After Watching the Man Who Promised Her Forever Place a Sapphire on Another Woman’s Finger, Diana Asked the Lonely Duke for One Dance to Make Her Ex Jealous—But Before the Music Ended, He Whispered, “Marry Me.”

PART 5

The inside of the carriage smelled of rich leather, damp wool, and a faint, sharp tang of peppermint.

For the first four hours, neither of them spoke. The carriage rattled and swayed over the rutted roads out of London, rain drumming a relentless, depressing rhythm on the roof. Diana sat huddled in her corner, staring out at the blurred grey countryside.

Her mind kept looping back. To the ballroom. To Simon’s face. To the heavy emerald dragging at her left hand, which felt precisely like a manacle.

Across from her, Benedict sat with one ankle resting on his knee, reading a dense leather-bound ledger and making sharp corrections in the margins with a silver pencil. He seemed entirely unbothered by the silence, or by her.

The carriage hit a deep pothole. Diana was thrown sideways, her shoulder slamming into the lacquered doorframe. She let out a sharp gasp.

He did not look up from the page.

“Hold on to the leather strap above your head. The roads only worsen from here.”

Diana gritted her teeth and rubbed her bruised shoulder. Then she reached up and gripped the strap.

“Are we travelling all the way to Northumberland today?”

“We travel until the horses require rest, or until the roads become impassable.” He turned a page. “Whichever comes first.”

“You are a remarkably accommodating travel companion.”

The sarcasm slipped out before she could stop it. It was a defence mechanism — a remnant of three seasons fencing with the sharpest tongues in London.

Benedict paused. He lowered the pencil. He closed the ledger and set it on the seat beside him.

Then he looked across the small, confined space of the carriage and fixed her with a heavy, unsettling focus.

“Let us establish a rule, Diana.”

It was the first time he had used her given name. It sounded harsh in his mouth.

“I do not play games. I do not engage in polite, passive-aggressive banter. If you are uncomfortable, say so. If you are angry, say so. But do not waste my time.”

Diana met his gaze. Her pulse thumped in her throat. She refused to look away.

“Very well. I am uncomfortable. It is freezing in here. My shoulder throbs. And I have just married a man who treats me with the warmth of a tax collector.” A pause. “Is that direct enough for you?”

Silence hung in the carriage, punctuated only by the rhythm of the horses’ hooves.

Then something extraordinary happened.

The corner of Benedict’s mouth twitched. A microscopic movement — but in the bleak landscape of his face it was practically a shout.

He reached beneath his seat and pulled out a heavy fur carriage rug. He tossed it across the space between them. It landed heavily over her lap, smelling of cedar and animal warmth.

“Felburn is cold,” he said, picking up his ledger again. “You will need to adjust.”

He found his page.

“And as for my warmth — I told you what I was before you agreed to this. You wanted a weapon against Rexford. You have it. A sword is meant to be sharp, not comforting.”

Diana pulled the fur up to her chest. The heat began seeping into her shivering bones.

“I suppose that is true.”

“It is.”

The tension in the carriage shifted. It did not vanish. But it changed, from a jagged, hostile silence into a heavy working truce.

The journey took four days.

They stopped at nondescript coaching inns. Benedict secured private parlours and separate bedchambers without asking her preference, handling the innkeepers with a quiet, terrifying authority that ensured they were never bothered. They ate in silence. They rode in silence.

But Diana learned things in that small space.

He drank his tea black. He did not read for pleasure. His briefcases were filled with agricultural reports, mining yields, and parliamentary drafts. He had a faint, jagged scar running along his jaw that disappeared into his cravat.

And he learned things about her. He noticed that she did not complain when the food was stale. He noticed that she did not weep, even when she sat staring out of the window for hours with an expression hollow and distant.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, the rain stopped.

The heavy clouds parted, and the landscape turned rugged and violent. The gentle green hills of the south had given way to jagged moors, dark patches of heather, and massive looming crags of grey stone.

The carriage slowed, turning off the main road onto a wide gravel drive lined with ancient twisted oaks.

“Look,” Benedict said.

Diana leaned forward.

Through the trees, a massive structure came into view. Felburn Castle was not a modern, airy estate. It was a fortress built of dark, rough-hewn stone, sitting on the edge of a cliff above a deep shadowed valley. Turrets flanked a central keep. Rows of narrow windows stared out at the moors like black, unblinking eyes.

