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 7

The carriage rolled away a few minutes later.

Diana did not watch it go. She walked straight to Benedict’s study and pushed the door open without knocking.

He was standing by the window with a glass of whiskey in his hand, watching the black carriage disappear down the long winding drive.

He turned when she entered. His expression was unreadable.

“They are gone,” she announced, closing the door behind her.

“I see that.”

He set the glass down on the desk. His eyes traced the rigid line of her posture.

“Did he beg for your forgiveness?”

“He tried. I told him he was exactly where he belonged.”

Benedict’s jaw tightened. He walked slowly around the edge of the desk and stopped a few feet away from her.

The space between them crackled.

The ghost was gone. The audience was gone. There was no one left to perform for, no scandal left to avoid. It was just the two of them, standing in the wreckage of a transactional marriage that neither of them knew how to navigate any longer.

“The contract is fulfilled,” Benedict said quietly. His voice was rough and carefully controlled. “You used me to humiliate him. You have done it. He is a broken man chained to a nightmare. And you are the Duchess of Rothwell.”

A pause.

“Have your victory.”

Diana stepped forward.

“Is that what you think this is? A victory?”

“Is it not?”

“No.”

She closed the distance between them and stopped mere inches from his chest. She tilted her head back to look him in the eye.

“A victory implies the game has ended. I am not playing a game any more, Benedict.”

A pause.

“Are you?”

He stared down at her. The careful, cold control he wore like armour began to fracture. He could see the pulse beating wildly at the base of her throat.

“I told you on the day we married,” he rasped. His hands had clenched into fists at his sides, fighting the urge to touch her. “I do not offer poetry. I do not offer grand declarations. I am a hard man, Diana. I live in a hard place. I do not know how to be the husband you wanted.”

“I don’t want the husband I wanted.”

She said it fiercely. She reached out and grabbed the lapels of his coat, her small hands gripping the dark wool tight.

“I wanted a liar who wrote bad poetry and abandoned me the moment it was convenient. I don’t want that.”

Her voice shook, and she did not stop.

“I want a man who clears my father’s debts without asking for gratitude. I want a man who sits beside me in the dark to balance a ledger. I want the man who stood at the bottom of a staircase and told a coward he would never touch me again.”

Benedict sucked in a sharp, ragged breath.

His hands came up and closed around her wrists. He did not pull her away. He held her hands flat against his chest, over the heavy, frantic beating of his heart.

“I proposed a transaction,” he warned her, his voice dropping to a dangerous, desperate rumble. “An arrangement of convenience.”

“It is no longer convenient, Diana.”

“Good.”

Her eyes were burning.

“Because I respect you. Because I trust you. And because if you do not kiss me right now, I am going to lose my mind.”

Benedict broke.

The iron control shattered entirely. He let go of her wrists and framed her face with his large, rough hands, and he did not kiss her gently. He kissed her like a man who had been starving and had finally been offered a feast — demanding, possessive, entirely without pretence.

Diana gasped into his mouth. Her hands slid up his chest to grip his shoulders. The heat of him engulfed her, and it erased the cold stone walls, erased the London ballroom, erased the last lingering ghost of the girl she used to be.

She met his intensity with her own.

He backed her up against the heavy mahogany desk, his body pressing her flush against the wood. He broke the kiss just long enough for them both to drag in air. He rested his forehead against hers, his chest heaving, his hands tangled in her hair and pulling the pins loose until it tumbled down her back.

“You are not collateral damage, Diana,” he whispered fiercely against her mouth.

“You are not a weapon.”

A breath.

“You are my wife. Mine.”

“Yours,” she agreed breathlessly, and pulled him back down.

They did not speak of contracts again.

They did not speak of the ton, or of the past, or of the ballroom in London where a girl had crossed a crowded floor because she had nothing left to lose.

The transaction was dead.

In its place stood a partnership forged in cold stone and quiet respect — an unbreakable fortress built by two people who had looked at the wreckage of their lives and decided to build an empire out of it.

The Duke of Rothwell had married a disgraced spinster to secure an heir and spite a rival.

He had accidentally found a queen.

And Diana Waverly, who had once stood against a ballroom wall waiting to be ruined, learned that the most dangerous man in the room was the only place she had ever truly been safe.

But the world does not stop for a closed study door.

The world had noticed.