Ninety minutes later…
Where is he? Elizabeth wondered.
She sat on the bench beneath her window, her legs curled under her. She remained fully dressed, believing he had understood her invitation—her bold, perhaps wanton invitation. Maybe not, she fretted. Or maybe he understood and was disgusted by it.
Or perhaps he is injured, she worried. Lying on the road somewhere, tossed by his horse. No, more likely, he is disgusted and wondering how he ever could have professed love to such a wanton creature.
She had nearly given up on him when she, at last, heard the approach of a horse, a horse which stopped a considerable distance from the house. Believing it could only be him, she nearly ran down the back stair, wrapping a shawl around herself as she hurried into the dark night.
He was tying his horse to a nearby tree when she arrived, and she gave him a fright. He straightened hurriedly, exclaiming, “Elizabeth! Is it you?”
“It is,” she said, suddenly feeling a bit shy. “I am sorry for startling you.”
“Never mind that,” he said. His voice was so warm and low; he sounded pleased, and all of her fears from before fled in the face of it. “I did not think I would see you.”
She drew nearer to him. “Then what are you doing here, sir? Has another of my sisters engaged you for a kiss this evening?”
He chuckled, stepping away from his horse to close the remaining distance between them. “No. I meant to say, I had supposed I would find you in the yard, not out in the lane.”
“I could not wait to meet you.”
She could barely see him in the dark night though they were no more than a foot apart. Clouds had drifted over the moon, and the night was a milk-laced black. He reached for her hand, pulling her closer to him. “Neither could I.”
Her heart thudded within her chest as he bent his head toward her. The first kiss was no more than a glancing touch of his lips on her cheek. Her body was scarcely touching his, and each of her hands remained clasped within each of his as his kiss alit upon her cheeks, a few on the left and then a few on the right. His lips were soft, much softer than she had expected, and she found herself turning her face, encouraging him to move them from her cheek to her mouth.
“This feels like a dream,” he whispered a few moments later, his mouth breaking contact with hers only long enough to utter the words. “I have yearned for you for so very long.”
She pressed herself against him, her hands linking around his neck. “How long?”
“From the first,” he said. “The first moment of our acquaintance.”
“Need I remind you how easily you then withstood my charms?”
“The first night I had been acquainted with you, I dreamt of you, of loving you, and holding you, and forever keeping you near me. It terrified me then just as much as it thrills me now, particularly as I know my dream shall become a reality.”
There was something in the obscured moonlight and the ease of his own confession which prompted her own. “I, too, recall feeling something the first moment of our acquaintance, something I scarce could comprehend. A sense that there would be something to us, that something had just begun.” She smiled. “And so it did, even if our beginning was...uncommon.”
“Because you despised me?” His tone remained easy, but she perceived the uncertainty beneath the light words.
“Because I did not know you,” she said, drawing close again and surprising him with a kiss of her own. She was quick to learn, and in the art of kissing, there was no exception. She pulled his head down with her hands, pressing a short but ardent kiss upon him. “And how grateful I am to have this opportunity to begin anew.”
“As am I.” He said, keeping her close and continuing to press his lips to her. “A second beginning, for us to be friends, lovers, and husband and wife. Perhaps not the first moment of our acquaintance but the first moment of our life and our love.”
“Wonderfully perfect,” she agreed, and they celebrated then, a newfound understanding, as lovers do for nearly all the night long.
The End