sooner, but I’m saying it now. And if you’ll forgive me for being a damn fool not once but twice, I want to ask you to be my wife.”
“Let me assure you, Lady Julianna, he was quite prepared to attempt to scale the wall,” Kendall added, leaning from inside of the coach.
“You were going to climb up the wall?” Julianna asked, searching his face. “Up to my bedchamber?”
“That’s right,” Rhys replied. “I was just about to ask Kendall here if he happened to have a length of rope in his coach.”
“The answer is no,” Kendall chimed in.
Julianna squeezed Rhys’s hands. “Oh, Rhys, even contemplating scaling a wall is better than jumping up on a sideboard as far as I’m concerned. And I heard you wrestled with Papa over me.”
Rhys limped one step closer to her.
Julianna looked down at his foot, worry lining her countenance. “You’re limping. Your injury from France?”
“Yes, that and the toss into the street, courtesy of two of your father’s footmen. But I haven’t slept in days. I couldn’t stop thinking about you getting married to the wrong man.” Rhys dropped to one knee. “Julianna, here, in front of your father’s house, I am asking you to please become my wife.”
Tears slid down Julianna’s cheeks. “You do know my wedding is in a few hours?”
Rhys shook his head. “No, your wedding was supposed to be in a few hours. Now, I hope, it’s cancelled.”
“I’ll have to toss over Murdock, you know?” She stared at him intently.
“I know. But Murdock will live, and according to my friend Kendall, here, he’ll be better off for it.”
“He will. He truly will,” Kendall dutifully agreed, in a muffled voice from inside the coach.
Julianna pulled Rhys up, jumped into his arms, and hugged him. He lifted and spun her around in a somewhat lopsided circle and kissed her passionately.
“The truth is, I was going to call off the wedding this morning and come looking for you,” Julianna said as he kissed her.
He lowered her back to the ground and grabbed her hands again. “You were?”
“Yes, we’re both obviously too stubborn for our own good. We never should have let it go this long.”
“Agreed,” came Kendall’s voice.
“I love you, Rhys. I love you and I should have told you as much that day at the gamekeeper’s cottage.”
Rhys pulled her into his arms and hugged her. “I should have told you then, too.”
Inside the coach, Kendall cleared his throat. “May we go home now? I hate to mention it, but it’s quite late, and standing about in the street doesn’t seem particularly prudent, even if we are in Mayfair.”
Rhys and Julianna both laughed.
“Yes,” Rhys replied, “but you’ll have to drop us off at my town house, because I intend to thoroughly compromise Lady Julianna here so that her father has no choice but to approve of our marriage.” He paused and looked at Julianna. “With your permission, of course, my lady.”
“Permission enthusiastically granted, Your Grace,” she replied with a laugh, sparing a blush for Kendall, before allowing Rhys to help her up into the coach.
They set off at a fast clip toward Rhys’s nearby town house.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Minutes later, Kendall’s coach pulled to a stop in front of Rhys’s town house.
“I promise that if asked, I will insist that I know nothing about either of your whereabouts and that I have neither seen nor heard a thing tonight,” Kendall announced with a resolute nod.
“Thank you,” Rhys said to the earl, inclining his head as he helped Julianna alight from the coach.
“I will also neither confirm nor deny the rumor that is certain to begin that the Duke of Worthington tried to scale the wall of the Duke of Montlake’s town house in order to declare his love for Lady Julianna,” Kendall added.
Rhys frowned at his friend. “Why would you think such a rumor would start?”
“Because I intend to start it, of course,” Kendall replied with a wink before pulling the door to the coach shut and ordering his coachman to drive home.
Moments later, with Julianna by his side, Rhys managed to sneak into his own house. They giggled like school children as they stole up the darkened staircase to his bedchamber, Rhys still limping all the way.
Inside the large room, candles were lit on the mantlepiece and either side of the bed. A sapphire blue bedspread covered the enormous bed. Two chairs and a small chaise sat in front of the fireplace, which took up an entire wall. The opposite wall was comprised of windows