“The purchase of paints will be an extraordinarily generous gift,” Anne said. “But will you not be able to give David some instruction yourself?”

“No!” he said far more sharply than he intended.

She sat farther back in her seat and compressed her lips.

“What is Ty Gwyn?” David asked.

“It is your new home,” Sydnam told him. “The words mean white house in the Welsh language. It is not white, though an older version of the house was, or so I have been told. It is larger than a house, though not nearly as large as Glandwr. It is close to it, though, and not far from the sea. There are neighbors, several of them with children. I daresay a few of them are close to you in age and will be delighted to be your friends and playmates. I think you will get along famously with the Llwyd brothers. They go to the village school, and you will be able to go there too if you wish and if your mama wishes it. I hope you will be happy in your new life.”

David gazed back at him and pressed the side of his face against Anne’s shoulder. He looked as if he were considering the prospects and not finding them altogether unpleasing. Sydnam looked into Anne’s face. The wheels of the carriage were rumbling over the Pulteney Bridge.

“Ty Gwyn is yours, then?” she asked him. “The Duke of Bewcastle has sold it to you?”

“Yes,” he told her, “though I have not lived there yet. We will move in together.”

As he held her glance, he knew that she was remembering what had happened at Ty Gwyn. It was there that today had become inevitable.

“We will not be in Bath long enough to hire a dressmaker,” he said. “I hope we will be able to find sufficient ready-made clothes for you in the shops this afternoon.”

“Clothes?” She flushed again. “I do not need to buy any clothes.”

This day and their new relationship were as unreal for her as they were for him, he realized as he saw in her eyes the dawning understanding that now he had every right-and obligation-to clothe her in a manner suited to his wife. But causing her embarrassment or even distress was the farthest thing from his intentions.

“A new wardrobe will be my wedding gift to you, Anne,” he said. “I have looked forward to it.”

“A wedding gift,” she said as the carriage turned onto Milsom Street and proceeded in the direction of the Royal York. “But I have none for you.”

“It is quite unnecessary,” he said.

“No, it is not,” she said firmly. “I shall buy something for you too this afternoon. We will all have gifts.”

They looked at each other. She was the first to smile.

She did need new clothes-quite desperately. It had been perfectly obvious to him during the summer that she had very few, and today she had worn an old evening gown for her wedding. The winter was coming on, and so were the advanced stages of her pregnancy. She needed clothes, and he was going to purchase them for her.

And after the shopping expedition, he thought, they would dine together in their private suite of rooms, the three of them, before David went to bed. And then there would be the wedding night.

He hoped he could do better than he had at Ty Gwyn. He hoped she would grow accustomed to him and find it possible to derive some pleasure from their marriage bed. He hoped so.

He remembered her as he had first seen her on the cliffs above the beach at Glandwr-like beauty personified stepping out of the dusk and into his dreams. And here she was three months later…

She was Anne Butler.

Mrs. Sydnam Butler.

David was ready for bed soon after the evening meal had been eaten. It had been an emotional day for him, though not without some pleasurable excitement. After they had all arrived back at the hotel from several hours of shopping, he had spread all his new painting supplies over one of the narrow beds in the room assigned to him and touched and examined them all one at a time with reverence and awe. He was going to be very impatient, Anne knew, to reach Ty Gwyn and meet the new art instructor Sydnam had promised to find for him.

But she had been hardly less excited about her own gifts and had spread them over the other bed in the room so that she could admire all the day dresses, the three evening gowns-one of which she was now wearing-the shoes and bonnets and reticules and other garments and accessories that Sydnam had insisted she needed. She had realized anew during the day how wealthy he must be. He had even insisted upon taking her to a jeweler’s, where he had bought her the diamond earrings and gold chain with a diamond pendant that she was also wearing this evening.

She had bought him a new fob for his watch at the same jeweler’s, recklessly spending almost all the money she possessed. He had stood in the doorway of the bedchamber, fingering it as he watched her and David admire their own far more lavish gifts.

