The Independent Bride Page 18

Pepper felt as if she were one huge blush. She squared her shoulders and said loudly, ‘A public debate. Entrance admission to go to the College Repairs Fund. You and me.’

  The fund-raisers began to realise what this was about. They started to look at each other, instead of her and Steven. There was the beginning of an approving buzz along High Table.

  A pleasant-faced elderly man leaned forward across a couple of the guests to address Steven, smiling.

  ‘I urge you to accept, Master. Honour of the college and all that.’

  At last Steven came out of his trance. ‘Thank you for your advice, Dean. Excellent as always.’ He made Pepper a little bow. ‘I accept with pleasure, Ms Calhoun.’

  There was a roar of delight from the body of the hall. Spontaneous clapping broke out.

  Pepper dipped her head, shy now that her task was accomplished. Negotiating skirt and slender-heeled shoes carefully on that lethal floor, she turned, not realising that Steven was coming rapidly round the table to her. At least, she didn’t realise it until she found her hand taken.

  ‘Allow me,’ said Steven.

  His voice sounded odd. She looked up unwisely and her shoe skidded.

  He caught her. Of course he caught her. Didn’t he always? He had a knack for it, Pepper thought hazily. She clutched at his arm and just about stayed upright. But her heart lurched like crazy when she saw the look in his eyes.

  ‘This is where I came in, I think,’ he said, laughing down at her.

  He walked her straight out through the murmuring crowd in the candlelit hall and she didn’t see a single face as they went.

  No garden interlude this evening. He took her straight to his rooms and shut the door against the world.

  ‘Now—that challenge,’ he murmured gently.

  And took her in his arms, not gently at all.

  When he raised his head he looked shaken. ‘I knew it,’ he said.

  ‘Wha—?’ said Pepper, still dazed and not too steady on her smart shoes.

  ‘I’m in love with you,’ said Steven baldly.

  Pepper blinked. ‘You don’t sound very happy about it,’ she said, torn between amusement and hurt.

  ‘I’m not.’ He put her away from him. ‘You’d better know the whole truth,’ he said harshly. ‘The last time I was in love I got burned. Badly. You’ve already felt the backlash from that, I’m afraid.’

  Pepper kicked off her shoes. It was easier, and anyway it made her feel more at home among his things. She sank onto an elderly sofa and pulled her feet up under her skirt.

  ‘Courtney?’ she asked.

  He was startled. ‘Someone’s been talking?’

  She shook her head. ‘You mentioned her once.’ She said with difficulty, ‘I paid attention. It seemed important.’

  He seized her hand and squeezed it so hard that she felt her bones would crack. But she did not cry out.

  ‘Yes. Yes, it was.’ He sounded shaken. ‘It’s a classic. I had a good friend—my best friend, like a brother. Courtney decided she wanted him instead.’ He looked away. ‘Well, not instead, actually. As well. She thought I was so besotted that I’d be there to cheat on my friend whenever she wanted a little fun on the side.’

  Pepper was so angry that she could have smashed Courtney through one of the long windows, if the woman had been in the room with them.

  Instead she said, ‘She didn’t know you very well.’

  He gave a shaken laugh and the grip on her fingers relaxed. ‘You’re right. She didn’t.’

  ‘So what happened to her? Is she still around?’

  ‘In a way. She is Windflower’s mother.’

  Pepper digested that. ‘I see. So Jan—er—Windflower is the daughter of this almost brother of yours?’

  He nodded. ‘His parents were like a second family to me when my father died. And Tom made Windflower my goddaughter. I couldn’t turn my back on her.’

  Pepper frowned. ‘Of course you couldn’t.’

  Steven said, in an oddly warning voice, ‘I think she’ll be with me a long time. Her mother is off finding herself somewhere.’

  ‘That’s tough,’ said Pepper.

  ‘Then—you don’t mind?’

  She was bewildered. ‘Mind?’

  ‘I thought you hated my having a child around. Especially the daughter of an old girlfriend.’

  “‘Hated”—’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve missed something somewhere. Where did that come from?’

  Steven let go her hand. ‘You couldn’t even remember her name,’ he said quietly. ‘I took that as a pretty clear indicator that you wished she wasn’t around.’

  Pepper bounced off the sofa. ‘Oh, that’s stupid. I couldn’t remember her name because I think of her as Janice.’

  It was Steven’s turn for bewilderment. He gaped.

