Madeline was frowning as she went to join him at the open door, her footsteps echoed on the cold flagged floor as she went to join him at the entrance to a big, surprisingly well lit room literally lined with empty bookshelves. ‘But surely the Courtney family would have emptied the place of anything valuable before you bought it from them? I mean,’ she murmured in puzzlement, ‘if some of the stuff in here is as old as you say, it must be worth a fortune!’
Dom just shrugged. ‘I offered them a good price for the lot,’ he informed her dismissively. ‘And they—indifferent fools that they were—accepted it. Morons, the lot of them.’ His derision was obvious. ‘It’s no wonder the major had nothing to do with them. They cared nothing for the old man or his belongings. And all they wanted was the best price they could get to have the whole thing taken off their hands. I gave it them and they accepted it. It was their loss and my gain.’
‘Speaks the hardened banker,’ Madeline mocked his dismissive shrug.
‘Speaks a man who abhors neglect, whether it be of a human being or his possessions,’ he corrected. ‘By the time I’ve finished with this place, it will look exactly as it would have done if the old man and his house had not been left to rot alone.’
Looking up at him, Madeline saw that the mask of disgust was tinged with something else she couldn’t quite recognise. ‘And you’ll enjoy filling it with all those weird and wonderful curiosities you’ve been gathering about you all your life.’
That brought a crooked smile to his face. ‘Of course. This house is the ideal setting for them, don’t you think? Come on.’ He reached for her hand. ‘I’ll show you the rest of the place.
The house was much larger than it looked from the outside, with an interesting hotchpotch of oddly shaped rooms all with at least one outstanding feature to fire Madeline’s artistic mind into action, and within minutes they were discussing how best to decorate and furnish without spoiling the period flavour of the house. The work still in progress on the ground floor was extensive, but as they moved up to the first floor Madeline could see that up here was almost ready for habitation.
‘We’ve been working from the top down,’ Dominic explained. ‘And the workmen moved off this floor only last week—which is why we keep the doors up here all tightly closed.’ He reached out to open one of them and stepped inside, drawing her with him. ‘Though this is the only room that’s completely finished. The master bedroom,’ he announced with an oddly mocking little bow.
‘Oh!’ she gasped in surprise, moving away from him to go and stand in the centre of a thick-piled dusky-pink carpet. Her eyes were wide with surprise as she turned in a slow circle, so shocked that she didn’t know what to say, his colour choice in here nothing like she would ever have expected a man like him to choose.
The room was dominated by a ceiling-canopied four-poster bed built of rich mahogany and draped with heavy silver and dusky pink brocade. It was huge, outrageously flamboyant in the way the brocade looped and twisted its way around the thick wood frame. The mattress itself was covered in a reverse match of the same fabric, its size alone enough to intimidate, and she glanced jerkily away from it to stare at the incredibly ornate mahogany fireplace that took up almost all of the wall opposite.
The room was big—big enough also to accommodate two big and comfy-looking armchairs flanking the fireplace, again upholstered with a matching blend brocade, like the windows and the several lamps dotted about.
‘Well,’ Dominic prompted when she had stood there for a good long minute without uttering a single sound, ‘what do you think?’
Think? A hard lump formed in her throat. It was a beautiful room. But a room so obviously designed to share with a woman he must love deeply that she felt the lump melt into tears and had to turn away from the intense expression on his face, so that he wouldn’t see just how deeply she was affected. This room was suggesting so much—so very much that she was actually afraid of what would come next.
A silence fell, throbbing tensely in the air between them, and, unable to stand it, she made to turn away towards the window, only then she saw it, the gold-framed painting hanging above the fireplace, and her body shivered to a breathless stop.
‘I promised to give this to you once, remember?’ He came to stand close behind her. ‘The painting recently, and the house a long, long time ago, when your dreams were…well, just dreams and I was happy to play along with them. Well…’ His hands came upon her shoulders, fingers closing gently, warming her all the way through to her very heart. ‘The painting—the house. They’re both yours, Madeline. My gift to you.’
