Tears were again sliding down her face, not from fear but from the deepest happiness.

“I love you,” he whispered. “I love you so much, Philippa, my future wife. The imprint of you is on my heart and will be there the day I die.”

“You sound like a doctor, diagramming your body,” she whispered back.

“I think you will not complain when I diagram your body,” he said, soft and low. The flame rose between them instantly, and when Jonas rolled his future wife over, sinking into a patch of buttercups so they couldn’t be seen from the road, indeed there were no complaints.

Epilogue

Several months later

Wick looked down at his bride with a surge of joy that came to him every time he saw her face.

Philippa was supine on their bed. They had retired to their bedchamber after luncheon, and now she lay in a patch of sunlight, her cheeks pink and her chest still heaving.

“I like our house,” he said, picking up a few strands of silky hair and curling them around his finger. “I like this bed. I’m sorry we’re leaving for Edinburgh.”

“I’m not sorry,” Philippa said, squinting at him. “You’re driving our poor butler out of his mind. I know you were an astonishingly competent majordomo, Jonas, but you can’t expect the poor man to ascend to your heights.”

“All I asked was that the silver be thoroughly polished on a regular basis.”

Philippa closed her eyes. “I cannot imagine how you did all that you claim a butler should manage in one day, and neither can poor Ribble. At this rate, you will know all there is to know about medicine in six months rather than a year.”

“Did you see that your father sent another letter?” he inquired.

She nodded. “He has launched into a ferocious battle with a benighted professor from Cambridge who had the temerity to disagree with his reconstruction of Napoleon’s first campaign.”

“I like your father,” Wick said. “He is a model of perseverance.”

“He’s too rigid,” Philippa said. “He will never accept that anyone else is right, even about the trivial details.”

Wick grinned down at her. “And yet . . . here I am.”

“Well, that’s true,” Philippa said. “He did change his mind about you. And I still smile every time I think about his insisting that I go to the village merely to return that silly book. It was very unlike him to participate in your charade.”

“What you should smile about is the image of me practicing that horse business,” Wick said. “I could have been at your side a full two days earlier had it not been for the hours and hours I lost, sweeping the knife boy up before me in the saddle.”

“Oh dear,” Philippa said sleepily. “I hope you didn’t drop him.”