  ‘Janice?’

  ‘That’s what she told me she was called,’ said Pepper crisply. ‘At Indigo. While she was giving me some free advice on make-up. At the time, something told me she was lying. But I never dreamed her name was anything so awful. Windflower—poor child.’

  Steven began to laugh. He laughed until he could not speak. In the end he sank onto the sofa and took her with him in a flurry of firelight silk and bare feet.

  ‘So you’re not jealous of Courtney?’

  ‘Huh!’

  ‘I won’t pretend,’ he said gravely. ‘She used to bring me out in a cold sweat every time I looked at her.’

  Pepper took his face between her hands and looked at him soberly. ‘And she asked you to cheat on your friend. She blew her chances a long time ago.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Steven on a long note of discovery. ‘Yes, she did.’ He feathered a kiss across her mouth. ‘But she never got to me the way you do.’

  ‘Ah.’ Pepper found she couldn’t meet his eyes. Which was crazy, really. But—she couldn’t. ‘Look,’ she said, trying to tell the truth, ‘I’m very flattered but—’

  ‘But you don’t trust me.’

  He sounded surprisingly calm about it. She dared a quick look at him, found that he was looking at her in a way that made her head swim, and decided it was prudent to transfer her gaze to his rusty black robe. He looked every inch the Master in his academic dress. He had no right to be looking at her in that way.

  Pepper shook her head. ‘I don’t have very good experience of trusting people,’ she said with wincing honesty. ‘You had your Courtney. Well, I had my own disasters. I discovered—rather late—that my dates have been organised by my grandmother all my life.’

  Steven searched her face. ‘I don’t understand.’

  She explained about Ed Ivanov in a cool, neutral voice. ‘And I gather that he wasn’t the only one. Only I didn’t know it. I thought he liked me. Hell, I even thought my grandmother liked me,’ she said on a little surge of self-contempt.

  ‘How stupid can you be?’

  ‘Meaning?’ His voice was clipped.

  She shut her eyes for a moment. ‘I wish I were like my cousins. They know what they’re doing with relationships.’ She fought tears and won. She opened her eyes and said baldly, ‘I don’t.’

  There was silence while he digested that. ‘Translation, please,’ he said at last, still clipped.

  She floundered. ‘When we—when I—that day—’

  ‘Our perfect day?’

  She smiled faintly. ‘That day, yes. I’d never done anything like that before.’

  There was a glimmer under the ice. ‘That makes two of us.’

  That startled her into meeting his eyes at last. ‘Really?’

  ‘Are you—?’ He had gone all British and clipped. It was surprisingly frightening. ‘Are you daring to think that I make a habit of taking days off at the drop of a hat, just to take stroppy women on the river?’

  Pepper reminded herself that she had bested a woman who terrified a workforce of a hundred thousand. She stuck her chin in the air.

  ‘I don’t know what you did before you met me,’ she said loftily.

&n
bsp; He gave a sudden bark of laughter. ‘Stayed sane,’ he said. ‘Stop tormenting me, you crazy woman. Are you going to marry me or not?’

  She did not believe he had said that. She stared at him, eyes wide and vulnerable, utterly silenced.

  Steven groaned. ‘Or do I have to ask you again in the middle of that damned debate of yours?’

  Pepper said slowly, ‘Would you?’

  ‘If I have to, yes.’

  ‘But you’d hate it.’

  He interrupted. ‘I’ve declared myself to your gorgon of a grandmother. The whole of Oxford will be a piece of cake by comparison.’

  She was instantly ice. ‘You’ve spoken to my grandmother?’

  Steven stayed calm. ‘I sent an e-mail to her company when I was trying to track you down.’ He added patiently, ‘You’d gone to ground. I didn’t have many clues. God knows what brought her up from the black lagoon this week. But she dropped by to suggest I could make a tidy sum if I persuaded you to go back to the States.’ Pepper thought of what Mary Ellen had said only this afternoon.

  She said slowly, ‘She implied that she would pay you to marry me?’

  Steven shuddered. ‘Shrewd, as I’d already told her that I was going to ask you. Now, that is a woman who could give classes in Control Freakery.’

  ‘You’d already told her—’

  ‘Just before I threw her out, yes.’

  Pepper felt terribly humble. Yet proud at the same time. And desperately uncertain, as if it was bad luck to believe that so much happiness could come all at once. Mary Ellen’s poisonous words still echoed: ‘You have no charm. You’re overweight. You haven’t a hope.’

