For Four Seasons, She Sat Alone and Unclaimed at Every Ball—Until the Duke Crossed the Crowded Room, Leaned Close, and Whispered, “Act as Though You’re Mine,” Unaware Their Carefully Staged Lie Was About to Become Real

PART 7

She returned to London the following morning, pleading a headache that fooled no one — least of all the Dowager Duchess, who watched her grandson hand Friedwide into the carriage with an expression of such careful, wounded formality that the old woman’s sharp eyes narrowed with unmistakable suspicion. Cadwallan did not accompany them. He remained at Winerth Park a further three days — ostensibly to attend to estate business — in truth because he did not trust himself in the raw aftermath of the corridor to conduct himself with anything resembling the composure the situation required.

He walked the length of the lake each morning, turning the whole arrangement over in his mind — the ballroom, the bargain, the fortnight just concluded — and arrived, by the second day, at a conclusion so plain he wondered how he had failed to name it sooner.

He loved her.

Not the performance. Not the convenient fiction that had begun as a shield against Lady Marberry. But Friedwide herself — her steady gray eyes, her refusal to flatter him, her fierce quiet devotion to a brother she had not seen in months, the particular way she had of listening to his account of the Northfield’s drainage as though it mattered as much as any matter of state. He had built his fortress against exactly this eventuality, and she had walked through its gates within a fortnight.

On the second evening, he sought out his grandmother and confessed the whole truth of how the arrangement had begun — haltingly at first, and then with a rush of relief he had not expected.

“You are a great fool, Cadwallan,” the Dowager said when he had finished. “Did you truly believe I would think less of the girl for the manner of your meeting?”

“I believed you would think less of me. For having deceived you. And I feared more than that — that the deception would poison whatever affection had grown from it in your eyes — if not in hers.”

“I have watched the two of you together for a fortnight. Whatever began it, I do not believe for one moment that what has grown from it is false — on either side. The girl looks at you the way I once looked at your grandfather, God rest him, before either of us had the sense to admit it aloud. Go after her properly — when the debt no longer stands between you as an excuse for either of you to doubt the other’s motives.”

But before he could act, a letter arrived from London — not from Friedwide, but from his own solicitor — informing him that Lady Marberry had formally called in the debt in full, with thirty days allowed for settlement, and had let it be known in the same communication that the terms would be reconsidered most favorably should an alliance between the two families still be forthcoming.

He returned to London within the day. Before calling upon Friedwide, he spent the better part of an afternoon closeted with his solicitor and his man of business, examining exactly what stood between Winerth Park and Lady Marberry’s demand. The dukedom’s entailed lands could not be touched — his father had at least been careful of that much — but a smaller property near Bath, a house and a modest parcel of farmland left to Cadwallan outright by his mother’s family and never entailed to the title at all, was his to dispose of as he chose. He had refused for three years to sell it, out of a stubborn, half-examined pride that it was the one thing of hers he had left unspoiled by his father’s debts. He set that pride aside within the hour, along with the last of the funds still sitting untouched in a shipping venture his grandfather had invested in decades before — money he had likewise been too proud to draw upon while any other course remained open to him. Between the two, the sum came within a few hundred pounds of Lady Marberry’s full claim; his solicitor arranged the remainder as a private mortgage against the Bath property’s rents, at terms considerably kinder than anything Lady Marberry had offered. Not one acre of Winerth Park itself would need to be sold, let, or mortgaged to satisfy the debt. It had cost him a piece of his mother’s memory and the last of his careful pride — but nothing of Iris’s home.

He found Friedwide changed when he called upon her at Kellett House — not cold precisely, but careful in a way that ached worse than coldness would have — every word measured, every glance guarded. She received him in the small parlor, and he told her without preamble, because he had decided that whatever else passed between them, it would be conducted with total honesty from this point forward.

“Lady Marberry has called in the debt. Thirty days — or Winerth Park itself may be forfeit to satisfy it.”

“Then you must reconsider her,” Friedwide said, her composure not wavering. “I would not have Iris’s home lost for the sake of a pretense that has already served its purpose.”

“I have no intention of marrying Lady Saraphina. I told you as much at Winerth Park, before you fled at dawn without permitting me to finish.”

“I did not flee. I removed myself from a situation that had grown confused past bearing.” Her voice caught, the first crack in her armor. “You must understand how it appeared — five weeks of growing to care for you, against every warning I gave myself, only to learn from your own grandmother’s mouth that the question of whether it was real remained open even to those who know you best.”

“It is not open to me. It has not been open to me for weeks.” He crossed the small parlor and stood before her, close enough that she could not mistake the earnestness in his face for performance. “I love you. Not the arrangement. You. And I did not come here merely to inform you of the debt. I came to tell you that whatever becomes of Winerth Park — whatever Lady Marberry does or does not forgive — I do not intend to purchase its safety with a marriage I do not want to a woman I do not love, when the woman I do love is standing in front of me, doubting a truth I have been too great a coward to speak plainly until this very moment.”

She stood very still, her hands clasped tightly before her, and for a long moment said nothing at all.

“You cannot know that with certainty. You have known me five weeks, under circumstances designed from the outset to manufacture exactly this feeling between us. How am I to trust that what you call love is not merely the residue of a very convincing performance?”

“Because I have loved poorly before — and falsely — and I know the difference now with a certainty I did not possess at nineteen.” He reached for her hands, and she permitted it, though her fingers trembled within his. “She never once asked me about the Northfield’s drainage. She never once wept at a play she had seen a dozen times before. She never told a girl of fifteen that her own opinions mattered more than the ones she had been told to hold. I did not perform affection these five weeks. I discovered it — slowly, against my own careful defenses — in a hundred small moments neither of us staged for anyone’s benefit.”

Something in her face broke open then — the careful composure giving way at last to an emotion too large to contain behind it — and Cadwallan watched, with his heart in his throat, as tears rose and fell unchecked down her cheeks.

“I have loved you for weeks,” she said, the words coming in a rush as though a dam long straining had finally given way. “I told myself it was foolish — that I was mistaking gratitude for something deeper. I have spent every day since Winerth Park trying to talk myself out of it, and I have failed at every attempt.”

“Then let London believe what it likes,” he said, drawing her closer. “I care nothing for what it believes. I care only for what is true between us — and I am telling you as plainly as I know how that it is love. Whatever pretense it began as. Let me prove it to you properly — without the shadow of a debt or a bargain hanging over either of us. Marry me. Not to save Winerth Park. Not to satisfy my grandmother. Not to defeat Lady Marberry. But because I cannot any longer imagine a life in which you are not beside me.”