The Dowager Ordered Her to Leave Ashborne Hall After She Made the Duke Laugh—But When She Whispered, “You Mustn’t Look at Me Like That,” He Growled, “I’ll Do Far More Than Look.”

PART 9

The Meavel Ball was held a fortnight later, at the neighbouring estate, and half the county came to see for itself whether the rumours about the Duke of Ashborne were true.

Iris did not want to go.

“You will not hide from this.” Lady Cassandra fastened the borrowed pearls at her throat with fingers that had not lost their precision. “Whatever is between you and my nephew, it will not survive being hidden. Love that hides itself away generally withers for want of light. Go. Let them stare. Give them nothing to whisper about but the truth.”

The ballroom found her within seconds of her arrival. She felt it — the pause in the noise, the turn of heads, the small delighted shock of a hundred people confirming that the story they had been told was, in fact, understated.

She stood at the edge of the floor in a gown that had plainly belonged to someone else, and pretended not to notice.

Then the Duke of Ashborne crossed the room.

He did it without hesitation, entirely indifferent to the ripple of appalled whispering that moved with him, and he stopped in front of her and put out his hand in front of the entire county.

“Dance with me.”

“Gabriel. Everyone is watching.”

“Let them.” He did not lower his hand. “I am done pretending that I do not want what I want, Iris, for fear of what a room full of strangers might say of it. I told you I was finished being careful. I meant it.”

She took his hand.

They danced badly.

Neither of them had danced for pleasure rather than duty in years, and it showed. He trod on her hem. She turned the wrong way at the end of the second figure and had to be steered back. They laughed — quietly at first, and then not quietly, at their own mistakes, in a way that made the older ladies of the county look at one another in consternation and the younger guests look at one another in delight.

Somewhere in the third set, Iris heard a woman behind her fan say, in tones of genuine astonishment, that she had never seen the Duke of Ashborne laugh like that. Not with anyone.

The Dowager watched from the edge of the floor with her face set in a mask of displeasure that did not quite manage to conceal something softer underneath it.

She said nothing that night.

But when Iris caught her eye across the room, she did not look away with her usual coldness. She simply looked. And for one long moment, watching the unmistakable happiness on her son’s face, something in the rigid line of her posture eased by a fraction — like a breath that had been held for four years and had finally, quietly, been let go.

It was not forgiveness. Not yet.

But it was the first crack in a wall that had stood far too long.

The crack did not hold.

Lady Sophia Wentworth, who had been raised to read a room for advantage and had read this one in a single evening, understood before anyone else that her position had become impossible — and, being practical, acted on it. She wrote to her father. The Dowager, who had watched the ballroom through a carefully placed window and understood precisely what she had seen, moved with the speed of a woman who had decided that the situation required ending before it became irreversible.

On the Monday, Iris was informed that her services would no longer be required. Lady Cassandra, the note said, had need of a companion of more settled temperament.

Iris read it twice. It was a very well-written note. It did not contain a single untrue word.

She packed her single trunk before dawn, in the grey hour — which was, she recognised with a small bitter irony, exactly the hour in which she had first found Gabriel Rothwell standing in his library with a candle burned to a stub, three months and a lifetime ago.

She heard his step in the corridor before she heard his voice.

“You cannot leave like this.”

“Without what?” She did not turn around. “What would you have me do, Gabriel? Fight your mother? Ruin whatever chance you have of an alliance that will actually secure this family? I have cost my own family everything once already. I will not be the reason yours suffers the same.”

“You are not a cost.”

He crossed the room in three long strides and caught her hand before she could turn away.

“You are the first thing in four years that has felt like it might be worth the risk of wanting. My mother is my mother, and I love her, and she is wrong. About this, she is entirely wrong.”

His thumb moved in a slow circle on the back of her hand, and she felt it everywhere, a small fire spreading under the skin.

“I am a duke, Iris. I do not require my mother’s permission to marry. I require only my own certainty — and I have never, in four years of careful distance and closed doors, been more certain of anything than I am of you.”

The word landed in the corridor like a stone in still water.

“Marry.”

“Marry,” she repeated, and it came out as a whisper of pure astonishment.

“Did you think I meant something less honourable?” The shadow of a smile — rare, half-formed — crossed his face. “I am aware, Iris Hartley, exactly what I am asking, and exactly what it will cost. In gossip. In my mother’s fury. In Lady Sophia’s extremely justified disappointment. I am asking anyway. I have spent four years standing guard over a wound I was too frightened to let heal. I do not intend to spend forty more.”

Iris could not speak.

Her whole careful architecture — sense, and duty, and self-protection, built up over a year of watching her family lose everything — was cracking apart in his hands, and she found, to her own astonishment, that she did not want to stop it.

“Come to the library tonight.” He released her hand. “After the house is asleep. Give me one hour, Iris. If at the end of it you still wish to leave, I will not stop you. I will have Mrs. Fenwick write you the finest reference this house has ever produced, and I will let you go with my whole heart, however badly it breaks. But give me the hour first. Please.”

She should have refused.

Every lesson of the past year, every hard and bitter education in what happened to women who trusted too easily, wanted too much, hoped past the boundaries the world had drawn for them, told her to refuse.

She went to the library that night regardless.