“I don’t know,” she said finally. “You are very important to me, Douglas.”
He liked the sound of that. He leaned down and kissed the tip of her nose. “I have decided that if I keep you in bed for, say, three hours a day—not to mention the nights of course—you just might be too busy focusing on me or too busy recovering from lovemaking to bring gray hairs to my head.”
“And would you also be too busy recovering from our lovemaking?”
“Never too busy to cease thinking about the next time I would haul you off to bed and have my way with you. You already occupy a great deal of my poor brain.”
He frowned then as she remained silent. “Not just haul you off to bed to make love to you. I fancy also I’ll haul you off to the stable, to the floor in the library on that soft rug in front of the fireplace. Perhaps also in the breakfast room with the morning sun streaming in on us and then on the formal dining table. You could clutch that ghastly epergne while I made you scream—”
She laughed and poked his arm.
“Tell me you love me, Alexandra.”
“I love you, Douglas.”
“Do you agree that a man needs to hear that every day of his life?”
“I am in full agreement.”
“Good. Now, wife, I want you to rest. I will see to the family, censor our tale just a bit unless Sinjun has already pried all the facts from Tony, and store up all the recent gossip to tell you later on.”
He kissed her mouth. He’d intended only a light, sweet kiss, but her arms went around his shoulders and she held him to her and parted her lips.
“You came after me,” she said into his mouth. “You were worried about me.”
“Naturally,” he said, kissing her nose, her lips, her chin, his breath warm against her skin. “You are my wife, I love you, I will even go so far as to say that cherishing has a good deal to do with it. Are you satisfied now?”
“Do you know that a wife must needs hear that every day of her life?”
“I’m not surprised. No, not at all.” He kissed her again, tucked the covers about her shoulders, and left her alone to rest.
Two weeks later in the late afternoon, Douglas came into their bedchamber. Alexandra looked up from her mending, smiling automatically. Good Lord, she loved him so very much.
“What do you have there?” she asked, trying not to look so besotted.
He was frowning. “I had to know,” he said more to himself than to her. “I just had to know so I went looking in Sinjun’s bedchamber.” He spread out on her lap the items he’d found in the back of Sinjun’s armoire.
Alexandra gasped. “It’s a wig! Goodness, it looks like the Virgin Bride’s hair! And that gauzy gown! Douglas, you can’t mean it, no, surely not, I—”
“Can’t believe that Sinjun was our ghost? Evidently so. Yes, she most certainly was. Here’s the proof.”
But Alexandra was thinking furiously, trying to remember when she’d first seen the ghost. She remembered quickly enough. Sinjun had been in London. She wasn’t wrong. She started to tell Douglas when she saw that he was staring fixedly at the east windows. He was somewhat white about the mouth. He looked tense and stif
f, his back and shoulders rigid. She said nothing.
Finally, he said firmly, turning back to her, “It was Sinjun all along. Just my little sister playing at being a ghost because she wanted to stir things up, wanted to have some fun at our expense.”
Alexandra was shaking her head. She opened her mouth but Douglas raised his hand.
“Yes, it was just Sinjun, nothing more, nothing extraordinary, nothing ghostly. A real live human being, not a willowy phantom, not a creature who speaks but really doesn’t but you hear it in your mind. No, nothing like that. It’s true. It’s very important that it’s true. It will remain true. Tell me you understand this, Alexandra.”
“I understand.”
He kissed her, stood straight again, and said as he stared at the wig and the gown, “I have decided not to say anything about it to Sinjun. I don’t wish to hear her denials, her protestations. I wish to let the entire subject alone. No, don’t argue with me. My mind is made up. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“Unlike my vaunted ancestors, I will never write about that accursed Virgin Bride, no matter the fact that she was of great assistance—in my mind, of course, nowhere else, naturally, and not really there as something substantial or nearly substantial. Since I will burn Sinjun’s props, there will be no more appearances by that ghostly young lady. Never again. No one will have a word to say in nonsensical diaries in future years. That’s the way it must be. I will accept nothing to the contrary. Do you understand, Alexandra?”