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

Chapter 8

The thawing of Jarnis became, over that spring, a thing the whole household watched with a kind of wonder.

Pride thawed the servants first, without seeming to try. She learned their names — all of them, from the housekeeper to the boy who blacked the boots, which no one at Jarnis could remember any member of the family ever troubling to do. She thanked them. Noticed them. Asked after the footman whose mother was ill, and the maid whose sweetheart had gone for a soldier. She treated the great silent staff of Jarnis not as furniture but as people — and within a month there was, below stairs, a cautious, growing, disbelieving devotion to the young woman who was to be their duchess.

For a household takes its temperature from the top. And the top had, for the first time in living memory, gone warm.

She thawed the gardens next. She and old Foster had become conspirators, and between them they had set about the resurrection of the Jarnis succession houses — the white rose at the center of it, standing now in pride of place in the restored glasshouse, as though it understood what was expected of it.

“You are thawing my entire estate,” the Duke told her one evening, “one servant and one rose bush at a time. Foster spoke to me at more length this morning than he has spoken to me in twenty years. He wished to tell me about the camellia. He was quite animated.” He paused. “I did not know Foster had it in him to be animated. I did not, if I am honest, know Foster’s name until you told it to me, which I am now deeply ashamed of.”

“You were the person you were taught to be,” Pride said. “There is no shame in that. There is only the question of whether you will go on being it now that you have seen it is a costume.”

And then she told him the thing he had been too busy being ashamed to notice.

“You are not going on being it, Leo. You have stopped being him. You learned Foster’s name. You have started coming out to the gardens. You laughed at dinner three times this week — I counted. And yesterday, when the boot boy dropped the coal scuttle in the hall with a crash that would once have made the whole house cower, you did not go cold and terrible. You called out to ask if he was hurt.”

She looked at him.

“Do you know what that boy did? He nearly fainted. He has served here two years, and the Duke of Jarnis has never once, in his hearing, asked if a servant was hurt. You are changing, Leo. Not because I am changing you — no one can change another person, it cannot be done. But because you are letting the warm man out a little more each day, now that you have someone to stand at the crack in the gate and promise she will not use it as a weapon.”

“That is not me changing you. That is you deciding to trust. And it is the bravest thing I have ever watched anyone do — precisely because it frightens you so — and I love you for it.”

The words came out unbidden. They simply arrived, the way spring arrives, and hung in the warm evening air of the room she had made of his cold one.

Pride Ambrose, who was never at a loss for words, found herself entirely at a loss.

The Duke of Jarnis had gone very still.

“Say that again,” he said quietly.

“I did not mean to say it yet,” Pride said. Her heart was hammering. “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. 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.”

She took a breath.

“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.”

The fire ticked.

The Duke of Jarnis looked at her for so long that the whole warm room seemed to hold its breath.

And then, very slowly, the man who had not wept since he was seven years old reached out and took her hand.