‘Oh, Dom,’ she whispered thickly. ‘I can’t take…’
Suddenly his arms were around her, stopping her words and crushing her body as he hugged her tightly to him. ‘Once, what seems a lifetime ago now,’ he murmured, his deep tone throbbing with an emotion she felt echoing inside herself, ‘a beautiful and enchanting creature I loved very much offered herself to me with all the passion in her loving nature, and I, fool that I was, turned her down.’
A hand jerked to her mouth to muffle the sob which leapt to her throat, and Dominic sighed unsteadily. ‘Wild, Madeline,’ he remembered gruffly. ‘My God, you were wild then. I hardly knew if I was standing on my head or my feet most of the time. And I wanted you so desperately that it took every bit of my control to keep things as light as I did. And even that was taking things dangerously close to the edge.’ The sob escaped and he bent to brush his mouth across her cheek. ‘You were very young, my darling. And everyone kept telling me how lucky I was, and teasing me about how I was going to handle the wild and wilful baggage you were then. No one bothered asking how I was going to handle myself!’ His harsh sigh vibrated against her resting spine. ‘Every time I so much as looked at you my heart flipped over!’
‘Dom—’ She tried to cut in on him, her own voice thick with tears, but he wouldn’t let her.
‘Let me say it all,’ he insisted. ‘I wanted you so badly, Madeline, I was tormented by the need. But there they all were, all those pleased and interested people, reminding me of how young you were, advising me to take care with you, remember your age, your sweet, sweet innocence, warning me not to break that wonderful spirit of yours with too much too soon!’ Another sigh ripped from him. ‘Then there were the others,’ he went on. ‘The ones who questioned the wisdom of marrying myself to someone so young and headstrong. The ones who questioned whether you were old enough actually to know your true feelings for me—and they made me question it myself, forced me into an agony of wondering whether I was being fair to you to trap you into marriage when you’d barely even tasted life to be really sure of what you wanted from it—or from me come to that.’
‘I knew,’ she whispered.
His smile was sensed rather than seen. ‘I could have been just another new and exciting experience to you, Madeline,’ he suggested grimly. ‘You have to remember how your life then was full of the need to try out new things. I began to worry that once I’d let you learn all I could teach you about love and loving you would need to be off, finding something else to soothe that frighteningly restless spirit of yours… What I’m trying to say to you, Madeline, is that I didn’t dare risk making love to you before we married because I was so afraid it would mean my losing you!’
‘You didn’t trust my love.’
‘No,’ he admitted.
‘And so lost me anyway.’
‘Yes,’ he sighed, then turned her around to face him, his eyes dark and sombre as he studied her upturned face. ‘Well, now the tables are turned, and it’s for me to do the offering and your chance to refuse me. If I kiss you now, and pick you up and carry you over to that big bed over there with the deliberate intention of making love to you, will you have me, Madeline?’
The silence hummed between them, tension springing along her nerve ends to hold her mute and still. Dominic looked down at her with a dark intensity which told her how absolutely serious he was, yet still she hesitated. The old M
adeline would have thrown her arm around him by now, giving him his answer with kisses and wild ecstatic cries. But this Madeline had learned the art of caution, and rarely stepped into anything without being absolutely sure of its outcome.
‘You want me, you know you do,’ he muttered huskily when she still said nothing, her blue eyes full of her uncertainty. ‘We’re both four years older, Madeline. And if those four years have taught me anything besides misery and loneliness and self-contempt, then they’ve taught me that love, true love, endures any span of time. I love you, Madeline,’ he stated solemnly. ‘I think I probably always have. I know I always will. Will you please let me show you just how much?’
His voice broke and Madeline trembled, her pale face crumbling with emotion as she fell into his arms. ‘Oh, Dom!’ she choked. ‘I missed you so!’