He pulled her on top of him. “Tell me, my very demanding lady, when did you finally realize that you absolutely cannot live without me?”
She glanced at him askance. “Have I ever come to such a maudlin realization?”
“Yes, you have,” he answered, cheeky and confident. “Now tell me when.”
She rubbed her palm on the beginning of his stubble and thought about it. “Possibly when you told me you’d hold dinner for me before I left. Also possibly when Prince Narcissus took a knife to his pride. Again, possibly, the first time I learned of the existence of Lake Sahara. But definitely when I remembered the days I spent in a coma.”
She recounted her memory of those three days, of her frustration and helplessness, and, most important, of his lovely voice keeping her despair at bay.
He cupped her cheek and kissed her tenderly. “All I wanted was for you to not feel alone. And to love you as I’d always meant to.”
She returned the kiss. “All I wanted was to wake up and tell you I love you.”
They kept kissing. His body changed, again ready for love.
She broke the kiss and licked the corner of his lips. “And now that I’ve told you I love you, we can at last turn our minds to truly important matters.”
He raised a brow. “Such as?”
“Such as when you will have your next smutty story ready for me.”
He laughed. “That is indeed the pressing question of our time.”
“So when will it be ready?” she whispered into his ear.
He rolled her beneath him and kissed her again. “Soon, darling, very soon.”
EPILOGUE
The wedding of Helena Charlotte Fitzhugh and David Hillsborough, Viscount Hastings, was not the wedding of the Season—understandably, since the Season had already ended. But in scope, attendance, and the amount of gossip it generated, taking place long after the couple had been established to have eloped, it rivaled any wedding of the Season in recent memory.
The bride wore a blindingly white wedding gown. The groom dripped with diamonds and pearls—diamond cuff links, diamond stickpin, diamond shirt studs, and a mother-of-pearl pocket watch. The ladies of the bride’s family wept openly during the ceremony, and her brother was seen dabbing surreptitiously at his eyes.
To mark this momentous day, the bride and the groom each prepared a gift for the other. Given the grandeur of the occasion, one might be forgiven for guessing those gifts to be comprised of legendary works of art, extraordinary pieces of jewelry, and perhaps exquisite ancient manuscripts. But one would be wrong.
The groom gave the bride a miniature model of a dirigible named Hastings’s Pride. The bride returned an even less costly present: a wooden sign, the sort to be found everywhere at crossroads and near landmarks.
This particular sign was staked into place by the pond at Easton Grange. One side of the sign read, OLD TOAD POND, the other, LAKE SAHARA.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Bride of Larkspear, Hastings’s smutty love letter to Helena, is available in its entirety at your preferred vendor of fine e-books.
The text of Helena’s book on publishing is borrowed From Manuscript to Bookstall: The Cost of Printing and Binding Books, with the Various Methods of Publishing Them Explained and Discussed, a volume published in 1894 by Arthur Dudley Southam, now in the public domain.
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Beguiling the Beauty
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Cambridge, Massachusetts
1896
The ichthyosaur skeleton at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology was incomplete. But the fish lizard was one of the first to be found on American soil, in the state of Wyoming, and the American university was understandably eager to put it on exhibit.
Venetia Fitzhugh Townsend Easterbrook stepped closer to look at its tiny teeth, resembling the blade of a serrated bread knife, which indicated a diet of soft-bodied marine organisms. Squid, perhaps, which had been abundant in the Triassic seas. She examined the minuscule bones of its flappers, fitted together like rows of kernels on the cob. She counted its many rib bones, long and thin like the teeth of a curved comb.
Now that this semblance of scientific scrutiny had been performed, she allowed herself to step back and take in the creature’s length, twelve feet from end to end, even with much of its tail missing. She would not lie. It was always the size of these prehistoric beasts that most enthralled her.
“I told you she’d be here,” said a familiar voice that belonged to Venetia’s younger sister, Helena.
“And right you are,” said Millie, the wife of