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

Chapter 6

He learned her history in fragments over that courtship, the way one learns the history of a person one is coming to love — not in a single telling, but in pieces, dropped and gathered until a whole shape emerges.

She had been the only child of a country parson of small means and large heart. Her mother had been the daughter of a gentleman who had married the parson for love against her family’s wishes, and never once regretted it. Pride had grown up in a small, warm, shabby house full of books and music and laughter and very little money, and had been happy in a way she had not understood was rare until it was taken from her.

Her mother died when she was seventeen. Her father two years later. And Pride had been left at nineteen an orphan, with no fortune and no near relations save a wealthy aunt and uncle who took her in out of duty and made her understand, every day, that duty was all it was.

“I will not paint them worse than they were,” she told him one evening in the library, the rain running down the tall windows. “I have too much respect for the truth. They fed me and clothed me and gave me a season, and expected in exchange that I would be grateful and quiet and marry the first respectable man who offered, so that I might be got off their hands. That was the whole of their kindness — a roof, a season, and the clear understanding that I was a problem to be solved, and that the solution was a husband. Any husband. As quickly as could be managed.”

She looked at the fire.

“And so I met Renwick. Handsome, respectable, full of attention. My aunt urged the match with an enthusiasm that had nothing to do with my happiness and everything to do with the prospect of my removal. And I very nearly took him.”

She let the words sit.

“That is the thing I have not told you, Leo. I nearly married Aldous Renwick — not because I loved him. I did not. I liked him, which is a different and lesser thing. But because I was nineteen and orphaned and poor and tired of being a problem, and he was a solution, and everyone I depended on wanted me to take the solution and be grateful. I nearly did it.”

The Duke was very still.

“And then,” Pride said, “I found him on his knees before my cousin, with my own proposal in his mouth. The same speech, word for word, delivered to two women in a fortnight. And it woke me like cold water. It showed me exactly what I had nearly done — sold myself into a loveless bargain to stop being a burden, exactly as my mother’s family had tried to sell her, before she married my father for love instead.”

She turned her face to the fire.

“And I thought, standing there in the conservatory, watching him propose to my cousin with my own words — I will not. I would rather be a problem forever than marry without love, the way the whole world is telling me to. My mother married for love against everyone’s wishes and was happy in a shabby house for twenty years. I would rather have twenty years in a shabby house than fifty in a grand one with a man who could not tell me from my cousin.”

She drew a breath.

“And I turned, and I fled, and I ran into a dark room. Into you.”

The Duke of Jarnis was silent for a long moment. The rain filled the room with its soft, steady sound.

“So when you tried to give back my rescue that first night,” he said slowly, “and when you offered to cry off and walk away from the dukedom with nothing — it was not a strategy. It was the same thing you did in the conservatory. It was you refusing, again, to be part of a loveless bargain — even a magnificent one. You would no more have married me for the dukedom than you would have married Renwick for the escape.”

“It is the deepest thing in me,” Pride agreed. “I grew up hearing how my mother’s family tried to sell her, and failed, because she chose love and was proved right by twenty happy years. And I watched my aunt try to sell me, and I nearly let her, and I was saved only by a man’s faithlessness showing me the pit before I fell in. And I made a vow, fleeing that conservatory — not a vow to catch a duke, I did not know you existed. A vow to myself, that I would never, whatever it cost me, marry without love. Never be interchangeable. Never be a solution to someone’s problem, a bargain in someone’s ledger.”

She looked at him then, steadily.

“So you see, Your Grace, the very thing the world whispers about me — that I schemed to catch a dukedom — is the precise opposite of the truth. Which is that I would sooner die poor than marry for anything but love. They have me exactly backward. They always do. It is the one comfort in being slandered — the slander is so often the exact opposite of the truth. The thing you are accused of being is the very thing you have most refused to be.”

She smiled, a small crooked thing.

“I am not a schemer who caught a duke. I am a girl who refused to sell herself twice, and was given, for the refusing, the one thing selling herself could never have bought.” She stopped. “A man she loves, who loves her, in a warm house for fifty years, if we are lucky. The world will never understand it. It does not need to. You understand it. That is enough. That is everything.”

The Duke of Jarnis sat in the rain-filled library and looked at her, and the gate his father had built and the woman had welded shifted somewhere deep in him, grating open on its old cold hinges.

“Then I should tell you,” he said quietly, “who taught me to build mine.”