. “But that’s almost a fortnight away. What’ll we do with ourselves ’til then?”

Madeleine drew back, let her eyes run down his half-naked body, then glanced at the little copse of trees. “What is that wonderful old Scots’ saying, Merrick? ‘Be happy whilst yer living, for ye’ll be a lang time dead?’”

“Aye, and well said,” Merrick agreed. “It’s one of Granny’s favorites.”

Madeleine looked him in the eyes, and smiled. “Well, I feel as if I have already been a long time dead,” she said without grief or despair. “And now, Merrick, I should like you to take me over there beneath that shady copse of trees, and make me very, very happy.”