She Ran From Her Unfaithful Fiancé Into a Dark Room—Unaware England’s Most Feared Duke Was Inside, Waiting in the Shadows.
Chapter 11
“Pride. Do not open that door.”
She stopped. Her hand on the latch. And she did not turn.
“If I open this door,” she said to the wood of it, “you will spend the rest of your life wondering whether I would have. And if I do not open it — if I turn around now, because you have asked me to — then we are exactly where we were a moment ago, with the whisper still in you and the doubt still growing, and I have proved nothing, and the gate welds shut a little more.”
She spoke to the door because she did not trust herself to face him.
“Do you see, Leo? That is the trap of it. I cannot prove my love by staying, because a schemer stays. I can only prove it by going. So you must let me go. Not because either of us wants it, but because it is the one thing, the only thing, that will let you believe for the rest of your life that I loved you. I would rather give you that certainty and lose you than keep you and leave you doubting.”
She closed her eyes.
“Let me open the door, Leo. It is the last and best gift I have to give you. Let me go, and be free of the doubt, and know the truth.”
“No,” said the Duke of Jarnis.
She heard him rise. She heard him cross the warm room she had made, and stop close behind her, and she did not turn, because she did not trust herself to.
“Listen to me,” he said. His voice was low, and steadier now, though it had cost him something to steady it. “You are right about everything except the conclusion. You are right that a schemer would stay, and that your offering to go is a proof no schemer could counterfeit, and that you have, in this last quarter hour, given me a certainty that no whisper on earth can ever again touch — that you never wanted the dukedom, because you have just tried, with your whole heart, to give it back.”
“I believe you, Pride. Completely. Past the reach of my father’s voice. Past the boy in the garden. Past fourteen years of welded fear. You have proved it, and I believe it, and I will believe it to my dying day.”
He put his hands on her shoulders. Gently. And turned her to face him.
And his face was wet, and hers was too.
“But you are wrong about the conclusion. You think the proof requires you to walk out that door. It does not. The proof was in the offering. You have already given it. You do not have to actually go to make it true — you had only to be willing to, and you were wholly willing, and that willingness is the whole of the proof, and it is done, and it cannot be undone, and so the door has served its purpose, and you need never open it.”
“I let the gate swing shut last night. I felt it happen, and I could not stop it, because that is what the old fear does — it moves before I can catch it. But you — you did the one thing that could stop it. You did not beg me to keep the gate open. You did not protest or weep or swear. You offered to walk out of it yourself, taking nothing, so that I might be free of the doubt.”
“And a woman who does that is not the enemy the gate was built to keep out. She is the one person in the world it should have been flung wide for from the very first. My father built the gate to keep out people who wanted to take. He never once imagined a person who would try to give everything back. You break his whole philosophy, Pride. You broke it in the dark three months ago, and you have just broken it again, past all repair.”
He drew her close.
“And I am done. Do you hear me? I am done with the gate. Not the crack in it — the whole gate. I am tearing it down today, now, with my own hands, and I am never building it again. Because you have proved, past any possibility of doubt, that the thing on the other side of it is not an enemy, but the only home I have ever had.”
“Do not open that door. Or open it, if you like — but only to walk out into the garden with me, to tell Foster we are to be married after all, and that he had better finish resurrecting the roses, because there is going to be a wedding at Jarnis, and I will not have my bride married among weeds.”
Pride Ambrose looked up at him — at the torn-down gate, and the wet, forbidding face that was not forbidding at all and never had been — and she felt the breaking in her chest reverse itself, the whole terrible morning turning over into its opposite.
“You are certain,” she said unsteadily. “Past the whisper. Past your father. Past all of it. Because I meant what I said, Leo. I would rather go than be doubted, and I will go even now, even from here, if there is any doubt left in you at all — because I will not be the second woman who taught you to weld the gate. Are you certain?”
“I have never,” said the Duke of Jarnis, “been certain of anything in my life until this moment. That is the strange gift of what you just did. For fourteen years I have been certain of only one thing — that love is a gate the enemy comes through. And you have replaced it, in a single quarter hour, with a new certainty, the first warm certainty I have ever owned. That you love me, and want nothing of mine, and would give it all back rather than have me doubt you. I will never be uncertain of that again. You have made it impossible.”
He took her hand.
“So no, Pride. There is no doubt left in me. There is only you, and the torn-down gate, and a great warm house full of thawing rooms and thawing servants and thawing gardens, and fifty years, God willing, in which to prove my father wrong every single day.”
“Marry me — not to save your reputation, not by accident, not out of convenience. Marry me because I love you, and because you have just shown me, past all my fear, exactly what love is. It is not the taking my father warned me of. It is the giving back. It is a woman with her hand on the door, offering to walk out with nothing, so that the man she loves might be free.”
He lifted her hand to his lips.
“I have that image now forever. And it has healed something in me I thought was welded shut for life, and I will carry it to my grave as the truest thing I know. Come away from the door, my love. We have roses to see about.”