Her Master's Servant (Lord and Master Book 2) (25 page)

‘Misss Gregory,’ came a familiar voice next to her ear. Luna jumped, heart pounding, and turned to find Florian standing behind her, eyes glittering furtively in the gloom of the vestibule. ‘I hoped I’d sssee you here.’

She made to move past him but he blocked her path, his rapt gaze travelling from her face down to the trickle of sweat glistening in the V of her black silk blouse. ‘Augusta’s little shadow,’ he purred, a ghastly facsimile of a smile on his lips. The sickly sweet odour of his cologne combined with that of the lilies to overpowering effect. Luna’s lungs seemed incapable of filling; spots were beginning to float in front of her eyes.

There came a rush from behind her and suddenly Stefan was ramming Florian against the church door, his forearm under Florian’s neck, squeezing against his windpipe.

‘You bastard,’ he spat. ‘You touch her again and I’ll—’

‘Stefan,’ Luna interjected weakly, reaching her hand out to him. ‘Not here.’ The vestibule began to tilt around her and Stefan immediately abandoned Florian, grabbing her just before she fell. She heard the sound of Florian wheezing as her head dropped briefly against Stefan’s shoulder. ‘I’m okay, I’m okay,’ she gasped, trying to catch her breath.

‘What is
she
doing here?’ Isabelle cried from the archway into the church. Helen appeared behind her and Florian began to stagger toward his nieces.

‘After what she’s done to Mummy. And Uncle Florian,’ Isabelle raged, her beautiful face distorted with fury. ‘She has
no business
being here.’ Helen put a hand on her shoulder, but Isabelle shook it off angrily, moving toward Luna and Stefan as if to physically confront them. At that moment, Sören came hurrying into the vestibule, quickly assessing the situation and grasping Florian by the shoulder.

For the next few seconds, everything slowed down inside Luna’s brain. She heard the sound of her own breathing, amplified to a roaring, ragged rasp. She felt Stefan pulling her close, drawing her from Isabelle’s path. She shut her eyes, willing herself back from the brink of unconsciousness, and when she opened them they were drawn not to Isabelle, nor Helen, nor even to Florian, but into the nave, to the woman standing alone there, dressed in black.

Then came the sound of Stefan’s voice, strong and clear. ‘Luna has every business being here.’ Beat. ‘She is my future wife. My fiancée.’

Isabelle stopped dead in her tracks – hers and almost every other jaw in the vestibule dropping open. Helen made a strangled noise, staring with open astonishment at Stefan. Who, in the brief, stunned silence that ensued, negated the possibility of further argument, tightening his arm around Luna and sweeping her out of the chapel. She scarcely felt her legs under her as he led her down a mossy path that led to a small mausoleum in the churchyard.

Pressing her up against the wall of the interior chamber, he angled his head down toward hers, chafing her shoulders. ‘Okay?’

‘Yes,’ Luna managed, gulping in air. ‘I just couldn’t breathe in there.’

They stood without speaking for a moment, till the sound of her breathing became less laboured. At length, Stefan looked toward the chapel, then back to her. ‘What I said in the church… I had to shut Isabelle up.’

‘Well,’ she replied shakily, ‘you certainly did that.’

‘I wasn’t thinking clearly when I said it.’

‘So,’ Luna hesitated, ‘you’re taking it back?’

‘Yes.’ A look of sudden panic, as he realised what he’d just said. ‘No!’ Then one of abject perplexity. ‘You… would you?’

Folding her arms under her breasts, Luna leant back against a wall of dead Wellstones and took another deep breath. ‘Well,’ she began contemplatively, ‘I’d have said we’re pretty well suited for each other, wouldn’t you? I mean, obviously, if you don’t feel you’re
ready
…’

‘I didn’t say that,’ he protested.

‘To be honest, I was thinking about asking
you
,’ Luna continued, pursing her lips to hide the smile forming there.

Stefan seized her shoulders. ‘You’re saying you’d marry me?’

‘Yes.’

Immediately his arms were around her again, lifting her off the marble floor of the mausoleum. ‘You’ll marry me, Luna?’ he repeated. She nodded and he spun her briefly around in a circle before remembering that this was the girl who’d almost fainted a few minutes earlier. Placing her gently back on the floor, he lowered his mouth to hers.

