She Ran From Her Unfaithful Fiancé Into a Dark Room—Unaware England’s Most Feared Duke Was Inside, Waiting in the Shadows.

Chapter 4

“A duke does not ruin himself by becoming engaged,” the Duke said. “He confers. He does not receive. The world will not say I have been trapped. It will say you have been extraordinarily fortunate. It is monstrously unjust, and tonight it happens to be unjust in your favor, and I suggest we accept the gift rather than quarrel with it.”

Pride opened her mouth.

He held up one long hand.

“Second — you say I know nothing of you. True. And you know nothing of me. Engagements have been founded on far less. But I did not act blindly.” His eyes met hers across the firelight. “I have been watching you for the last quarter of an hour, in the dark, in a crisis — and a crisis is the only honest window a person ever gives you, Miss Ambrose, because in a crisis nobody has time to perform. They can only be what they are. And in that quarter of an hour, I watched you flee a man who wronged you rather than weep over him. I watched you tell a total stranger the plain truth of your humiliation, without varnish and without self-pity. And when I announced our engagement, you thought first not of your own rescue but of my supposed ruin — and rose up to forbid it.”

His voice had gone very quiet.

“I have spent two-and-twenty years surrounded by people who think only of themselves. I sat down in this dark room tonight to escape three hundred of them. And into my refuge burst the one person I have met in a decade who was handed a rescue and immediately tried to give it back, because she feared it was costing the rescuer too much. That is not blindness, Miss Ambrose. That is the best evidence I have gathered about any human being in ten years. It arrived quickly. It was still evidence. I trusted it.”

Pride sat very still. The fire ticked and settled, and she felt, for the first time, the ground shift under everything she had assumed about the man.

“Third,” he said, more quietly still, “you will not hold me to it. I honor that, and I offer you the same freedom I would want offered to me. The engagement stands tonight — it must, or the ruining defeats the whole purpose. But I hold you to nothing. In a month, or three, if you find you cannot bear me — and I am, I am told, a difficult man to bear — you shall cry off. You, not I. I will let it be understood the fault was mine, some coldness, some unreasonableness, and you will walk away with your reputation intact and my good wishes. That is the worst case, Miss Ambrose. It is not a bad one.”

He paused. Something crossed the forbidding face that she could not read.

“The best case is that we suit. That the evidence I gathered in the dark proves sound. I do not say it will. I say only that it might — and that I find, to my very great surprise, for I came here tonight intending to speak to no one and vanish to my own study at the earliest possible moment, that I should like to find out. Will you let us find out? No promises. No trap. Only a betrothal of convenience, entered to save your name, with a clear door out at your own hand whenever you wish it — and, if we are lucky, a chance to learn whether either of us will ever want to use it.”

Pride looked at him across the dying fire — this cold, forbidding, feared man who had, in the space of a quarter of an hour, disposed of her faithless suitor, saved her reputation, offered to shoulder the whole blame if she tired of him, and confessed that he should like to find out whether they suited. And she found that her heart, which had been racing with fear and then with fury, was now racing with something else entirely.

Something that felt absurdly, dangerously like hope.

“Yes,” she said. “All right. Let us find out.” And then, because she was Pride Ambrose and had never once in her life let a thing lie unspoken, she added: “But I warn you, Your Grace. I am difficult to bear. I speak my mind, always, whether it is wanted or not. I have no fortune and no great connections, and I have just been humiliated by a man who found me interchangeable with my own cousin. So I am in no mood to be anybody’s convenient anything. If we are to find out whether we suit, we find out honestly. Both of us. No gallantry. No performance. You be as cold and solitary and difficult as you truly are, and I shall be as blunt and penniless and unmanageable as I truly am, and we shall see what is left standing when neither of us is pretending. Those are my terms.”

The Duke of Jarnis was silent for a moment. Then — for the first time that night — he smiled. A real smile. Slow and startled, transforming the forbidding face entirely.

“Miss Ambrose,” he said, “I do believe those are the first terms anyone has offered me in twenty years that I have wanted, with my whole heart, to accept.”

The finding out began the next morning, and it did not go at all as either of them expected — which the Duke reflected afterward was the first sign it was going to work.

He had expected his convenient betrothed to arrive subdued, grateful, on her best behavior. Almost everyone, in his experience, was on their best behavior around the Duke of Jarnis, and their best behavior bored him to the edge of madness, because a person on their best behavior is a person you cannot see.

Instead, Pride Ambrose was shown into the morning room where he waited, looked about her at the cold formal grandeur of it — the gilt, the marble, the enormous cold mantel — and said:

“Good heavens. Does anyone actually live here, or is it kept purely to intimidate visitors? Because it is doing an excellent job of the second and no job at all of the first. There is not a single thing in this room that suggests a human being has ever sat in it for pleasure. Is the whole house like this?”

“The whole house,” said the Duke of Jarnis, “is exactly like this.”

“Then no wonder you fled to a dark room to escape a party. You have no cheerful room to flee to. You have been escaping one cold room into another your entire life. It is very sad, actually, when one thinks about it.”

The Duke of Jarnis looked at his betrothed of eighteen hours, who had walked into his ancestral morning room and diagnosed the central sorrow of his existence in under a minute, and felt the ground shift under him in exactly the way it had shifted in the dark room the night before.

“You are very frank, Miss Ambrose.”

“I warned you I would be. Are you regretting it already? We are not an hour into the finding out, and you have gone quite still.”

“It is a very good sign,” said the Duke slowly. “It is only that I am unused to it. People do not, as a rule, tell me that my house is sad. They tell me it is magnificent. They have been telling me it is magnificent for two-and-twenty years, and I have believed them, more or less. And it took a penniless young woman I met in the dark eighteen hours ago to walk in and tell me the truth — that it is magnificent and sad, both at once, and that I have been escaping one cold room into another my whole life. I do not think anyone has ever said a truer thing to me. It is a most uncomfortable sensation.” A pause. “I find I want a great deal more of it.”

Pride looked at him for a long moment. Then she sat down in the great gilt chair without being asked, and tucked her feet up, and looked at the cold hearth and the portraits and the enormous stiff room, and said, very matter-of-factly:

“Well. That is easily remedied, then.”