The Librarian's Spell by Patricia Rice (ebook offline reader TXT) 📗

but he felt this as a piece of Lydia’s heart and wore it proudly. When he finally kissed his bride, the genteel crowd erupted in cheers, egged on by his incorrigible schoolmates and groomsmen—who tossed flour as well as rice. The mice would have a field day.

“We have a dungeon I can throw the barbarians down,” he murmured against Lydia’s lips. “You have only to say the word.”

“They have been celebrating your daring rescue while we dressed. I suspect by evening they will all be drunk enough to pour themselves into the cellar. Why waste your energy when it’s better spent on me?” she suggested, before turning back to the cheering audience and lifting her bouquet in acknowledgment.

Chuckling, Max led his lovely librarian down the aisle and through the flowered and beribboned arch held by the servants, back to the great hall where a repast had been laid out for the guests.

With not enough tables to serve a crowd this size, a buffet had been set up. Most of the guests circled it while the wedding party ate at the head of the room, under the arch the servants planted in buckets of soil.

While Lydia and her ladies fussed with veils and lace and whispered excitedly to each other, Max lifted a glass in toast to the men who had answered his call even after twenty years of absence. “I am far beyond honored that you gentlemen have taken time from your busy lives to aid a prodigal in his time of need. I hope to toast you soon at your own happy nuptials. Who is next? Rainford?”

The blond marquess grimaced. “The duke has arranged an assortment of exceptionally suitable maidens for my perusal. An heir is essential, so I suppose I’m next.” He glanced at the dark and dashing earl at his side. “You can choose from the ones left over, Ives. My father has excellent taste.”

Gerard barked a laugh and sipped his champagne. “You forget, my lord, we are related through maternal lines only. I am an Ives and you are a mere Malcolm. We Ives proliferate with males. We have an overabundance of heirs to the marquisate. And the pater will probably live until eternity, so there is no rush at all.”

“Money, not heirs, drives us,” Bran announced from the far end of the table. “We’ll accept your leftovers, Rainford.”

The non-talkative twin intervened. “Rainford’s prospects will have no interest in impoverished, untitled sons of diplomats.”

Max gestured at the array of guests, many of them his mother’s students and teachers. “Look out there, my friends, at some of the finest ladies in the kingdom. If they do not have wealth, they have intelligence and integrity, and that is worth far more than gold.”

“And they’ve been known to drive men mad with their talk of ghosts and auras and spirits and things that go bump in the night,” Gerard grumbled.

Lydia whispered in Max’s ears. “Tell him he’s the next one destined to marry a barmy Malcolm. A barmy Malcolm says so.”

Max laughed and kissed her, in front of friends and family. Their guests cheered and lifted their glasses in unspoken toast.

“This is the happiest day of my life,” he murmured, touching his crystal glass against hers. “Let us remember this moment forever.”

“Look this way and smile,” Azmin shouted.

As they turned in her direction, she flashed her blinding camera lights.

When Max could see again, he spied his uncle speaking with Hugh Morgan and Miss Trivedi, the team he hoped would be overseeing their financial future, once he talked to the judge. There was the meteor on his sunlit horizon.

He gulped down the rest of his champagne.

Twenty-nine

“I wish we’d had time for a honeymoon,” Max whispered in Lydia’s ear as he removed the pins and lace from her hair later that evening. “I’d take you away from all this, to a place with warm breezes and moonlight and the ocean tide lapping at our feet.”

“If I’m with you, it does not matter about tides and breezes,” Lydia said, stretching her aching neck as the weight of all the folderol was lifted from her head. Her hair rippled down her chemise—Max had already divested her of her sumptuous gown.

She did not mention that what she really wanted to do was go into the library and test her new gift. Max might be as pragmatic as she, but this was their wedding night. She would never have another—even if they’d already anticipated their vows these past weeks.

“You really don’t long for romantic strolls down a sandy beach or a fancy hotel with gilded cherubs?” he asked, kissing her throat. “You are that tied to this castle?”

“Why do you ask?” She was terrified he meant to ask her to leave the castle—or that he meant to leave.

“I’ll admit,” he said reluctantly, “That I am not the world’s most romantic person. I was hoping to hear your thoughts on the matter.”

Lydia muffled a laugh and worked on his shirt studs. “It is not romance I require. It’s you, just as you are, who I admire. But we were discussing honeymoons. Are you saying you do not want a beach but something else?”

“I want you.” He nibbled her ear, sending a thrill to her midsection. “Never doubt that. But your performance today as a Latin-speaking lady intrigues me more than any beach or gilded cherub. Will that ever happen again, do you think?”

Filled with joy, Lydia laughed aloud. “I am wondering the same. If it were not our wedding day, I would have buried myself in the stacks in an attempt to raise her again.”

“We’ve had our wedding night already, and as much as I would love to ravish you now, I am just half-rats enough to think ravishment should wait.”

“Half-rats?” she asked with curiosity.

He chuckled. “Tipsy, half-drunk, not thinking straight, as is obvious from my next question. If the solicitors really have sent testers, shouldn’t we practice this exciting new gift you’ve displayed?”

“I did not think it was possible for me to love you