Her Groom Let Her Fall at the Altar to Save His Polished Shoes—But the Feared Duke Caught Rosalind, Carried Her Out Before Three Hundred Guests, and Refused to Return Her to the Family That Had Nearly Killed Her.

PART 7

Three nights later, the carriage pulled up at the Royal Opera House.

Rosalind stepped out.

She did not wear white. She did not wear pastels. She wore a gown of midnight-blue velvet with no lace on it anywhere and no pearls, the neckline cut square and sharp, the whole thing built with such structural brilliance that it held her perfectly without a single bone of whalebone in it. She wore no diamonds.

She wore one choker of black velvet around her throat, nothing more.

She looked like a woman walking up to a guillotine fully intending to run the execution herself.

Dominic offered his arm. He was in stark black, and his presence radiated a grounded, lethal threat that had nothing to do with the breadth of his shoulders. He did not smile. He did not look at the crowd.

He looked only at her.

“Ready?”

“Let them stare.”

They went up the grand staircase.

The effect was immediate. The loud buzzing chatter of the foyer died a sudden, violent death. Hundreds of heads turned toward the stairs at once, champagne glasses frozen halfway to open mouths.

The Duke of Wickliffe, and the runaway bride.

They walked through the parting crowd like wolves through a flock of nervous sheep. Dominic’s hand rested warm over hers on his sleeve, anchoring her to the floor. She kept her chin up and her gaze straight ahead and did not flinch, and she could feel the arithmetic happening in every single pair of eyes she passed — the tally of her shame being recalculated in real time, from cautionary tale to something that did not yet have a name.

They reached the second tier of private boxes.

“Wickliffe.”

Rosalind stopped.

She knew that voice. Nasal, entitled, and slightly too loud even when the man was sober.

Linus Hastings stepped out of the adjacent box, flanked by two of his sycophants. He had been drinking; his face was flushed, his eyes swimming with a mixture of fear and bruised ego. He looked at Dominic, and then his gaze slid sideways and landed on Rosalind, and he sneered.

A wet, ugly sound.

“I see you have finally brought your—” He paused deliberately. “—companion out of hiding.”

The air in the corridor vanished.

The surrounding aristocrats went absolutely still, waiting for the Duke of Wickliffe to commit murder in a public building.

Dominic shifted. His hand dropped from her arm. He took one step toward Hastings with his eyes gone dead and his shoulders rolling as his body began, quite calmly, to prepare itself for extreme violence.

Rosalind stepped in front of him.

She pressed her palm flat against his chest and stopped him where he stood.

He looked down at her, surprised.

She held his gaze for exactly one second. A silent instruction. Mine.

Dominic stopped.

He stepped back. He folded his arms across his chest.

He yielded the floor.

Rosalind turned to face Hastings.

She did not raise her voice. She did not shrink. She looked at him with the cold, clinical detachment of a woman auditing a bankrupt account, and her voice carried down the silent corridor without any apparent effort at all.

“Lord Hastings. I am surprised to see you here. Given the state of your copper mines in Cornwall, I had assumed you would be fleeing the country by now.”

Hastings blinked. The sneer faltered. “What?”

“Your copper mines.” She said it clearly, for the benefit of the corridor. “The ones producing half their projected yield, leveraged against notes now held in trust for me.” A pause. “You did not want a wife, Linus. You wanted the Abernathy name to make your failing credit look respectable.”

Hastings’s face went the colour of chalk.

Behind him, his friends took a subtle step apart from him, the way men do when they can suddenly smell smoke.

Rosalind took one step forward.

“You are considerably further in arrears than you have told your friends. I would not care to say the sum aloud in a public corridor — it would embarrass you far more than it would me.”

She smiled. It was a terrifying, brilliant expression.

“Unluckily for you, the name you tried to buy now controls the notes that can ruin you.”

Hastings’s mouth opened.

“So call me whatever you wish.”

