One Night for Love by Mary Balogh Page A

gained by lamenting the impossibility, is there? She must simply be made possible.”
    “I think her deuced pretty, Nev,” Hal Wollston, his cousin, had said.
    “You would, Hal.” Lady Wilma Fawcitt, the Duke of Anburey’s red-haired daughter, had sounded scornful. “As if pretty looks have anything to say to anything. I agree with Aunt Clara. She is impossible!”
    “Perhaps,” Neville had said with quiet emphasis, “you would care to remember, Wilma, that you are speaking of my wife.”
    She had tutted, but she had said no more.
    His mother had got to her feet to leave the room. “I must return to the dower house and see what is to be done for poor Lauren,” she had said. “But tomorrow I shall move back into the abbey, Neville. It is going to need a mistress, and clearly Lily will be quite unable to assume that role for some time to come. I shall undertake her training.”
    “We will discuss the matter some other time, Mama,” he had said, “though I agree it would be best if you moved back here. I will not have Lily made unhappy, however. This is all very difficult for her. Far more difficult than for any of us.”
    He had left the room before anyone could say anything more and had come to stand on the steps. There were some days, he reflected, that were so unremarkable that a week afterward one could not recall a single thing that had happened in them And then there were days that seemed packed full of a lifetime of experiences. This was definitely one such day.
    He had written several letters after returning from the dower house and then checking on Lily, who had been fast asleep. He had sent the letters on their way. It would not be easy to be patient in awaiting the replies.
    The fact was that for all his solicitude, for all his apparent calm,
he simply was not sure Lily really was his wife
.
    They had married without a license and without the customary banns. The regimental chaplain had assured him that the wedding was quite legal, and he had drawn up the proper papers to which Neville had put his signature and Lily her mark and which had been witnessed by Harris and Rieder. But Parker-Rowe had been killed in that ambush the following day. Harris had reported that the belongings of the dead had been left with them in the pass.
    That would seem to mean that the marriage had never been registered. Was it therefore not a marriage at all? Was it void? Neville supposed that his mind must have touched upon the possibility before today. But he had never pursued the question. It had been unimportant. Lily had been dead.
    But now she was alive and at Newbury Abbey. He had acknowledged her as his wife and his countess. Lauren had been made to suffer. All their lives had been turned upside down. But perhaps there was no legality to the marriage. He had written to Harris—now
Captain
Harris, it seemed—and to several civil and ecclesiastical authorities to try to find out.
    What if he and Lily were not legally married after all?
    Should he mention his doubts to her now before he knew the answer? Should he mention them to anyone else? The question had been weighing on his mind ever since it had struck him as he stood on the beach with her, gazing out across the sea. But he had decided to keep his doubts to himself until he had the answer. He was not sure it would make a great deal of difference anyway. He had married Lily in good faith. He had made vows to her that he had had every intention of keeping. He had consummated the marriage with her.
    And he had loved her.
    But he could not rid his mind of the image of Lauren,swinging gently back and forth on the tree swing in her wedding gown, listless and quietly accepting of her disappointment—and surely about to explode with the anger she had told him was pointless. A bride rejected and humiliated.
    This was the devil of a coil, he thought. He felt weighed down by guilt even though common sense told him that he could not possibly have foreseen the day’s