“Give Me an Heir and You’ll Be Free,” the Ruthless Duke Told the Stranger He Married — He Never Guessed She Had Loved Him for Seven Years, or That Her Ruined Physician Father’s Forbidden Knowledge Could Save His Life

PART 10 — THE END

The Duke of Edshot woke at full morning to sun on the ceiling and his wife asleep in the chair beside his bed, her hand still loosely about his wrist, even in sleep. Her face was streaked with dried tears, and more beautiful to him than any face he had ever seen.

He lay still a long while, breathing. Only breathing. The plain miracle of it. And watching her sleep, knowing that everything was different now. That the last wall of it was down. That the bargain was ash.

She woke near noon and found him watching her. She came awake all at once with the physician’s start, her hand tightening on his wrist to find his pulse before her eyes were fairly open.

“Steady,” he said, turning his wrist in her grip so that his hand caught hers instead. “It beats. You may feel it if you doubt me.”

He drew her hand up and laid it flat against his own chest, over his heart, where it beat strong and even under her palm, and held it there.

“Varden,” she said, her voice cracked. “You should not be—”

“I have spent nine months being told by everyone in this house what I should and should not do, and being wrong about the whole of it, and I have done with it. Be quiet, Glenna. It is my turn to talk.”

He told her that he knew. That he had known since July, since Sir Godfrey let fall her father’s name. That he had lain awake three nights and put the whole of it together. That he knew she was Edmund Viner’s daughter, and that he had been the cleverest man in the West of England, and that they had broken him for being right. That he knew what she had done—signed his wicked bargain, come into his cold house, saved his life in secret at the risk of her own neck, and never breathed a word of it.

“And you asked for nothing. You were ready, I know, to take your settlement and go, and never tell me I owed you the breath in my body. Do you deny it?”

She was weeping now, silently. “No,” she whispered. “I do not deny it.”

“Then answer me one thing. Why would a woman do such a thing for a cold stranger who bought her like a beast at market? I have told myself it was because you had come to care for me. But there was no time for that in January. You knew before you cared. Why, Glenna? What was I to you before I was anything at all?”

And Glenna Viner, Duchess of Edshot, who had guarded this last secret closer than all the rest, looked at her husband and found she could not hold the door shut any longer.

“You do not remember me,” she said. “I have known that from the beginning. It is why I could bear to come.”

“Remember you from when? I never set eyes on you until January.”

“You set eyes on me seven years ago. In the assembly rooms at White Cross. You were not a duke then. You were young, and the handsomest man in three counties. And I was eighteen, standing against the wall in a made-over gown for two hours while no one came. And then you came—all the way across that bright, crowded room, past every pretty girl in the West of England. And you bowed to the plain girl no one wanted. And you asked me to dance.”

“You forgot my name within the week. I know that. But I carried those two dances through my father’s ruin and his death, through three years of other women’s houses, the way a soldier carries a letter next to his heart. It was the one time in my life someone had crossed a room for me.”

The Duke of Edshot could not speak for a long moment. And then something moved behind his eyes—some old, buried image struggling up through twenty years.

“A gray gown,” he said slowly. “Made over. A girl by the pillars, who had been standing a long time. I could not have told you her name an hour after. God forgive me, I was a careless fool of a boy. But there was no wager. I remember thinking it was not right that a girl should stand so long and no one come. That whatever her name was, she had a face worth crossing a room for.”

His own eyes filled. “I did not know it was true. I have known it seven years and never known I knew it. You have been in me all this while, and I did not know your name.”

“You know it now,” she whispered.

“I know it now.”

He drew her in, awkward with the child, and did not care. He gathered her against him and held her as though she were the one thing that stood between him and every grave.

“Glenna, I love you. Not out of gratitude, though I owe you my life. Not out of duty, nor the bargain, nor the child. I love you as I did not know I was able to love anything. There is no house waiting for you in any county. No freedom coming when the child is weaned. The bargain is ash—I tore it up in July. You are never going to be free of me.”

Glenna laughed and wept at once, her face against his beating heart. “I never wanted to be free of you, you foolish man. I have told you and told you. You decide the whole of a matter before you have heard the half.”

“I have heard the half now,” he said into her hair. “It appears I am going to have a great deal of time to spend on the other half.”

The child came at the turn of the year, in the deep of winter. A son. They called him Edmund, after the disgraced physician who had died crying out a truth no one would hear—Lord Edmund of Edshot, named for the cleverest man in the West of England, whose daughter had saved a duke and married him.

And the Duke of Edshot lived a long life and a full one, into a silver-headed old age his father and grandfather never saw. He became a man famous, to a county that remembered the cold young duke shut up in his great house, for his laugh. And on winter evenings, when the fire was built high—for he would never again suffer a fire in that house to burn low—he would sometimes look down the length of the room at his wife, sewing or mixing cordials or with a child against her knee, and remember the January night he had stood with his back half turned and offered a stranger a bargain: an heir for her freedom.

He would cross the room and take her hand where it lay in the firelight—the thin hand that wore the old sapphire loose upon its finger—and lift it to his lips. And she would look up at him with the eyes that had never once stopped watching over him. And neither of them would say anything at all, because everything had long since been said.

A cold man had offered a cold bargain to a woman he did not know. And she had crossed the whole of a lifetime to answer it, and had never told him why until it was too late to do anything but love her back for the rest of his days.

Which he did, wholly and without reserve, to the last. Having found, at the far end of everything he had schemed to lose, that there had been nothing to fear after all. No shadow in the blood. No death waiting.

Only her. And the fire kept high. And the long, warm years.

THE END