After some seconds, he pulled away and said vehemently, ‘Please don’t take that job in Toulouse.’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘I know I have no right to ask it of you and if it’s really what you want… but I’m
tired
of being apart from you, Luna. I sleep better when you’re with me and—’

‘Okay.’

He did a quick double take, like he wasn’t sure what he was hearing.

‘I wasn’t even sure I was interested in it,’ she shrugged. ‘I’ll tell the headhunter to withdraw my name.’

‘You will?’

Luna cocked her head at him as if to say, really, you can be dense sometimes.

He pulled her back into his arms, murmuring, ‘Strange, with you, how things that should be easy are sometimes hard, and things that seem hard…’

Sören appeared in the entrance to the shrine. ‘The cars are leaving for the house,’ he said to Stefan, before turning his gaze innocently skyward and stepping a few paces away from them.

‘You go,’ Luna said to Stefan. ‘I’ll walk back.’

‘Right,’ Stefan said, bending down to kiss her quickly. ‘But don’t go anywhere, yes? I’ll phone you later.’ He kissed her again before going to join his father. Whereupon, Luna leant back against the wall of dead Wellstones and put her hand to her chest. Well,
this
was a turn up for the books.

Looking back on that day, she found she couldn’t remember the walk back to the house. Maybe she floated there, or was carried on the wings of the angels poised over the entrance to the shrine.

She was… engaged. Engaged to Stefan Lundgren, the love of her life. Everything else that had occurred in that chapel, from Florian’s approach, to Isabelle’s attempt to confront her, to the sad current of understanding that passed between the Marchioness and herself during the split second their eyes met across the church – all of that she’d have believed had she been told in advance that it would happen.

But Stefan proposing to her? Never. Never in a million years.

And, okay, it hadn’t been an actual proposal; more like a shield he’d thrown up to protect her. A moment of pure, unadulterated, lovably Stefan chivalry. It didn’t matter. She had not the slightest doubt in his intent.

After she got back to the house, she joined Caitlin in her office for a post-funeral debrief, relieved to discover that news of the confrontation in the chapel had yet to go further. She was glad, for the present, to hug this secret to herself. Stefan sent her periodic, leg-jellying texts throughout the afternoon.

I love you, Miss Gregory.

All mine now, min arg flicka.

And that evening, as she sat in the staff kitchen chatting with Marta about possible job opportunities for Ashley Eccles, he rang her.

‘Come and meet me in the Rose Temple.’

Approaching along a gravel path from the house, Luna climbed the steps of the miniature temple to where Stefan stood waiting for her, leaning against one of its Corinthian columns. Hard to credit how completely different the place looked now, at the height of summer, than it had the last time she’d stood there with him in January. The small fountain burbling away inside the temple had been turned off then, and the surrounding garden, now full of Arborage roses, had been covered in snow.

‘This place makes me a little sad,’ Luna admitted as she got to the top of the steps.

‘Me, too,’ Stefan nodded. ‘That’s why I want to do this here.’ He went down on his knees in front of her. ‘To make it a happy place again.’

Reaching into his suit pocket, he extracted a small black leather box and opened it to reveal an emerald-cut blue diamond ring, sparkling in the evening sunshine. ‘For three months I have been carrying this around in my pocket, waiting for my moment. And the one morning I wake up and say—’ he adopted the Stefan-talking-to-Stefan voice she loved so well, ‘“No
way
are you going to propose to Luna at a funeral. That would be
crazy
…”’

Removing it from its velvet cushion, he took her hand in his and said, ‘Stellaluna Gregory. Will you marry me?’

‘Yes,’ she said immediately, shutting her eyes as he slipped the ring on her finger.

Sitting on the steps of the temple shortly thereafter, her head on his shoulder, Luna stared in disbelief at the ring on her left hand and said wonderingly, ‘Three months, you’ve had this?’

‘Three long months,’ he confirmed. ‘But every time I thought of proposing, something would be wrong. Like, oh, I want to give Luna this ring now, but she is wheezing and I have sheep shit all over me. Or, oh, maybe
this
is the night, but whoops, I’ve just sodomised her, so maybe not now…’ His chest rumbled and Luna started to laugh herself, before sobering.

‘It’s beautiful, I love it,’ she said. The large emerald-cut diamond was flanked by two smaller rectangular diamonds on a delicate band of platinum. ‘I love the colour of it.’

‘I chose it because it reminded me of your eyes,’ he said simply. Heart full, Luna lifted her mouth to his larynx, feeling him swallow against her lips.

