Tears blurred her eyes, and as though he knew what she was feeling he rocked her gently in his arms, his chin resting on top of her silky head.
‘Maggie, there’s still something you haven’t told me.’
She moved and looked up at him and questioned, ‘What?’
‘How you feel about me. Whether what happened between us was simply a short trip down memory lane, or whether it was the first step forward into a future you want to share with me.’
Maggie looked at him in wonderment. Never in any of her daydreams had she seen him like this: hesitant, uncertain, vulnerable; and her heart flowered with warmth and love.
‘I love you, Marcus,’ she told him honestly and simply. ‘I didn’t think I did, not any more, I wouldn’t have come home if I’d thought that, and yet perhaps deep down in my subconscious I did know. When I saw you again…that was when I realised that those old feelings had never really gone and that they were still there, a foundation for the love I feel for you today as a woman.’
‘My woman,’ Marcus told her fiercely, drawing her back into his arms and kissing her with a sharp hunger that made her shake a little with laughter as she acknowledged the vast gulf which had lain between her teenage imaginings and reality.
‘What’s so funny?’ he asked her as he slowly released her.
When she told him, he too grinned. ‘I should think so, but if you’d like to make sure…’
* * *
THEY DECIDED TO break their news to Susie and Sara over dinner that night. They had agreed that in view of Marcus’s ‘engagement’ to Isobel they would wait three or four months and then get married very quietly, but there was no reason why the girls should not know of their plans.
‘There’ll probably be a certain degree of gossip,’ Marcus
warned her, ‘but nothing we can’t weather. Isobel’s never been particularly popular locally.’
‘Oh, I expect there’ll be quite a few people who’ll think you married me on the rebound,’ Maggie agreed, but Marcus shook his head and said with a wicked glint in his smile, ‘Not once they see how difficult I find it to keep my hands off you.’
Marcus made the announcement after dinner, as he opened a bottle of vintage champagne.
‘There, I told you,’ Susie crowed, turning to her sister. ‘I told you they’d probably been in love years ago and that that was why Maggie ran away. I knew if we could get her up here, they’d probably fall in love with each other all over again.’
Maggie stared at her, open-mouthed, while Marcus grinned and said to her sotto voce, ‘Sometimes the power of your sex terrifies me.’
‘What on earth made you think that?’ Maggie asked Susie.
‘Oh, I don’t know. I suppose it was the way Marcus looked whenever I asked him about you…and then when you arrived and I saw the way you looked at him, it was easy-peasy after that.’ She looked at them thoughtfully, put down her glass of champagne and asked conversationally, ‘Marcus, when you and Maggie get married and have children, they’ll be our nieces and nephews and our cousins as well, won’t they? I hope you have girls, though; I don’t like boys…’
Over her head, Marcus looked at Maggie and said drily, ‘You will, little sister, you will—and when you do, heaven help them!’
* * *
THREE MONTHS LATER Marcus and Maggie married very quietly at the local village church. There was a small reception at the vicarage afterwards, and, watching Susie preening herself in her bridesmaid’s outfit in front of the bemused eyes of Marcus’s partner’s eldest son, Marcus looked at his new wife and said under his breath, ‘Does Mrs Simmonds really know what she’s doing, offering to take charge of those two while we’re away? No, don’t go and warn her,’ he added as Maggie instinctively looked over her shoulder in the direction of the vicar’s wife. ‘I’ve waited twelve years to have you all to myself, and the way I feel right now that’s twelve years too long.’
* * * * *