Her voice dropped to a whisper that carried like a gunshot.

“But address me correctly. Because I currently hold a great deal of paper with your signature on it. If you ever speak to me again, I will see exactly how much of it I choose to call in, and how soon.”

Hastings opened his mouth again. Nothing came out.

He looked at Rosalind, and then past her at Wickliffe — who was watching her with an expression of deep and absolute reverence, the way a man watches weather he has spent his whole life waiting for.

Hastings turned and fled down the corridor, shoving past his own friends.

The silence held for three excruciating seconds.

Then Rosalind turned back and placed her hand calmly back on Dominic’s arm.

“Shall we?”

Dominic looked down at her. A slow, dark smirk curved his mouth.

“After you.”

They stepped into the box and left the ton smouldering behind them.

The carriage ride back to Mayfair was quiet.

Not the cold quiet of a carriage full of strangers. This was a different kind of silence altogether — electric, buzzing, the silence of aftermath.

Rosalind leaned her head back against the velvet squabs. The adrenaline was draining away and leaving behind a deep, satisfying warmth in her chest.

She had walked up to the monster in the dark, and she had watched it run.

She was not ruined. She was untouchable.

They came into the foyer. Mrs. Gable had already gone up; the house was dim under the gas lamps, all stone and shadow.

Dominic did not go to his study.

He stopped at the foot of the stairs and turned to face her, and he took off his gloves and set them on the silver tray.

“You were ruthless tonight.”

His voice was rough, scraping against the quiet of the hall.

“I learned from the best.”

She had stopped on the step above him, which put her nearly at his eye level for once.

Dominic looked up at her. The midnight velvet made her skin look like porcelain, and there was nothing remotely fragile about her. She was a weapon he had accidentally unsheathed, and she was magnificent.

He stepped up, closing the distance between them.

“I did not take you out of that church to own you,” he said. His words were slow and deliberate. “I took you because I could not stand there and watch you suffocate.”

A pause.

“But I find, Rosalind, that I am becoming increasingly possessive.”

Her breath caught.

The air between them pulled tight, thick with something they had both been carefully not looking at for three months.

She looked into his dark eyes. There was no polite society here. No contracts, no dowries, no fathers trading daughters across a table.

There was a man and a woman in a stone house.

“I am not a ledger, Wickliffe,” she whispered. “You cannot buy me.”

“I know.”

He reached out and brushed the side of her neck with his knuckles, then set his thumb lightly against the pulse point where it beat against the black velvet choker. It was racing.

“I do not want to buy you. I want to partner with you. In the business. In this house. In everything.”

He stepped closer. His chest brushed hers.

“I want the woman who corrects my arithmetic and burns Viscount Hastings to the ground in a corridor.” His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “I want you. Exactly as you are. Without the corset. Without the lies.”

Rosalind looked up at him and saw the absolute sincerity in the hard lines of his face.

He was not offering her a cage. He was offering her the keys to the kingdom.

She did not wait to be asked.

She reached out, took two fistfuls of his coat, and pulled him down.

The kiss was not gentle and it was not polite. It was a collision. Dominic’s arms came around her waist and lifted her clear off the stair, pulling her flush against him, and she tasted of champagne and defiance. He backed her into the panelled wall of the staircase and kissed her with the starved, desperate intensity of a man who had spent his entire life surrounded by ghosts and had finally, unexpectedly, found someone real.

Rosalind got her hands into his hair and broke the kiss just far enough to breathe.

“No weddings,” she gasped against his mouth. Her eyes were fierce. “No churches. No white dresses.”

“None,” he promised, and pressed a rough kiss to the corner of her jaw, and then took her face in both hands.

“I will call the solicitors tomorrow. We will sign a partnership agreement. Equal shares, complete autonomy.” His thumbs moved along her cheekbones. “And then I am going to spend the rest of my life showing you exactly what freedom feels like.”

Rosalind smiled — a brilliant, breathless thing — and pulled him back down.