Page 127 of The Duke's Virgin Bride
“At the opera.”
“During Don Giovanni.”
“In the retiring room.”
“While the performers sang their hearts out.”
They looked at one another—and dissolved into slightly hysterical laughter.
“No one will believe it,” Adrian said.
“Oh, they shall. It is too perfectly us to be fiction.”
Elisabeth stirred, making small contented sounds.
“Will she forgive us,” Adrian wondered, “for so theatrical an entrance?”
“She is a Blackwell. Drama is her birthright.”
“Poor child.”
“Lucky child. Two parents who adore one another, a family that will dote upon her, and the best birth-story in London.”
“The gossips will dine upon it for years.”
“Let them. Our daughter was born to music—and love. What could be more fitting?”
After a silence, he said very softly, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For seeing me that night. For refusing to look away. For giving me everything I never knew I wanted. For our daughter. For teaching me happiness.”
“Adrian—”
“I love you. Both of you. Beyond words.”
“We love you too. Even if you are overprotective.”
“I am appropriately protective.”
“You threatened to have Mr Peterson transported.”
“Again, that was stress-induced hyperbole.”
They might have continued their familiar bickering, but Elisabeth had other plans. She wailed, a fierce little cry that suggested she had inherited both parents’ determination to be heard.
“Already making demands,” Adrian said, sounding absurdly proud.
“Definitely a Blackwell.”
As Marianne fed their daughter for the first time, Adrian’s arm around them both, she found herself thinking of circles—how life curved back upon itself, how love created its own gravity. They had begun at the opera, with a glance that shifted the course of two lives. And now, in that same place, their daughter had made her entrance, completing one circle even as she began her own.
Outside, London slept, unaware that its newest scandal was also its most beautiful love story—the Beast and his merchant duchess, and the opera-born child who proved that the most shocking events were sometimes the most wondrous.
Elisabeth nursed contentedly, already at home in her dramatic beginning, while her parents watched her with the kind of love that had tamed a beast, elevated a merchant’s daughter, and produced this perfect, improbable, absolutely miraculous moment.
The End