Mary Balogh - Slightly Scandalous

The last few yards were the most difficult, where solid stone became intermingled with earth and grass and loose pebbles and the dangers of finding a false foothold and sliding uncontrollably became very real. He remembered clinging motionless for maybe half an hour a body length from the top the first time he made the climb, unable for all that time to persuade himself to move a muscle while telling himself that he must before he disgraced himself by losing control of his bladder.

Freyja did not make the mistake of clinging too long and so becoming paralyzed. He had been trying to decide what to do if she did. He climbed after her over the lip of the very hollow where they had sat a few days ago and lay facedown on the grass, panting, beside her.

She was the first-after perhaps five minutes-to start laughing.

He joined her.

They lay side by side, clinging to the world as if they expected the force of gravity to expend itself at any moment, and shook and snorted with laughter.

"I believe I won," she said-a pronouncement of enormous wit that sent them off into renewed convulsions.

"I suppose," he said, "you are afraid of heights?"

"Always have been," she admitted.

They laughed so hard they wheezed for breath.

He turned onto his side to look at her, and she turned onto hers to look at him.

"You are not finding the night cold, are you?" he asked.

"Cold?" She raised her eyebrows. "Cold?"

They met in the middle of the space between them and were soon having tolerable success at trying to occupy the exact same space. Their arms were about each other, their mouths wide on each other's, kissing with the urgency of two madcaps who knew very well that they had just challenged death itself and won.

They came together soon afterward in a tangle of clothes and arms and legs, heat and wetness and enticing urgency at their shared core. They made love with vigor and passion and joy.

"My sweetest heart," he murmured, and other inanities of a like kind, whenever his mouth was free for speech.

"My love. Oh, my dearest love," she murmured back to him.

They exploded into completion together-perhaps all of three minutes after they had begun. As if now, their climb over, they were running a race. Which, appropriately enough, they finished in a dead heat.

They were panting again then, and she was laughing again into his shoulder as he wrapped one arm about her from beneath and both their cloaks about them from above.

"What was this?" he asked, his mouth against her ear. "Has my hearing turned suddenly defective? My love? My dearest love? Passion and lust run wild, sweetheart?"

Her laughter subsided, but she said nothing.

"Speechless?" he suggested.

"Don't spoil it, Josh," she said.

"What will spoil things for me," he said, "is to see you leave here in a few days' time, Free, and to smile cheerfully as if I were happy to see you go off to plan our wedding. And then to wait for your letter officially ending our betrothal. And then to waltz with you next spring, having lived all winter for just that one half hour. And then to spend the rest of my life without you."

He heard her drawing a slow, deep breath.

"There is no need-" she began.

"Dammit!" He cut her off before she could launch into the expected speech. "Let there be some truth between us at least, Freyja. I have had enough of lies and evasions and secrets to last me a lifetime. If all this has been nothing but a lark to you, then so be it. Say so honestly and I will let you go without another word-unless, that is, you have been got with child. But if you are letting me go because you think you ought to honor the temporary clause in our bargain and because you think I am being annoyingly noble in my offer to make our betrothal real, then stuff it, sweetheart. Just stuff it! Give me honesty now. Do you love me?"

Her voice sounded reassuringly normal-it was cold and haughty.

"Well, of course I love you," she said.

"Of course." He was back to laughter then. He held her tightly and could not seem to stop laughing for a while. "Are we going to allow a little bargain to ruin the rest of our lives, then?"

"Whenever we would quarrel," she said, "and we would quarrel, Josh, each of us would wonder if the other had felt coerced into marrying."

"What poppycock!" he said. "Do you not trust me to say the truth to you, Freyja? I say that I love you, that I adore you, that I can imagine no greater happiness than to spend the rest of my life loving you and laughing and quarreling and even fighting with you. I trust you to say what is true to me. You have said that you love me-that of course you love me. Does that include the wish to marry me, to live here with me all your life, to have babies with me and fun with me? To share the sorrows of life with me? And all its joys?"

"Of course it includes that wish," she said. "But, Josh, I am terrified."

"Why?" he asked. Her face was pressed hard against his shoulder.

"I have never done too well with love and betrothals and marriage prospects," she said. "If I give in to happiness now, it may all evaporate before my very eyes."

"Sweetheart, sweetheart," he said. "What happened the other day when you were afraid of the sea?"

"I was not-"

"What happened?"

There was a short silence.

"I persuaded you to take me over to the island," she said.

"And?"

"And I insisted on rowing part of the way back."

"Even though you had to switch places in the boat with me," he said. "What did you do tonight when you were terrified of the height of the cliffs?"

"Climbed them," she said.

"And now," he said, "you are terrified to love me. What are you going to do about it?"

She drew her head back from his shoulder and glared at him.

"Love you anyway," she said. "Don't ask the next question, Josh, if you admire the shape of your nose. You remind me of everything I hated about all my governesses, asking their questions, and trying to extract the correct answers out of me by slow degrees and with infinite patience. You are going to ask me what I plan to do about my terror of a real betrothal with you and a real marriage with you."

He gazed back into her eyes and said nothing.

"We are betrothed," she said firmly. "There-that is what I am going to do. We are really betrothed. But if you should die before our marriage, Josh, I shall pursue you through all of heaven and hell after my own death and throttle you. Do you hear me?"

"Yes, sweetheart," he said meekly, and grinned at her. "I want to hear myself say this, Free. And I want to hear your answer."

He sat up, checked his distance from the edge, and ar-ranged himself in a picturesque kneeling posture. He took one of her hands in his and smiled his most charming smile at her.

"Lady Freyja Bedwyn," he said, "will you do me the great honor of accepting my hand in marriage? On the understanding that it is to be purely a love match on both sides?"

"You look remarkably silly," she said.

"I know, sweetheart," he said, making a kissing gesture with his lips. "But I want you to be able to boast about this to our grandchildren one day-that their grandpapa went down on bended knee and begged you to marry him."

"They will never believe it," she said, "when they look at the old lady I will have grown into and then look at the handsome old gentleman you will have become." She sat up and sighed. "But I will remember this moment all my life, and I daresay it will bring tears to my eyes when I know no one is looking. Yes, I will, my love. I will marry you-but only on the understanding that it is to be a mutual love match."

She sat and he knelt, and they grinned at each other like a couple of self-satisfied fools while her hair blew wild about her face and he was very aware of the long, almost sheer drop less than a yard behind his heels.