It looked incredibly old. Incredibly strong. Completely isolated from the rest of the world.

“It is imposing,” Diana murmured. Her breath fogged the glass.

“It is defensible.” He corrected her without looking at her. “My ancestors built it to keep the Scots out. I maintain it to keep London out.”

The carriage rumbled into the courtyard and halted. Footmen rushed out, pulling open the doors and letting down the steps.

Benedict stepped out first. The wind whipped his dark coat around his legs. He turned and offered her his hand.

Diana hesitated for a fraction of a second. She looked at the massive stone walls of her new home.

It was a prison.

But it was a prison where Simon Rexford could never reach her. Where the whispers of the ton would never echo.

She put her gloved hand in his. He pulled her down, his grip firm and steady.

A line of staff stood on the front steps, shivering in the cold. At the front was an older woman with a severe face and a ring of heavy iron keys hanging at her waist.

Benedict did not introduce Diana with a grand flourish. He did not smile.

He led her up the stone steps and stopped in front of the housekeeper.

“Mrs. Higgins.” His voice carried easily over the howling wind. “This is the Duchess of Rothwell. You will answer to her on all domestic matters. Her word is absolute.”

He looked at the rest of the staff, his grey eyes sweeping them.

“She is the master of this house as surely as I am. See that she is treated as such.”

He released Diana’s hand and walked through the heavy oak doors into the dark interior, leaving her standing on the steps.

The undisputed queen of a very cold, very lonely kingdom.

Felburn Castle did not welcome occupants. It merely tolerated them.

For the first month, Diana felt as though she were living inside a dormant volcano. The stone walls leeched the heat out of the hearths within minutes. The corridors echoed with wind screaming off the moors — a relentless, punishing noise that rattled the iron window frames. The servants moved like shadows, efficient and entirely silent, watching their new mistress with a mixture of scepticism and pity.

They expected her to break. They expected her to demand a return to the soft, civilised south before the first frost.

She did not.

Instead, Diana went to war.

She started in the kitchens. She audited the pantries and found a horrific waste of winter stores due to damp, and ordered the grain moved to the higher shelves. She dismissed a scullery maid caught stealing sugar and replaced her with a local girl from the village who actually knew how to bake bread that did not taste of ash. She stripped the heavy, rotting velvet drapes from the drawing rooms and replaced them with thick bright wool woven by the estate’s own tenants.

She did not wait for Benedict’s permission.

She remembered his words on the steps.

Her word is absolute.

She tested the boundary of that absolute power every single day.

Benedict, for his part, stayed out of her way. He left the castle before dawn to inspect the coal mines and the tenant farms, and returned long after sunset. They dined together at opposite ends of a mahogany table that could have seated thirty. The conversation was sparse and limited to the price of oats, the roof repairs in the east wing, and the weather.

He did not seek her company. He did not avoid it. He simply existed beside her — a heavy, silent anchor.

Then came the first week of November. The temperature plummeted. Frost locked the moors in ice and turned the ground as hard as iron.

Diana was in the library, wrapped in a heavy shawl, poring over the household accounts. The previous steward’s ledger was a disaster. Mr. Halloway had been skimming funds from the coal shipments, and she had spent five hours tracing the false entries, her eyes burning in the dim light of the oil lamp.

The heavy oak door swung open.

Benedict walked in and brought the cold with him. His riding coat was dusted with frost, his boots caked in frozen mud, and he looked exhausted — the sharp lines of his face drawn tight, shadows pooled under his grey eyes.

He stopped when he saw her. He had expected the room to be empty.

“It is past midnight,” he said, unbuttoning his coat and tossing it over a leather chair.

“I am aware of the hour.”

She did not look up. She dipped her quill into the inkwell.

“I am trying to untangle Mr. Halloway’s creative mathematics regarding the October coal yields.”

Benedict walked over. He leaned across her shoulder, and suddenly he was close enough that she could smell horse and cold air and that faint sharp sandalwood that clung to his coat.

“He was inflating the transport costs,” he said, his voice a low rumble near her ear, “and pocketing the difference. I dismissed him for it two months ago. You do not need to balance that ledger, Diana. It is a lost cause.”

