Remember Love (Ravenswood #1)(12)

“Splendid!” Gwyneth laughed.

What the devil sort of fairy tales had Stephanie been reading? Devlin wondered.

“Don’t elope, Steph,” he said, smiling at her and patting her hand. “I want to be at your wedding. Proud brother and all that.”

“You will wait forever, then.” She sighed and lost her look of rapt ecstasy. “No one will ever want to marry me. Unless it is because I am Lady Stephanie Ware, daughter of the Earl of Stratton, and rich. No one will ever fall in love with me. I am sorry about that, Dev, for you are the eldest and will therefore have to look after me all through my spinsterhood.”

“I will gladly look after you for an eternity if needs be,” he told her.

“I think you may be pleasantly surprised, Stephanie,” Gwyneth told her. “I think it altogether possible that the handsomest man in the world—and the most dashing and discerning—will fall very deeply in love with you and sweep you off your feet.”

Stephanie made that puffing sound with her lips, but then she chuckled. “And the man in the moon may fall off it,” she said, “and crash in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”

“And on that note we had better get Gwyneth to the church before Sir Ifor and Lady Rhys grow tired of waiting for her and she has to walk home,” Devlin said as he stood up.

“We would take her in the curricle, silly,” Stephanie said. But she drained her glass and jumped to her feet.

The three men with whom the earl had been talking were still outside the inn when they left. Mrs. Shaw had gone on her way, though. So had their father, Devlin noticed.

Four children were out on the village green, to one side of the duck pond, throwing a ball from hand to hand. One of them waved to Stephanie, and she waved back and darted across the grass toward them, her braids bobbing against her shoulders.

“I’ll see you by the curricle, Dev,” she called over her shoulder.

He offered his arm to Gwyneth.

“You really do not need to escort me to the church, Lord Mountford,” she said.

“I am to be abandoned by both my female companions, then, am I?” he asked her. “In full view of half the village? My reputation will be in tatters.”

She smiled and took his arm after all. “I do love Stephanie,” she told him.

“So do I,” he said. “I just wish she loved herself a little more. But she looks in a mirror and, instead of seeing herself, she sees a fat child. Are you going to fear for Nick and worry about him after he joins his regiment?” he asked before he realized the question would leave his lips.

“Of course,” she said. “The situation with Napoleon Bonaparte is getting nastier by the day. There are bound to be open hostilities soon, and the silly boy—man—is so eager to be a part of it all that sometimes I could shake him.”

“He does know, though,” Devlin said, “that war is serious business.”

“Yes,” she said. “He does. Oh, of course he does. I do him an injustice when I call his enthusiasms silly. Sometimes, though, I wish it was women who ruled the world. We would do so much better than men.”

“Only, perhaps, because women do not have power,” he said. “Perhaps if they did, they would soon begin to wield it as men do.”

“Oh dear,” she said. “Power really does corrupt, then?”

“I think perhaps it does,” he said. “Not many people can hold firm to the noble ideal that power ought to be used in the service of those who do not have it.”

This, he thought, was the longest conversation he had ever had with Gwyneth Rhys. And he was sounding as though someone ought to pick him up and shake the dust off him. Was it any wonder she had never liked him?

They had arrived outside the church. The doors stood open, and organ music spilled out.

“I think,” she said, and he felt a bit breathless because she was smiling and looking directly at him, “all men should learn to play the organ or the cello or harp and pour all the passion of their soul into music. Or some other form of art. The world would surely be a better place. But since we do not live in a perfect world and I daresay my mother is feeling very hungry after missing luncheon, I had better go in there and suggest we all go home. Thank you for the lemonade, Devlin, and for your escort here to the church.”

He had always noticed the slight lilt of a Welsh accent in her voice, though it was far less pronounced than it was with her mother and father, who often spoke Welsh to each other. He had not fully realized until today, though, how much it was part of her attraction. She had a low-pitched speaking voice to match her contralto singing voice. She had just called him Devlin.

He watched her disappear inside the church before he turned to look for Stephanie.

He drove her home by her favorite route and by far the longest one, over the crest of the hills between their land and Sir Ifor’s. He flatly refused to spring the horses, but she exclaimed enthusiastically anyway over the steep drop on both sides of the track in places while she clung to the armrest of her seat on the one side and his coat sleeve on the other. Much good that would do her if he pitched them over.

Gwyneth had never totally abandoned her wild nature when she was at home, though it had been less in evidence as she grew older. Or so it had seemed to Devlin, who had viewed it from afar during his visits to Idris. She had continued to go barefoot outdoors, to leave her hair unbound, to run free. He had seen her sometimes running at play with the dogs or sitting on a stile reading. Once she had been up in the not-so-low branches of a tree with her book, a cat perched on a branch beside her and within reach of her caressing hand. She moved, it had always seemed to him, with a natural grace rather than with the trained deportment of a lady. But only at Cartref. Elsewhere she behaved with accepted propriety—as she had this morning.