Given to a Duke Far Too Old, She Wept for Her Dreams—But on Wedding Night His First Gift Amazed Her

Chapter 10

She found him in the library, standing before the fire with his back to the door, the way she had found him on the night of the storm.

He did not turn when she came in. He had known she would come — had known it the way he had known, on her wedding night, that he could not touch her. There was a trust between them now that moved ahead of words, a current that had been running under everything from the moment he had left that velvet box on her table.

“You married me,” she said, “to save me from a man who would have killed me.”

“Yes.”

“You let me believe you were cold. You let me believe I was bought. You let me owe you nothing.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He turned. His face in the firelight was bare, all the stone worn away.

“Because I have spent my life watching women be taken,” he said. “My mother. Rosalind. Every bride my father brought to this house and wore down into a portrait on the wall. I was twelve years old when I swore I would never take a woman the way my father took them. I was twenty-two when I buried my mother’s last memory of joy in a locked room. And then you came, and you held your head the way she held hers, and you hummed her song without knowing you had it, and I understood that I was being given a chance to break the pattern. Not to take. To give.”

He stepped toward her, and stopped at the distance he had always kept — the careful distance of a man who had trained himself not to want.

“I want you to choose,” he said. “That is all I have ever wanted. If you choose to leave, I will provide for you, and I will never cross your door again. If you choose to stay, I want it to be because you have looked at everything I am — every locked room, every secret, every year of silence — and you have decided that you want it anyway.”

Isolde looked at him for a long moment. Then she reached into her pocket and drew out the silver key.

It caught the firelight, old and worn, the letter E faint at the bow.

“You gave me this on the night you married me,” she said. “You told me I was free to close my door or open yours. The choice would always be mine.” She held it up between them. “That was the first time in my life that anyone had ever given me a choice that cost them something. You gave me my freedom, Julian, and you asked for nothing in return. Do you know what that did to me?”

He did not answer. He could not.

“It terrified me,” she said. “I did not know what to do with a gift I had not earned. I thought I understood it. I thought it was pity, or duty, or the debt of a man keeping a promise to his mother’s ghost. But it was none of those things. It was a man looking at a woman who had been traded twice and deciding, with his whole heart, that she would never be traded again.”

She stepped forward and closed the distance between them.

“So now I am going to choose,” she said. “Not because I owe you. Not because I am grateful. Not because you saved me. I am choosing you because you are the first person who ever looked at me and did not see something to be used. You saw a person. You gave me a key. And I am giving it back.”

She pressed the key into his hand.

“No more locks,” she said.

The Duke of Hollowmere looked down at the key in his palm — his mother’s key, the key he had given away on his wedding night, the key that had come back to him through a woman who had been given every reason to run and had chosen to stay. And then he did something he had never done in his life.

He wept.

Not the neat, controlled grief of a man alone in a library. Real weeping, ugly and silent and desperate, the kind a man does when the walls he has built around himself finally come down and he discovers that there was a garden behind them all along.

Isolde wrapped her arms around him, and the fire burned low, and Hollowmere Hall — which had been a monument to duty for a hundred years — began, for the first time, to feel like a home.

The days that followed were a slow, astonished thaw.

The Duke began to smile. It was alarming at first, a crack in the stone, and then it became ordinary, then it became something she looked for in every room she entered. He left notes again — not careful, deliberate notes, but quick, greedy ones, the notes of a man who could not stop saying what he felt now that he had started. I am thinking of you. You hum when you read and it is my favourite sound. The gardenia bloomed again and I thought of your wedding morning.

Isolde played the piano. The rooms that had been built for echoes filled with music, and the servants began to leave doors open, and Mrs. Caldecott, who had served three generations of broken Marlow women, was observed on more than one occasion pressing a handkerchief to her eyes.

And then, one morning, in the third month after the storm, Isolde woke with the room tilting gently around her and the certain, terrifying, wonderful knowledge that she was no longer alone inside her own body.

She did not tell him at once. She sat with it for a week, holding the secret like a pressed flower, turning it over in the light of her new life.

And on the evening of the last day of that week, as the sun sank over the moors and he stood at the library window with a glass of wine, she came up behind him and set his hand on her belly.

“I am going to have a daughter,” she said. “I do not know it yet for certain. But I know it.”

The Duke went very still.

His hand, the hand of the man they said had buried love and never found it again, trembled against the silk of her dress.

“Julian,” she said softly, “what shall we name her?”

He did not answer. But his other hand found the key — his mother’s key, still warm from his pocket — and closed around it.

And the name that neither of them said aloud hung in the air between them, waiting, patient as the stars.