“It is not a lost cause if I can determine exactly how much he stole. We can withhold it from his severance pension.”

Benedict paused. He looked down at the neat, aggressive columns of numbers she had written.

Then he looked at her.

“You have been working on this all day.”

“I have.”

“Why?”

Diana set the quill down and finally looked up at him. His face was inches from hers. There was no mockery in his eyes — only genuine curiosity.

“Because you told the staff I was the master of this house,” she said evenly. “If I allow a thief’s ledger to remain unbalanced, I am not a master. I am a figurehead. And I have no intention of being a figurehead in my own home, Benedict.”

It was the first time she had used his given name. It slipped out naturally, a product of the late hour and the quiet of the room.

Benedict did not flinch. His gaze dropped to her mouth for a fraction of a second, then back to her eyes. He reached out and his large, calloused hand brushed over the ledger. His fingers grazed hers. The contact was brief, and it sent a sharp, involuntary jolt up her arm.

“You have changed the drapes in the drawing room,” he observed softly.

“They were rotting. They smelled of mildew.”

“You dismissed the scullery maid.”

“She was stealing sugar. I tolerate many things. I do not tolerate thieves.”

A heavy silence stretched between them.

It was not the cold, hostile silence of the carriage ride from London. It was thick and pulling. The transactional nature of their marriage suddenly felt very fragile — a thin sheet of glass resting over something deep and dangerous.

Benedict pulled a chair up beside the desk and sat, stretching his long legs towards the hearth.

“Show me,” he said.

Diana blinked. “Show you what?”

“Show me where he hid the transport costs. If we are going to dock his pension, I want to know exactly how much to take.”

For the next two hours they worked side by side in the dim light.

They did not speak of the ton. They did not speak of the scandal that had brought them together. They spoke of numbers, and coal, and winter stores, and the survival of the estate.

When Diana finally closed the ledger, her neck was stiff, but a strange, quiet satisfaction had settled in her chest. She looked at Benedict. He was watching her, the firelight catching the sharp angles of his face. The exhaustion was still there, but the harsh defensive edge was gone.

“You are a terrifyingly competent woman, Diana,” he murmured.

“Is that a compliment, your grace?”

“It is a fact.”

He stood, towering over the desk. Then he reached out and lightly touched the edge of her shawl, drawing it closer around her shoulders.

The gesture was shockingly gentle for a man so rough.

“Go to sleep. The coal can wait until morning.”

As he walked out of the library, Diana touched the spot on her shoulder where his hand had rested.

It was warm.

For the first time since she had arrived at Felburn, she did not feel like a prisoner.

She felt like she belonged.

Winter hit Northumberland with the force of a hammer in late December. Snow buried the moors and cut Felburn off from the surrounding villages. The isolation was absolute.

And yet Diana thrived. She managed the staff. She organised the winter rationing. She sat by the fire in the evenings reading while Benedict worked silently at his desk.

They had settled into a rhythm. It was not a romance. There were no grand declarations, no intimacy beyond a brushed hand or a lingering look. But there was a profound, quiet respect — a mutual reliance that felt stronger than the frantic, desperate infatuation she had once mistaken for love.

Then the outside world intruded.

It happened on a Tuesday afternoon. A massive blizzard had rolled in off the coast. Diana was in the great hall directing two footmen to drag extra logs to the hearth when the heavy front doors were thrown open.

Snow whipped into the hall.

A group of travellers stumbled over the threshold, shouting over the roar of the wind.

Diana stepped forward, authority settling over her like a cloak.

“Close those doors before you freeze the entire house.”

The footmen rushed to obey. The travellers stood in the centre of the hall, shivering, covered in snow, and looking entirely out of place. There were four of them — a coachman, a maid, a woman in a ruined velvet travelling cloak, and a man whose expensive beaver hat was crushed between his hands.

“Our carriage slipped off the road two miles south,” the man gasped. “The axle is shattered. We saw the lights of the castle. We need shelter.”

The voice hit Diana like a physical blow to the stomach.

She stopped walking. The heavy iron keys at her waist clinked against her skirt.

The man wiped the melting snow from his eyes and looked up.

He froze. The colour drained out of his already pale face, leaving him looking like a corpse.

It was Simon Rexford.

And clinging to his arm, shivering and whimpering, was his wife.