“None of Them Will Be My Mother!” the Duke’s Son Declared — Until the Cook Brought an Apple Pie
Chapter 19
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"I am afraid, too," said Rosamund. She put down the spoon because her hand was shaking. "I have been afraid since the day I walked into your kitchen. I have spent 28 years being very careful, Your Grace. I have never taken the last piece of anything. I told myself that wanting you was a kind of theft." She drew a breath. "But I stood up in front of 300 people tonight, and nothing fell down. I should like to try again. I should like to try wanting you, and see whether the sky holds."He crossed the kitchen in three strides and stopped before her, close enough to touch; and he did not touch her. He waited. It was the last and the best of the things she loved him for: that he asked, even now."May I?" said Theodore, very low."Yes," said Rosamund.His hand came up to her cheek as gently as if she were made of spun sugar, and he kissed her slowly and with infinite care in the quiet kitchen, with the kettle singing on the range. It tasted of honey and cold air and something far older than either of them. And when it ended, she found that she was crying and laughing at once, and could not tell the two apart."Marry me," said the Duke against her hair. "Not for Ned, though he will be insufferable if you refuse. Not for the house, which is cold without you. Because I should like to wake up every morning for the rest of my life to a woman who tells me when I have a crumb on my cuff.""I shall have to insist upon one condition," said Rosamund, her voice muffled in his waistcoat."Anything.""Apple pie on Sundays in the kitchen with Ned. And nobody is to leave the room when it is mentioned."There was a long silence, and she felt his chest shake with something that was not quite a laugh."Every Sunday," said the Duke. "For as long as I live."And from the dark doorway behind them, where a small figure in a nightshirt had been standing for some time with a candle, there came a loud, satisfied, and entirely unrepentant sniff."I told you," said Master Edmund. "He goes red."He came to her the next morning at the kitchen table with a very serious face and flour on his nightshirt."You may call me Ned," he said without preamble. "I have been thinking about it, and I believe she would not mind. She would be glad it was you."Rosamund put down her teacup. She did not trust her voice, and she did not try to use it. She held out her arms, and the boy walked into them as though he had been doing it all his life; and his thin shoulders shook against her once, hard, and went still."Thank you, Ned," she said when she could.