Anne had been very aware all evening of the other bedchamber-the one with the large canopied bed-at the other side of the private sitting and dining room, where she would presumably spend her wedding night with her new husband.

Although David had been with them the whole time, something in Sydnam’s manner all afternoon and during dinner had assured her that though this had been a forced marriage, he nevertheless desired her and had no intention of making this a mere marriage of convenience.

She did not want a marriage of convenience either. She wanted to be a normal woman. She wanted to have a normal marriage.

And perhaps, she thought, now that she had been with him once, her body would believe what her mind had told her. Perhaps it would be a magical wedding night.

All day she had been partly terrified, partly excited at the prospect.

She felt the tension again now as she sat on the side of David’s bed telling him a story, as she still did each evening before he settled for sleep. As usual she picked up the narrative from where she had left it the night before, continued it for ten minutes or so, making it up as she went along, and then broke off at a particularly suspenseful moment. As usual she laughed at David’s sleepy protest and bent to kiss him.

“How are we expected to live until tomorrow night before finding out what happens to poor Jim?” Sydnam asked from the doorway, where she knew he had been standing though she had been sitting with her back to him.

“You have no choice,” she said, getting to her feet. “Until tomorrow night I will not know myself what is to be Jim’s fate.”

She turned back to smooth David’s hair away from his brow and saw resentment in his eyes for a moment before he closed them.

Oh, David, she told him silently, give him a chance. Please give him a chance.

“Good night, David,” Sydnam said, not advancing farther into the room.

“Good night, sir,” David said-and then, after a brief pause, “Thank you again for my paints.”

Anne followed Sydnam back into the private sitting room a few moments later, closing the door of the bedchamber behind her.

“He will be wanting to get to Ty Gwyn as quickly as the carriage wheels can turn,” she said, “so that he may use his new paints. You could not possibly have given him a more welcome gift.”

“I think we will not go there immediately,” he said. “We are relatively close to Alvesley. I would like to have my parents meet my new wife. I believe we will go there for a few days.”

Anne froze as she sat again at the cleared dining table and Sydnam sat opposite and picked up his wineglass. It was strange that in all the time she had waited for him to come to marry her, it had not once occurred to her that she would also be marrying into the family of the Earl of Redfield. Whatever would they think of her? The answer did not bear contemplating.

“Do they know about me?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

And for the first time she realized what an awkward position she had put him in with his family. Though she must not begin to think that way. He was as much to blame for what had happened as she was-if blame was the right word.

“We must indeed go to Alvesley, then,” she said.

There was a twinkle in his eye suddenly and he smiled his lopsided grin.

“You sound as if you are agreeing to attend your own execution,” he said. “You will like them, Anne, and they will love you.”

She doubted that very much indeed. Even though she might continue to reassure herself with the knowledge that they were equally responsible for having conceived a child and thus having been precipitated into an unplanned marriage, she did not doubt that his family would see matters quite otherwise.

“Will we tell them…everything?” she asked.

He set down his glass, though his fingers played with the stem.

“I want them to know,” he said, smiling again, “that I am to be a father. But for your sake we will say nothing at present. I will let them know in a letter after we have gone home to Ty Gwyn, and they may draw whatever conclusions they wish when the child is born sooner than expected.”

His gaze slipped downward to her abdomen, and Anne resisted the urge to spread her hand there. It seemed strangely unreal that they had created life together in her womb. She felt an unexpected but very welcome surge of desire between her thighs and in the passage within.

“Kit and Lauren have three children,” he said. “They are all considerably younger than David, but even so he may enjoy having some cousins to meet.”

“He loves playing with young children,” she said. “I think it is a natural reaction to having spent the last few years with older girls. Young children make him feel important.”

“We will leave for Alvesley in the morning, then,” he said.

They fell into a short silence that might have been comfortable if it had not been so charged with sexual tension. But the discomfort, Anne thought, feeling her breath quicken and her nipples harden, was very pleasurable. They were man and wife, and tonight and for the rest of their lives they would share a marital bed, and they would make love whenever they wished.