“I don’t mind being a fool for you,” she said. “I love you.”

There was no response behind her, and she rather thought there never would be one. So she clambered over the windowsill.

“Get in that carriage,” Piers said from behind her, nodding to a large one standing to the side, the horses blowing and stamping. “It’s the duke’s, given the crest.”

“Good-bye,” she said. “God bless.”

She left before he could say anything, because it wouldn’t be what she wanted to hear, and she was blinded with tears anyway.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Robert leaped down from the window after handing out Marguerite, but she refused to move. She was standing, frozen, listening to Piers’s voice emerging from the drawing room.

“We must go,” the duke said quietly, catching Marguerite’s hand to pull her away, just as their son said flatly, “I don’t want to marry you.”

“He is a fool,” Marguerite whispered, “Such a fool. Linnet is the one for him. There will never be another, not like her.”

But Robert drew her away, down the path toward the guardhouse, listening silently as she told him what he already knew: that Piers seemed to be determined to bring himself more unhappiness. That their son was unable to accept the woman whom he obviously loved, and who loved him.

She stopped talking only when they walked into the guardhouse’s sitting room. The interior of the little house didn’t look like a servant’s dwelling, but like the country home of a gentleman, albeit in miniature. The walls were hung with paintings and the room glowed with color, punctuated by a scarlet throw tossed over a settee before the fireplace.

“How odd,” Marguerite said, looking around. “From the outside, it looks quite rough, but in truth, it is charming. Look at that little sofa: surely that was in the small drawing room only last week?”

Robert had his own theories about why the house resembled a snug little nest, but he didn’t think Piers’s mother would appreciate the insight.

“You may leave now, Robert,” Marguerite said, pushing open the door to the bedchamber and poking her head inside. “I shall be perfectly comfortable here. The servants will tend to me, and if Piers becomes ill, you may depend on me to care for him.”

“I always knew you would,” he said, coming up behind her.

She looked over her shoulder, smiling. He had not kissed her again after the first time, unwilling to risk the chance that she might repudiate him for good. But they had talked and talked about the last few years, about how he had slowly emerged from an opium haze, only to realize that his family was lost to him. During the lonely years that followed, his only happiness was the certain knowledge that Marguerite was taking the very best possible care of their son.

“I know,” she said now, accepting it.

“If you become ill, Marguerite, what then?” He wrapped his arms around her, from behind, and dropped a kiss on her cheek. “What then?”

To his enormous pleasure, she didn’t pull away, but stayed in the circle of his arms. “Oh, I shan’t,” she said, with a perfect confidence that echoed Piers’s. “I am never ill.”

“I remember differently.”

“Never!”

“When you were carrying our son. Don’t you remember how ill he made you?”

She laughed at that, and actually leaned back into the circle of his arms, remembering. “How I came to detest that wretched green basin we kept in our bedchamber! I threw it away after he was born.”

“So I have seen you ill,” Robert said, holding her even tighter and daring to kiss her ear. “I cared for you then, remember? When you were ill in the middle of the night. And I shall be there to care for you again, if worse comes to worst. If Piers falls ill, we shall both be at his side.”

“Nonsense,” she said, pulling free and turning about. “What are you saying, Robert?”

Even the way she said his name, with her enchanting accent, made his heart thump. “I am saying that I shall not leave you,” he said steadily.

Her brows drew together. “That is foolish.”

“No.”

“Foolish,” she persisted.

For a moment he just stood looking down at her, and then he stated with absolute truth, “I shall never leave you again.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“If you throw me out of this house, I shall sleep on the path outside. If you return to the Continent without me, I shall follow you. I will build a willow hut at your gate; I will sleep under your window; I will be waiting for you at your own front door.”

Her hand went to her mouth, laughter escaping from behind her fingers. “You have lost your mind, Robert!”

He shook his head. “On the contrary: I have found it. I’m in love with you. I was always in love with you, always. Even when I couldn’t think straight, there was one thing I knew, even in an opium dream: that I loved you.”

“It is a tragedy that you could not remember your beloved ones the day Piers entered your study unexpectedly.” But her voice was not harsh.

“I will always, to my dying day, beg Piers to forgive me. But Marguerite . . . At this moment I don’t want to talk about Piers. He is now a grown man, a wonderful man, which is entirely to your credit. But you are not only Piers’s mother. You are my wife, the only woman I ever wanted to marry, and the wife of my heart, even though I behaved like a fool after you took Piers to France. You were perfectly right to leave.”

“You were un idiot,” she observed. Her eyes encouraged him, though.

“No one will ever love you as I do,” he said, catching her hands and bringing them to his lips. “No one ever has loved you the way I do. You are my heart and my life, Marguerite.”

A little smile played at the corner of her mouth, an enticing, utterly feminine smile.

“Take me back.”

His words seemed to hang in the air, to echo in the small house.

“I am sure what you did is unforgivable,” Marguerite said, finally. “All my friends say so.”

“They’re right. Don’t forgive me. Just—just take me back.” His fingers tightened on hers.

“And if I say no?”

“Then I shall leave this house.”

“And?”

“I will not allow you to be at risk for scarlet fever. I will be outside, should you need me. I will take the food from the servants so they cannot infect you.”

“You may get the fever yourself,” she said softly.

“I would die for you in a heartbeat.”

Hope had exploded from his heart and was pouring through his veins: a torrent of joy and fear and desire.

Marguerite took a step closer, pulled her hands free and wound her arms around his neck. She fit there as sweetly as she always had. “You may stay.”

He pulled her to him, put his cheek against her hair, closed his eyes. “Mon amour.”

“But I am not sure that I will marry you again,” she observed.

“I don’t care. We can live in sin for the rest of our lives.”

He heard a gurgle of laughter. “I am French. We are very prudent.”

“Prudent and delectable,” he whispered, his hands moving slowly down her narrow back.