They spoke of many things, after that.

Of Sören, with whom he’d had a brief conversation regarding her the night before. ‘All the usual stuff about how I don’t deserve you,’ Stefan smiled. ‘In the end, I said, “But,
Pappa,
I love her. I can’t live without her.” And then he looked at me as if to say, why didn’t you say so before? And
now
suddenly it is all, “So, when will you set the date?” and, “A winter wedding would be nice.”’

Luna laughed a little nervously at this and said, ‘Oh, there’s no rush to set a date…’

Of John Wellstone, and of Augusta. ‘I look at her and see a woman who knows the past thirteen years of her life could have been different, if she had behaved differently,’ he said. ‘Oh, I know, it takes two to break a marriage and John was no saint. But if you wanted her to suffer, Luna, to pay for what she’s done, believe me, she is suffering.’ Luna shook her head at this, not trusting herself to speak.

He looked toward the house, where the exterior floodlights were just beginning to come on, one by one. ‘Luna,’ he said, and shook his own head. ‘So much has happened so quickly—’

‘Yes,’ Luna said, cutting him off.

He turned to face her, his expression serious, uncertain.

‘If Arborage is what you want,’ she said, ‘have it.’ She had known since he raised the matter in his apartment the previous week that this would be her answer. Seeing him today in the funeral procession, so grave, so poised and in control – the Marquess of Lionsbridge in waiting – had only reaffirmed it to her.

Confirming her instincts, he acknowledged, ‘I want it. I want it very much. But only with you by my side.’

‘Have it, then. Because that’s where I’ll be.’

Last, they spoke of their separation the previous winter. Tongue-tied as ever when it came to articulating her emotions, Luna struggled to find words to express her thankfulness that Stefan had kept faith. ‘You—’ she began, leaning into him on the temple step. ‘You believed we’d fix things and you were right.’

He was quiet for a spell. ‘There was only one time I doubted,’ he admitted eventually. Luna sat back from him and tilted her head, and he continued, ‘I’d just come home from the Association of Historic Homes to find your motorcycle gone. And… all I could think was the amount of trouble you must have gone to, to come all the way from Shetland on the one day you knew I wouldn’t be here.

‘But fortunately the gods smiled on me,’ he added lightly. ‘By coincidence, I had prior plans to go and see
Cats
that night.’

Luna half-laughed incredulously, but he insisted, ‘I tell the truth, I swear. Partly to make up for missing Kayla’s preview last year and partly because I was desperate. Desperate for news of you, desperate to talk to someone who knew you. But when she told me you’d been there the previous afternoon, I thought to myself, “Maybe this is what Luna wants. Maybe she thinks she’s better off without me.”’

Luna reached out and put her hand on his chest and he covered it with his own. ‘I said as much to Kayla and…’ He smiled. ‘Kayla loves you very much,
flicka
. She is a good friend to you. She said you probably think she’s so busy thinking about herself that she doesn’t see you.’ He drew away from Luna and wagged a finger at her in true, East End Kayla style: ‘“But I see dat goh.”’

Luna smiled at his impersonation and Stefan continued, ‘She said the only reason you’d have left without coming to see her that day was that you were worried you “couldn’t keep your shit together”. That she’d ask how you were, or say something about me and you’d break down. Kayla said that was the one thing you wouldn’t risk, and it meant you couldn’t be over me, not yet.’

Luna blinked, slightly amazed by Kayla’s insight.

‘And then she said that if she were me, she’d act fast – “do whatever it takes”.’ He paused, then concluded, voice vibrating with emotion, ‘“Before Luna puts you inside a box marked ‘dead to me’, and nothing you do will ever convince her to take you back.”’

Luna made a horrified, distressed noise and Stefan lifted his hand to her chignon, turning her to face him. He shook his head.
Over now. That part of our life is over.
She heard the sound of water pouring into the fountain behind them, smelled the roses all around. And slid her eyes shut in happy gratitude as his lips melded with hers.

*

The next night, Luna was standing in an alley in the West End when suddenly the door next to her opened and Patrice popped his head out, gesturing to her.

‘Babe!’ Kayla exclaimed when she entered her dressing room a few minutes later in full Grizabella costume. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I have one more night in town before I fly back to Shetland,’ Luna replied, hugging her, ‘and I thought I’d come see you.’