“I Never Should Have Married You,” the Duke Told His Steward — But When His Wife Smiled and Replied, “Good News, You No Longer Have To,” He Had Only Five Weeks to Stop Her Leaving and Confess the Love He Had Hidden for Nearly a Year

PART 2 

It was, he would think later, the precise moment he ought to have said something true. He had a whole year’s worth of true things banked up behind his teeth. That he had never once regretted signing the settlement, only regretted the manner of it — the coldness with which duty had delivered her to him like a parcel. That he had watched her win over his mother in a fortnight, when the old duchess had not warmed to a soul outside the family in a decade. That he had stood in the doorway of the library three nights past and watched her read by a single candle, with her stocking feet tucked beneath her like a girl, and felt something in his chest crack quietly down the middle.

He had all of it banked up. And what came out instead was silence.

Because the Duke of Fossborough had been raised by a father who considered feeling a species of weakness best kept locked in the estate’s oldest, dampest cellar. And old habits did not die merely because a woman with ink-stained fingers and an unbowed spine had walked into his house and begun, without asking his leave, to matter.

“That will not be necessary,” he said finally.

“Which part?” Odelina asked. “The packing or the leaving?”

“Either.” He heard how inadequate it sounded, even as he said it, and clenched his jaw against the urge to say more and botch it worse. “I spoke in anger. Lord Ashwell is a fool, and I ought to have silenced him myself rather than sitting there like a post and leaving you to do it.”

“I did not require silencing done on my behalf. I have a tongue of my own, Your Grace, and I find I manage it rather better than most men manage theirs.” But she was watching him now with a new attention. The sharp, assessing look she gave a column of figures that did not sum correctly, as though searching for the error in him.

“You did not answer the question. Did you mean it, or did you not?”

He should have said no outright. He should have crossed the small distance between them and said something that would have ended the conversation in his favor, the way he ended every other conversation in his life — with authority, with the flat certainty that came so easily to him in every room but this one.

Instead he found himself saying, “I meant that I never should have married a stranger and expected her to remain one.” Which was not an answer at all.

“That,” she said slowly, “is not what you said to Hollis.”

“No,” he agreed. “It is what I ought to have said.”

For a moment, neither of them spoke. The fire popped and settled, throwing a brief orange light across her face. And he saw, not for the first time, but freshly, as though seeing it new, that she was not, whatever the dowagers whispered, a plain woman made merely tolerable by a fine gown. She had a face built of candor rather than beauty — all quick intelligence and stubborn chin, and eyes that gave away far less than her mouth did.

“You have five weeks to decide what you ought to say next, Your Grace,” she said at last, quietly, and there was something more careful in her voice now. “I will not make it easier for you by pretending I did not hear what I heard tonight. But I will not make it harder either, by weeping in your drawing room like a woman with nothing better to do with her evening. If you wish this marriage ended, you have only to say so plainly. I will sign whatever paper Mr. Paraga puts before me. And I will go back to whatever is left of Alcott Grange and trouble you no further.”

She dropped a small, precise curtsy. Mocking in its perfection.

“Good night, Your Grace.”

She was at the door before he found his voice again.

“Odelina.”

It was the first time in eleven months he had used her given name without a title attached to it. It stopped her as nothing else had. Her hand on the door frame, her back still to him, but the set of her shoulders no longer quite so armored.

“Yes, Your Grace?”

“Ketrick,” he said. “If you are to be angry with me, you might at least do it to my name.”

She turned. And for one unguarded instant, something almost like a smile touched her mouth before she mastered it.

“Very well. Good night, Ketrick.” And then, softer, with a flash of the wit that had undone him from the start: “Do try not to insult me to the servants again before breakfast. It puts Mrs. Burch quite off her custards, and I am fond of the custards.”

She was gone before he could answer. The door closing with a firmness that was not quite a slam.

And he stood alone in the cooling drawing room, with the fire dying at his back, and the strange, unfamiliar sensation of having lost an argument he had not entirely meant to have. And worse — of not minding it nearly so much as a duke ought to mind losing anything at all.