cutting her off before she had a chance to deflect him from his purpose. ‘I never meant you to ever know I’d written that stupid list. It was only a means to help me get my thoughts together. And my friends, seeing how low I was at the prospect of getting married, made it all into a bit of a joke. The thing is...’ he raised her hand to his mouth and kissed it ‘...it was a meaningless piece of nonsense. Whereas the one you wrote...’
Letting go of her hand, he dug into his pocket for the list she’d written.
She gasped when he unfolded it and she saw what it was, her eyes widening in horror.
‘You raised some serious points,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘Which I fully intend to answer.’
‘I really wish you wouldn’t! I’ve already said I was wrong about you being unkind and inconsiderate.’
‘We’ll skip over the bit about not having any money as well then, shall we?’
Her hand flew to the pearls about her neck.
‘I know it was a bit wicked of me to buy jewels as well as the clothes you promised me...’
‘You really are the most absurd creature,’ he said with a tender smile. ‘If you wanted to punish me by squandering money on jewels—and I wouldn’t blame you if you did—you should have bought diamonds.’ He glanced down at the note. ‘I was trying to amend my behaviour, you know. I was trying to think of what you wanted, and to treat you better. I just made a mull of it.’
‘Yes, yes, I see that now....’
‘And as for the bit about family...’ he looked down at her, sorrowfully ‘...I can see how my original list made it sound as if I don’t care about family. It was another stupid, selfish thing we wrote down when we were trying to see if there was some way to make marrying anyone slightly less unpalatable....’
He cringed when he thought how crass his behaviour had been when he’d first started to match what he liked about her to the items on his list.
‘The thing with family is that you can wish them at the devil three-quarters of the time, but the minute you find one of them in real trouble, you have no choice but to help them out. And not just close family, either. Not even true family, come to that. Take Julia’s little brothers, for example. After spending the happiest school holidays in their home, with their father, I’ll never be able to turn my back when they need their school bills paying, or when they want sponsorship into their career, will I?’
‘Plenty of men could,’ she pointed out, a strange expression flitting across her face. ‘My own relatives didn’t think twice about turning me away.’
‘You’ve been on the receiving end of such shabby behaviour, you’ve come to expect nothing else. Even from me.’
‘Oh, please, please don’t take what I wrote so...seriously. I was angry when I wrote it. I didn’t mean the half of it.’
‘Yes. Well...’ He looked down at the scrap of paper in his hand. ‘I wrote mine when I was drunk. And before I met you, at that.’
His heart was beating so hard now, because what he said next, how Mary responded, was going to shape his whole future.
‘Tell you what I’d like to do,’ he said, fishing in his pocket for the list he’d written, before he’d known there could be a woman anywhere in the world like Mary. ‘I’d like to tear these lists up, scrap our original agreement altogether and make a fresh start.’
‘What do you mean? Scrap our agreement? Don’t you want,’ she said in a small, scared voice, ‘to be married to me any more?’
‘Mary. I want to be married to you more than anything. But not in the way we said. When we were both so convinced marriage couldn’t work we gave ourselves permission to walk away from it without even trying to smooth things out when we hit our first bumpy patch. Now, if you will just bear with me a minute, I have something I’d like you to consider.’
He reached into his pocket yet again.
‘I’ve written another list,’ he said, feeling his cheeks heating and his collar growing tight. ‘Setting down what I want from marriage, now that I understand a bit more what it’s really about.’
He cleared his throat.
‘“My perfect wife,”’ he said and glanced at Mary. She was sitting stock-still, her hands clasped on her knees, her dark eyes staring up at him with trepidation.
‘“My wife needs to be as tall as my shoulder. She will have straight dark hair that feels like bathing in silk at midnight.”’
He heard her gasp. Glanced up. Her hands were still clasped together, but they were at chest height now, not on her lap. And her eyes...
‘Brown eyes,’ he said, because he’d got this part off by heart. ‘That look right to the heart of me and accept me just as I am, because her own heart is so generous,’ he said, hoping it was true right now. But just in case it wasn’t, he lowered his gaze to the paper again, unwilling to say the rest in the face of any direct opposition.
‘“She won’t be afraid to work hard. She won’t be afraid of being poor. She will be a little shy and uncertain, but so responsive to my kisses that after a bit she will forget where she is and surrender to the waves of passion that break over us, drowning us both. She won’t care about my title. She would feel just the same about me if I never had one. She will judge everyone by a yardstick of kindness and generosity. She won’t care so much about her appearance that she would rebuff a child.” Oh, and one last thing,’ he finished, lowering the sheet, and making himself look her steadily in the eye, no matter what.
‘Her name must be Mary.’
A little sob escaped her throat. ‘I never knew you had it in you to be so...poetical.’
‘If I could write poetry,’ he scoffed, ‘I would have done. Setting all this down so it made any kind of sense took me hours and hours. But the thing is, you’re worth it, Mary. I want to court you. Woo you, if you like. Make this marriage one that’s full of romance, and...’ he gulped ‘...and love.’
‘Love?’
‘Yes, love. Don’t look so shocked. I don’t expect you to fall in love with me, the way I’ve fallen in love with you. Don’t suppose it’s possible. But I can stand that,’ he said, drawing himself up to his full height. ‘I can bear anything, so long as you don’t forbid me to love you.’
‘Of course it’s possible,’ she cried. ‘I’ve loved you practically from the very first night I saw you!’
‘From the...’ He shook his head. ‘No. You couldn’t have. You didn’t give me the slightest bit of encouragement. I had to get your cousins twisting your arm to even get you to come out sightseeing with me.’
‘That’s because I was afraid.’
‘Afraid of me?’
‘Not of you. But the way you made me feel. I’d never thought of any man in...that way before. I thought those sorts of feelings made a woman weak and vulnerable. It shocked me. Scared me. So I fought it. Tried to deny it.’
‘Right
