Remember Love (Ravenswood #1)(91)

“Oh,” she said. “Did you?”

“You will laugh,” he warned her as he spread his hand beneath one of the handkerchiefs and turned toward her.

“Laughter is good,” she told him, and leaned over his hand as he carefully turned back the fold of linen that covered four leaves, one still summer green, the others varying shades of autumn.

“I found them early this morning,” he told her. “They were out on the back side of the pavilion hill. Beneath our tree.”

Good God, it had seemed such a good idea at the time. But why would she want to be reminded of that night? And with a few half-dead leaves.

She was running a finger very lightly over them. She lifted her face to smile at him. “I asked for something extraordinary,” she said.

“Four leaves?”

“Yes,” she said. “I will press them and keep them all my life.”

“You said spring always comes,” he said. “We were standing on the bridge outside the village.”

“Yes,” she said.

He set the handkerchief down very carefully and picked up the other, which he set on her upturned hand. “I found these last evening beside the bridge,” he told her. “But they seemed incomplete in themselves. So I went out to our tree this morning.”

She opened the linen folds and looked down at the smooth, flat oval stone inside, resting on a pure yellow leaf. On the stone he had painted words. “Spring always comes.”

He heard her swallow. And gulp down what could only be a sob. She looked up into his face, smiling, her eyes swimming with tears. “You could try forever, for the rest of our lives,” she said. “You could spend a fortune on me. But you could never give me more precious gifts than these today, Devlin.”

Which was the daftest thing he had heard in a long time. Maybe ever. But . . . What if it was true? What if spring always did come? As well as all the other seasons, one by one?

There was a tap on the door as she set down her second gift beside the other one. The door opened a crack.

“The champagne will be flat if you do not come soon,” Lady Rhys said without actually poking her head around the door.

“Oh, Mam,” Gwyneth cried. “Do come and see my treasures.”

And Devlin had to endure the excruciating embarrassment of having both Lady Rhys and Sir Ifor bending over the table to look at five leaves and a painted stone while Gwyneth told them the story behind the objects.

A fabulously wealthy earl comes a-courting, he thought with an inward grimace and a fervent wish that the floor would open up and swallow him whole.

And to make matters worse, Idris had come to drape himself against the doorframe in order to wink at Devlin and then grin at him.

“Well, son,” Sir Ifor said, straightening up and beaming at his future son-in-law. “It would seem that after all you must have some Welsh blood running in your veins.”



* * *



—

Both the gig and the carriage were on the terrace outside the front doors when Devlin returned home after drinking two glasses of champagne and eating one slice of each type of cake—five of them—Lady Rhys had baked herself that morning because she had not been able to decide which would be best to celebrate the occasion.

“Mr. Ellis is taking Miss Ellis to play with the children of Mr. and Mrs. Cox,” the groom who was with the gig explained when Devlin looked at him with raised eyebrows. “I believe the younger Miss Cox has a birthday today.”

Devlin nodded. The carriage, he knew, would be taking his mother and Owen to his grandparents’ home for a farewell tea in honor of Owen’s leaving for his first term at Oxford next week. He had been hoping they would have left already.

But they were all gathered in the hall, he discovered when he stepped inside after relinquishing his curricle to another groom, who had seen him returning and come hurrying from the stables. Stephanie was there too. She must have been granted another afternoon off from the schoolroom.

Nobody looked to be in any great hurry to leave, though. Joy, wearing one of the frilly dresses Ben had bought for her in London, an improbably large bow anchored somehow among her very short curls, was running about the hall on her little legs, giggling and occasionally shrieking. Owen was in hot pursuit, though for all the length of his legs, he never quite caught up with her but clapped his hands on empty air and roared every time he came close and missed.

“She will be tossing her luncheon if you keep that up,” Ben was telling Owen while everyone else looked on, seemingly quite undismayed by the noise and the delay in their departure.

Then Owen spotted Devlin and stopped abruptly. “I say,” he said. “Where are you off to, Dev, looking like a Bond Street beau?”

“Are you coming to Grandmama and Grandpapa’s with us?” Stephanie asked.

Well. The moment was upon him, it seemed.

“I have just come from Cartref,” he told them.

“Cartref?” Owen stared at him in some puzzlement. “To see Idris? Looking like that?”

“Gwyneth was here yesterday, Owen,” Ben said. “Remember?”

Owen looked Devlin over again. “You went courting, Dev?”

“Gwyneth has done me the honor of accepting my marriage proposal,” Devlin said curtly.

“I knew it,” Stephanie cried, clasping her hands to her bosom. “I came and told you yesterday, did I not, Mama?”