He looked at her face, tilted up to the slight breeze, and smiled. “It was. And thank you—you were a great help.”
The smile she sent his way was rich with satisfaction.
Deservedly so. He couldn’t understand why he hadn’t encouraged her to assist him in the political sphere long before now. Her extensive social skills made it easy for her to guide conversations, and she often accomplished the task without her interlocutors being aware of it.
Largely thanks to her assistance—and that of Lady Kilroy, too—he now had a much deeper understanding of the likely issues that might arise in bringing forward some of the bills the Prime Minister was hoping to introduce. When next he spoke with Lansdowne, he would have quite a bit to report.
They reached the carriage, where Dennis the footman was proudly holding open the door. With a flourish, Devlin offered Therese his hand. With a beaming smile that declared she was entirely delighted with her morning, she placed her fingers in his and, smiling in much the same way, he handed her up, then followed.
In the small hours of the following morning, Devlin lay sprawled beside Therese in the comfortably rumpled expanse of her bed.
From the soft, steady huff of her breathing, from the bonelessness of her limbs, she was still sunk deep in the oblivious sleep of extreme satiation.
A state in which Devlin, too, had been immersed, until a persistent, nagging question had speared through the pleasured fogs and dragged him to awareness.
He didn’t know what had brought it to the fore or why it seemed so important, but Does she love me? suddenly blazed in his mind.
He couldn’t stop himself from reacting—from rapidly reviewing their past, especially their interludes over recent weeks, most especially their activities over the past hours.
As the memories scrolled through his mind, the unforgiving tension that had, out of nowhere, gripped him eased and fell away. Given how she’d behaved over the past hours, only a highly insecure man could possibly doubt that she loved him, and surely he wasn’t such a man?
She loved him. She had that night, through the past weeks, through the past months, for the past five years and more. She’d given him her love from the first; he’d always known that. Why, then, the question?
He honestly didn’t know, and that left him just a touch uneasy.
Hoping to banish the unsettling feeling, he turned his mind to assessing the progress he’d made in his campaign. He’d drawn closer to her socially, finding ways to spend more time by her side. He’d helped her with Martin, and she was openly happy over how well he and her younger brother were getting on. And—admittedly somewhat to his surprise—he’d found it easy to interest her in the business and political aspects of his life; indeed, he could foresee them functioning as a much closer partnership in those arenas from now on.
All those small but deliberate steps had gone better than he’d hoped, and he’d been able to deliver an unexpected gift in arranging for her to see the special performance at the opera house. That had made her exceedingly happy.
Making her happy was now the standard against which he measured any potential gift, outing, or event. If it would make her happy, excellent. If not, what was the point?
Looking back over recent weeks, he felt an undeniably deep relief that he’d been able to accomplish what he had without in any way upsetting or damaging the relationship they’d already enjoyed. He’d been able to build on that without in any way weakening it.
He turned his head and looked at Therese. She remained asleep, her expression—relaxed and unanimated by the elemental energy of her conscious mind—that of the gentlest Madonna, her face framed by the golden web of her disarranged hair.
He drew in a slow breath, conscious of the upswell of feelings that rose inside him—familiar, yet stronger, deeper, more powerful. Those feelings had always been there between them whenever they’d come together in passion, but in recent weeks, at least for him, their continuing intimacy and what, through that, they shared with each other had only grown more precious. More infused with meaning and feeling that reached to his soul.
He hoped she felt the same.
Looking at her, wondering and hoping, he allowed the question hovering in his mind to form. Was he ready to take the final step and open her eyes?
How?
He thought of the possible ways. The only one that seemed realistic was via some sort of declaration.
He tried to envision that, to formulate the words he would use to explain what he’d done and how he wished to correct his mistake, but at that point, his mind balked and halted.
Much like a horse refusing a fence.
He frowned. He wasn’t yet ready; that much seemed clear.
He grimaced. While he was excellent at acting on the fly and, in pursuit of his immediate best interests, taking advantage of situations as they occurred, long-term planning wasn’t his strong suit. Indeed, that weakness had significantly contributed to his current dilemma; he hadn’t foreseen changing his mind over acknowledging that their marriage was, in fact, a true love-match.
Now…
The truth was that it would probably be wise to play to his strength and assume that, once he’d reached the point of being ready to declare his love to Therese, some scenario, some situation, would arise, and the necessary words and actions would occur to him. Following that approach was, usually, how he got the best, most desirable results.
He refocused on her features, then softly sighed and forced himself to ease from the bed.
After collecting his robe and shrugging into it, he crossed to the connecting door to his room, opened it, and walked through. He carefully closed the door, then went to his cold and lonely bed and climbed between the chilly sheets.
Of one thing he was very sure; he was getting exceedingly tired of greeting the dawn alone.
Chapter 8
As she had no morning engagements, Therese elected to take her morning tea with the children in the nursery.
The large L-shaped room took up a significant portion of the attic, with the long arm running down one entire side of the house and the smaller arm stretching halfway across the front. The schoolroom, where the children spent most of their days, occupied the smaller arm, with wide windows affording an excellent view over the tops of the trees in the park. Therese glanced that way and saw the distant glass panels of the soon-to-be-dismantled Crystal Palace winking in a stray beam of autumn sun.
“See, Mama?” The boys had been drawing, and Spencer proudly held up his effort. “It’s Nobbin on the lawn at the Priory.”
Nobbin was Spencer’s pony. Therese studied the oddly shaped lumpy brown figure with all the admiration her eldest son might expect. “It’s a very good likeness, my darling. You’ll be drawing as well as your great-uncle Gerrard any day now.”
Spencer beamed. Therese suggested he put the sheet aside to show his father later.
Also seated at the low table beside which Therese sat, Rupert hunched over his artistic effort and heaved a disgruntled sigh. As Spencer took his drawing to set it on the wide window ledge, Rupert looked up at Therese with weary resignation. “I tried to draw Pippin, but I just can’t seem to get him right.”
Pippin, of course, was Rupert’s pony. Therese smiled reassuringly. “Let me see.”