She Fled Her Faithless Suitor Into a Dark Room, Unaware England’s Most Feared Duke Was Hiding There — Before She Even Learned His Name, He Did Something That Left Everyone Speechless.

PART 6

“I did not mean to say it yet,” Pride said. “We agreed to find out slowly, and it is too soon, and I have no wish to force the gate before you are ready.”

“And I, Pride — say it again.”

She looked at him — the forbidding face that was not forbidding at all, the cold duke who had asked the boot boy if he was hurt, the man who had welded his heart shut for fourteen years and was even now, even against his dead father’s voice, choosing to stand and hear it — and she said it again, plainly, because plainness was the only gift she had ever had to give.

“I love you,” she said. “Leo of Jarnis. I did not come here to. I came here to find out whether we suited, and to keep my reputation, and to be honest with you, and somewhere in the finding out, I stopped finding out and started loving you. And I do not know the exact hour it happened, only that it has happened, and it is not going to unhappen. And you may do with that what you like. You may weld the gate. You may tell me it is too soon, or too dangerous, or that your father’s voice is louder tonight than mine. I will understand. I will wait. I meant it when I said some people stay. But you asked me to say it again, and I have never in my life said a thing I did not mean. I love you. There. Now you know the thing I found out. It was not whether we suited. It was that I love you. That is what was on the other side of the gate all along.”

There was one person in the world who received the news of the Duke of Jarnis’s engagement with unmixed and unholy delight — the Dowager Lady Osborne, his aunt, who had badgered him for a year into finally opening Jarnis for the fateful house party in the first place. She descended upon Jarnis three months later, once the courtship had ripened into something she judged worth witnessing in person, a tiny, fierce old woman of seventy-odd, with bright black eyes and no patience whatever for her nephew’s coldness, which she had spent more than twenty years deploring and attempting without success to thaw.

“I made this match,” she announced upon arrival, before she had so much as removed her bonnet. “And I will be thanked for it properly. Where is she? I wish to meet the girl who has done in three months what I could not do in more than twenty years — which is to make you look less like a closed door and more like a man.”

Pride was summoned, met the Dowager’s amusement with amusement of her own, and the two women took each other’s measure across the warm morning room, and something passed between them — a recognition, the mutual respect of two people who say exactly what they think — and the old woman’s fierce face cracked into a delighted grin.

“Ooh,” she said. “You’ll do very well. You are not the least bit afraid of me, are you? Nor of him. Everyone is afraid of me, and everyone is afraid of him, and you are afraid of neither of us. That is precisely what this house has wanted for two-and-twenty years. Come and sit by me, child, and tell me the truth about how you caught him. I cannot abide the polite version.”

“I did not catch him,” Pride said, sitting. “I fled into a dark room to escape a faithless suitor, and he was already in it, hiding from your party. We were found together, and compromised, and he announced our engagement to save my reputation, and neither of us expected it to become real. And then it did, because it turned out we suited, which surprised us both a great deal. That is the real version. I am sorry it is not more romantic. It is mostly a story about two people hiding from the same party in the same dark room, by accident.”

The Dowager Lady Osborne stared at her, and then began to laugh — a wheezing, delighted, unstoppable old woman’s laugh — until she had to wipe her eyes.

“Hiding from my party. Both of you, in the same dark room. Oh, that is better than romance, child. It means I made this match twice over — once by forcing him to the party he fled, and once by being so tedious that he had to hide in the very room you chose. I am responsible for all of it, every scrap, and I shall dine out on this for the rest of my life.”

And she did — she told the story at every opportunity for the rest of her long life, growing more central to it with each telling, until in her final version she had personally arranged the dark room, the faithless suitor, and the dying fire — and the Duke and Duchess of Jarnis let her, gladly, because she had, after all, in her meddling, fierce, unlooked-for way, been the first door through which the whole of their happiness had come.

The Duke of Jarnis rose from his chair one evening, not long after, and crossed the warm room his betrothed had made of his cold one, and stood before her, and Pride watched fourteen years of welded silence war in his face with the thing that was trying to come out of it. She held her breath and did not help him, because some gates a person must open with their own hand or they are not truly opened at all.

“I have not said these words to another living soul since I was six-and-twenty,” the Duke said. His voice was not steady. “I said them once to the wrong person, and she laughed, and I welded the gate, and I swore I would never say them again as long as I lived, because the saying of them had nearly destroyed me. I have kept that oath for fourteen years. It is the longest and coldest oath a man ever kept.” He drew a breath that shook. “And I am about to break it. Because you knelt on my library floor and told me my father was wrong. And you learned Foster’s name, and you wept over a white rose, and you tried to give back the rescue that saved you, and you have stood at the crack in my welded gate for three months, and never once, not for a single hour, reached through it to take anything. You have only stood there, warm, patient, promising you would stay, asking for nothing — until I could not remember why the gate was welded at all, except that a frightened man built it, and a cruel woman sealed it, and neither of them was you.”

He reached out and took her face in his hands — this great, cold, feared man, and his hands were not cold now, and not quite steady either.

“I love you, Pride Ambrose. There. It is said. Fourteen years of oath broken in five words, and I find the sky has not fallen, and the enemy has not walked through the gate, and I am not destroyed. I am only standing in a warm room I did not know I had, holding the face of a woman I did not know I was allowed to want, saying the words I swore I would never say again, and discovering they do not feel like a weakness at all. They feel like the first true thing I have said in fourteen years. My father was wrong. You were right. A soft heart is not an open gate for the enemy. A soft heart is the only part of a man that was ever worth defending, and I welded mine shut to keep it safe, and only succeeded in keeping it empty. And you have pried the weld open with nothing but patience and rose bushes and the truth, and I love you, and I am not going to say I am sorry it took me so long, because you told me to take my time, and I did, and here we are, and I would not trade the slowness of it for anything. A gate opened slowly, with trust, stays open. A gate flung wide in a rush slams shut at the first cold wind. This one is open now. It is going to stay open. I have you to thank for it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life doing so.”

Pride Ambrose, who had promised herself she would not weep, wept and laughed both at once — which her practical soul informed her was the only honest way to greet the largest happiness of her life — and the Duke of Jarnis gathered her into his arms in the warm room she had made of his cold one, and held her, and it was not a betrothal of convenience any longer. And both of them knew it, and neither of them said so, because some things are too true to need saying, and are only diminished by the words.