Married at 17 to a Cold Husband Who Moved His Mistress In — The Duke Said “Mine”

Chapter 9

The divorce that followed shook London society.

It began with a scandal that no one could look away from — whispers at breakfast tables, headlines shouted by newsboys, clubrooms buzzing with names that had once been untouchable. Evidence appeared. Financial fraud. Debts. Adultery. Cruelty. Some of it came from solicitors and investigators. Some of it came from a leather journal, worn with use, that Lady Blackmoor handed to her barrister with steady hands — six years of dates and names and cruelties, written down in the small hours when no one was watching.

London gasped.

The Earl of Blackmoor lost everything. His estate. His fortune. His reputation. The ton, which had once laughed at how generously Lady Blackmoor shared her husband, now found the joke had curdled. Doors closed in his face. Old friends crossed the street to avoid him. The man who had spent six years pretending his wife did not exist discovered that the whole of England now wished he did not exist either.

Lady Vivienne Trent disappeared to the continent before the scandal finished unfolding. Her trunks were packed within a week; no one saw her go. The rose bedroom stood empty.

And Rosalind — Rosalind became one of the very few women in England to win a parliamentary divorce.

It took nearly a year.

A year of waiting rooms and legal briefs and the endless, grinding machinery of the law. A year of mornings when she woke in a borrowed house with her heart hammering, certain that the world would find a way to take everything from her again. A year of sitting in silence while men in wigs discussed her marriage as though she were not in the room, as though the life they were dissecting belonged to someone else entirely.

But she endured it. Because she was no longer alone.

Gideon never stood beside her publicly during the proceedings. That would have compromised the case — the law was cruel to women who appeared to be merely trading one protector for another. But every morning, a letter arrived at her door.

Short notes. Observations. Reassurances.

The rain kept me indoors today. I thought of the way you hum when you walk through gardens. It rained here, too. The camellias held up.

Always ending with the same line.

I am here.

She kept them all, tied in a ribbon, in the drawer of her dressing table. On the nights when the fear threatened to swallow her, she read them again, by candlelight, until the trembling in her hands stopped.

Three weeks after the divorce was finalized, Gideon brought her to the third floor of Ravensmere House.

It was a part of the house she had never seen. He opened a heavy door with a key from his own pocket, and stood back to let her enter first.

The room was dark. He crossed to the windows and drew back the curtains, and afternoon light spilled across the walls.

Rosalind stared.

Six portraits.

Six paintings of her — each from a different year. The first showed a girl of seventeen in white muslin, standing near a wall at her debut ball, holding a glass of lemonade with both hands. The second showed her a year later, newer and paler, in the first weeks of her marriage. The third, the fourth, the fifth — she watched herself age across the walls of that room, watched the light leave her own painted eyes, year after year, until the final portrait, painted only months ago: the woman she had become, standing in a corner of a ballroom, hidden behind the fronds of a fern.

Tears slipped down her cheeks.

“You watched me for six years,” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“You loved me for six years.”

“I did.”

She pressed a hand to her mouth. “I am not the woman in those portraits anymore.”

Gideon crossed the room slowly. He lifted her face gently in his hands.

“You were never broken,” he said softly. “You were buried. And I have spent six years digging you out.”

Rosalind kissed him first.

His hands trembled. The most feared duke in England, trembling.

“Marry me,” he whispered.

“Yes.”