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

Chapter 7

“My father,” said the Duke of Jarnis, “was the coldest man I have ever known, and he made it his particular project to freeze the warmth out of me.”

The rain had grown heavier. He spoke to the fire, not to her.

“He believed, sincerely, as a matter of principle, that warmth was weakness, and that a duke who felt things — and worse, who showed it — was a duke who could be managed. Manipulated. Made a fool of. He had a saying: ‘A soft heart is an open gate, and an open gate is how the enemy comes in.’ He said it to me a thousand times, from the time I was very small, and he set himself to close my gate by a hundred small cruelties and a thousand cold examples.”

“When my dog died, when I was seven, and I wept, he did not comfort me. He told me I had made an error — that I had let myself love a thing that could be taken from me, and that the lesson of the grief was not that death is sad, but that love is a mistake. When my mother died, I was twelve. He did not grieve, or let me grieve. He told me she had been a weakness in his life, a thing he had permitted himself against his better judgment, and that her death was, if anything, a simplification.” He paused. “He said that to a twelve-year-old boy. About his own dead mother.”

Pride said nothing. She had gone very still.

“And I believed him, Pride. That is the thing I want you to understand. For most of my life, I believed him. I built the gate exactly as he taught me, and I called it strength, and I became the cold, forbidding Duke of Jarnis — feared and solitary and safe — and I thought I was the wise one. The one who had learned the lesson. The one no one could hurt, because I had made certain there was nothing left in me soft enough to wound.”

“Leo,” Pride said softly.

“There is more,” he said. “And it is worse, because it is the part where I proved him right, or thought I had.”

He touched the scar at his temple without seeming to notice he was doing it.

“When I was six-and-twenty, I forgot his lesson once. I met a woman, and I loved her, or thought I did, and I opened the gate. She was after the dukedom. I found it out too late — after I had opened everything, after I had let her all the way in. She did not want me. She wanted the title, and she was prepared to endure me to have it, and she had said so, to a friend, laughing, in words I was not meant to hear and did hear.”

His voice had gone flat and old.

“There was a quarrel. Her brother, or her lover — it hardly mattered which — thought I had insulted her. There was a garden, and a knife, and blood, and this.” He touched the scar again. “The last thing I ever let another human being close enough to mark me. I closed the gate that night, Pride, and I welded it shut, and I told myself my father had been right all along. The one time in my life I opened the gate, the enemy walked straight in, and I paid in blood, and I have kept it welded for fourteen years.”

He turned from the fire and looked at her at last.

“Until a young woman burst through the door of a dark room I was hiding in, and told a total stranger the truth of her own humiliation, and then tried to give back the rescue I offered because she feared it cost me too much. And something in the weld cracked. I do not know how else to describe it. Fourteen years shut, and a girl I had known a quarter of an hour reached through the crack without even trying — and I have been unable to weld it up again since. Though I have told myself a dozen times that I should. That it is not safe. That my father’s voice is surely right, and yours is surely a trap like the last one.”

He drew a breath.

“So there is your answer, Pride. My father taught me the gate. A woman I loved at six-and-twenty taught me to weld it. And I have spent fourteen years believing them both — and now I do not know what to believe, because you do not fit the lesson. You are penniless, and yet you tried to refuse the very thing another woman would have schemed a lifetime to obtain. You break the whole theory. And a man whose entire understanding of the world is breaking is a frightened man, Pride, however cold he looks.”

She understood then, all at once, the weight of what he had just handed her — not a confession, but a weapon, freely given, the only weapon that could ever hurt him.

And she knelt.

She crossed the library floor and knelt down by his chair, and took both his cold hands in her warm ones, and looked up into the forbidding face she had long since stopped finding forbidding at all.

“Your father was wrong,” she said. “About all of it. The dog, and your mother, and the gate, and every cold thing he ever taught you. He was not wise, Leo. He was afraid — more afraid than you have ever been — so afraid of being hurt that he chose to feel nothing at all, and called his cowardice strength, and set about making his son as frightened as himself. Because misery wants company, and a frozen man cannot bear to see warmth in anyone, least of all his own child. That is not strength. It is the deepest weakness there is — the refusal to risk.”

She pressed his hands.

“And the woman at six-and-twenty was real, and her cruelty was real, and I am so sorry she taught you to weld what your father taught you to build. But one greedy woman does not prove a law of nature, Leo, any more than one faithless suitor proves that all men are Aldous Renwick. It proves only that there are greedy women and faithless men in the world, which we both already knew, and that we had the misfortune to be hurt by two of them.”

She was quiet a moment.

“I am not asking you to fling the gate wide today. I would not. It has been welded fourteen years; these things take time. I am asking only that you not weld the crack back up. Leave the crack, and let me stand at it, and let us find out slowly, the way we agreed, whether the person on the other side is a thief like the last one — or whether she is only a penniless, blunt-spoken girl who thinks you are the warmest man she has ever met, and would very much like the chance to prove your father wrong.”

She looked up at him.

“That is all. Leave the crack. I will do the rest, as gently as I can, for as long as it takes. I am in no hurry. I have found, rather to my surprise, that there is nowhere in the world I would rather be than kneeling on your cold library floor, holding your cold hands, watching a welded gate decide whether to open.”

She smiled, and it broke something in him.

“Take your time, Leo. I am not going anywhere. That is the thing your father never learned, and the last woman never meant. Some people stay.”