  Steven stood up suddenly. Reaching out, he brought her to her feet and looked at her very steadily.

  ‘Penelope Anne Calhoun, you are a woman I did not believe could exist. You are natural and bright and funny and you’ve had my heart on a stick since the first time you fell into my arms. For God’s sake, marry me and give me back my sanity.’

  But still she hesitated.

  He groaned. ‘Pepper, for God’s sake. I love you. What more can I say? Or—don’t you love me, after all?’

  ‘Mary Ellen said I was a potato,’ she said in a final rush of wincing honesty.

  There was an incredulous silence.

  Then Steven sighed. ‘I wish you wouldn’t think of yourself like that,’ he said, irritated. ‘Think of yourself as lavish. Abundant. Didn’t I read that Arab princes are always attracted to plump ladies to prove how rich they are?’

  She could not have been more startled if he had suddenly stood on his head in front of her. Years of pain disappeared like fog in the morning.

  Pepper laughed aloud in pure amusement. ‘I can see it now.’ She struck an attitude. ‘The night is young and you’re enormous! Very sexy. Not.’

  But Steven was taking off his robe, looking thoughtful. ‘Rubens’ women were pretty damned sexy.’

  ‘But not—’

  His jacket followed. ‘And you’re right. The night is young.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Pepper, suddenly very conscious of her bare shoulders and the warmth in his eyes.

  ‘Since you can’t make up your mind, I’m going to do something that I’ve wanted to do all my life,’ said Steven with resolution.

  ‘What—?’ She broke off. ‘Steven!’

  For he had swept her off her feet and draped her over his shoulder as if she were a piece of pirate’s booty.

  ‘Captain Blood, my boyhood hero,’ he said wickedly.

  And carried her up the spiral staircase to bed.

  EPILOGUE

  THE debate was a huge success. The dining room was full to overflowing. The speeches were witty and pertinent and widely reported. An old alumnus undertook to pay for the repairs to the roof. Various college funds were boosted to a healthier level than they had ever been in the whole of their existence. Even the Dean said that Steven Konig had proved his worth. At last he had succeed in raising the college’s profile.

  Of course, the news that he was going to marry up-and-coming retail entrepreneur Pepper Calhoun didn’t hurt. Though the Dean wished he wouldn’t hold hands with her in public.

  Pepper did not care. Steven reached for her whenever they were close enough to touch. He was unashamed about it. And so, slowly, she learned to reach for him, too.

  On the day that they finally told the world they were going to marry they were sitting in the middle of a newly mown meadow. She was leaning against his shoulder, basking in sun and the smell of fresh-cut grass.

  Windflower was with them for a picnic, having agreed to fit them into her social calendar for once. They wanted to tell her first.

  She considered them both gravely, then turned her attention to Pepper. ‘Do you know lots and lots about children?’ she said with reserve.

  Pepper was alarmed. ‘Not a thing.’ A thought struck her and she gave a spurt of laughter. ‘Heck, I wasn’t much of a child myself, now I come to think of it. I have a lot to learn.’

  Windflower sucked her teeth. Pepper looked anxiously at Steven. He shook his head in silent caution. She turned back to Windflower.

  ‘Will that be a problem?’

  Windflower took a considered decision.

  ‘Never mind. Uncle Steven and I will teach you,’ she said kindly.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Pepper with real gratitude.

  Windflower was magnanimous. ‘No problem.’

  She pottered off to play cricket with some children she had already identified further down the riverbank. They watched her go with resignation.

  ‘Do you think she’s okay with this really?’ asked Pepper, still anxious.

  ‘I think she’s still working on a change of name,’ said Steven callously. ‘I’m just waiting for her to suggest it as part of our wedding celebrations.’

  Pepper gave a choke of laughter. ‘Well, why not? Everything else is changing.’

  He held her close. ‘Isn’t it just? A few months ago I was a man without a family or even a private life. And now—’

  ‘And now you’re a man just loaded down with domestic responsibilities,’ she teased him.

  Steven took her hand and carried it to his lips. His look was heart-stoppingly tender.

  ‘No, sweetheart,’ he said softly. ‘Now I’m a man in love.’

  ISBN: 978-1-4603-6587-8

  THE INDEPENDENT BRIDE

  First North American Publication 2003.

  Copyright © 2003 by Sophie Weston.

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