She Refused to Curtsy to the Most Feared Duke in London—But Instead of Punishing Her, He Protected Her From the Ballroom’s Cruel Whispers. Months Later, Just as They Fell in Love, One Rumor Made Her Believe He Was a Terrible Man.

PART 8

Inside the library, James’s instincts snapped alert at the sound. He found the gallery empty but for a flat wrapped board lying on the polished floor. He knelt, untied the twine — and the breath seized in his throat.

His own likeness stared back at him, drawn with unmistakable, intimate mastery. Intertwined with his profile, a soft, dark silhouette. There was only one pair of hands in the world that could capture his eyes with such fierce, aching truth.

“Who brought this?” he demanded of the butler in the lower hall.

“The English painter, your grace. Miss Douglas. She ran toward the high terrace above the canal.”

He did not wait for another word.

He found her on the high terrace above the canal, beyond the stone balustrade, her cloak whipping in the Venetian wind, her shoulders trembling with silent, suffocating sobs. He slowed, chest heaving, looking down at the sketch in his hands, and spoke with careful, nervous restraint.

“I see you have conquered your fear of heights. Or were you intending to sprout wings and fly back to London?”

She flinched at his voice but did not turn — could not bear him seeing her face.

“I fear you have entirely lost your touch with a brush,” he said, holding up the board, his lightness wavering. “This likeness looks nothing like me.”

“I know I am late,” she choked out, back still to him, the wind off the canal tearing at her hair. “I know I have no right to stand on your threshold. But please — let me say what I traveled across the sea to say. Then you may return inside to your fiancée.”

“My — what?”

“Please, do not interrupt me.” She turned at last, cheeks wet, eyes red and swollen. “I was wrong, James. I was a coward. I let the gossip of strangers decide how I treated you.” Her voice cracked. “I thought you were making a fool of me — that you would amuse yourself with a poor artist before settling on a proper, noble wife. I was so afraid of giving you my whole heart only to be discarded that I gave you nothing at all.”

She turned back to the water. “I only learned the truth days ago, in London. She was never yours. She is to marry a man from France. I made you suffer for nothing but empty talk, and I will never forgive myself for what I cost you.” A shaking breath. “I understand that you have moved on. What man wouldn’t? I do not blame you. I will board the first packet back to England tomorrow. You may return to your bride upstairs.”

Silence, broken only by the water lapping against the stone below. Then a low, incredulous sound rose from his chest.

“My bride.”

He closed the distance in two strides, catching her cold hand in his, gently pulling her back from the edge, turning her to face him.

“The woman in the library is my uncle’s daughter, Francesca,” he said. “She is nineteen. She was telling me about her betrothal to a Venetian captain.” A faint, unsteady smile. “Are you truly going to run across Europe making wild assumptions all over again?”

Her breath caught. The teasing dissolved from his face, replaced by a vulnerability stripped entirely bare.

“Do you have any idea what those eight weeks were like for me?” His voice thickened. “Standing outside your house night after night, waiting for a curtain to move. When Casper told me you had accepted him, I thought the breath had been ripped from my body. I came to Venice because every street in London carried some memory of you. I tried to hate you. I couldn’t. I spent every night wondering what I had done to make you doubt the one thing in my life that was ever completely true.”

“James, I am so sorry —”

“Hush.” He pulled her against his chest, arms locking around her, his face buried in her hair as though he had just surfaced from drowning.

After a long moment, he drew back and reached beneath his coat, unfastening a fine gold chain. An antique sapphire ring hung from it, ringed with diamonds.

“I have carried this since the last day I waited outside your house,” he said. “It was my mother’s. She told me never to part with it unless I found a woman who held my entire soul. She is not here to ask you herself, so I must do it.” His eyes burned, unguarded, into hers. “Are you willing to walk life’s road with me, Miss Douglas? Are you willing to share —” a small, wicked light touched his mouth — “a dozen sleepless nights, watching the stars, together?”

A wet, breathless laugh broke through her tears.

“Yes,” she whispered against his lips as his hands framed her face. “A thousand times, yes.”

The following spring, society’s grandest spectacle was not held in a fashionable London chapel but beneath a flowered arbor on Annalise’s family estate, under open countryside sun, for the wedding of Lady Annalise and Lord Philip. Every eye among the gathered guests drifted, at some point, from the ceremony to the front row — where Emily, Duchess of Westfall, sat radiant beside her husband, an antique sapphire gleaming on her hand.

Preston raised his glass at the wedding breakfast, loudly and insufferably reminding anyone who would listen that he was the sole reason the Duchess had not turned around on the Mayfair steps months earlier. Casper made a brief, stiff appearance, murmuring something about a misunderstanding of intentions — though everyone in the room understood precisely how thoroughly, and how deservedly, he had lost.

In the years that followed, the halls of Westfall House were never quiet. Three children eventually filled its nursery — twin boys, and a dark-eyed daughter who inherited her mother’s fierce gaze, and a permanent fondness for charcoal stains on her sleeves.

Sometimes, on quiet evenings, Emily still took out the old sketch from the terrace above the canal — the one drawn in grief, meant as an apology, that had somehow become a beginning instead. And she would think, not for the first time, that the greatest danger to love had never been another person. It had been gossip mistaken for truth, and pride mistaken for protection, and the fear of asking the one person who could have simply told her.

She had learned, in the end, that silence leaves room for other people to write your story for you — and that the truest kind of courage is not refusing to bow to a duke in a crowded ballroom, but crossing an entire sea to ask him, plainly, whether he had ever stopped waiting.

THE END.