“The Duke Is Gay and Impotent,” Her Stepsister Mocked When Clara Was Forced to Marry Him—But His Wedding-Night Confession Revealed Why She Had Really Been Chosen

PART 4

He came to her again the next morning, before breakfast, with a folded document and none of the careful composure she’d grown used to seeing on him.

“I had my solicitor draw this in the night,” he said, setting it on the small table between them without ceremony. “A settlement. In your name alone — a small property near Bath, and an income independent of this marriage, of me, of anything Ravencliffe owes or doesn’t owe you. If you wish to leave — today, next month, five years from now — it is yours. No court, no family, no husband’s signature required to release it.”

Clara stared at the paper, then at him. “You’re offering me a way to leave you.”

“I’m offering you the one thing I never gave you the chance to have,” Anthony said. “A door that isn’t locked. I would rather you stay because you chose to, Clara, even if that means learning to live with the possibility that you won’t.”

She read the document twice, her hands not quite steady. It was real — witnessed, sealed, entirely hers. For eight years she had not owned so much as the bed she slept in. Now a man she had known a handful of days was handing her a house, an income, and the plain, terrifying gift of a choice nobody had ever thought to offer her before.

Their fragile new footing was interrupted by frantic knocking below. Mrs. Gable appeared in the doorway, lips pressed thin. “Lady Sterling and Miss Honoria have arrived, your grace. They say they’ve come to check on her grace — given the circumstances of the wedding night.”

Anthony’s eyebrows rose. “How thoughtful of them.”

Clara dressed carefully — not for Anthony this time, but for herself, deep blue silk, curls falling soft. Whatever else remained unresolved between them, she would not let Honoria see anything less than a woman standing on her own two feet.

Honoria and Lady Sterling stood waiting at the foot of the staircase, clearly braced to find a weeping bride. Instead they found Clara composed, chin high. Honoria’s eyes swept her from head to toe, and something in her face faltered.

“We came the moment we heard news of your wedding night,” Lady Sterling said, dabbing at her mouth with a handkerchief. “We feared you might need us.”

“How kind of you to worry,” Clara said. “As you can see, there was no need.”

Anthony appeared at the top of the stairs and crossed directly to her side, resting a hand at the small of her back — not a claim, an offering. Clara let herself lean into it, and found, to her own surprise, that it felt like her own decision to do so.

“Your grace,” Honoria managed, strained. “I had heard — that you suffered certain afflictions.”

“Strange,” Anthony said, unblinking. “I’d heard you suffered a complete lack of suitors, Miss Honoria. Yet here you stand, still full of opinions about a marriage bed you know nothing about.”

Honoria’s cheeks flooded red. Lady Sterling gathered the last of her dignity and did not stay long after that.

As their carriage pulled away, Clara let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “You didn’t have to defend me.”

“I know,” Anthony said. “I wanted to. Those are not the same thing, and I understand now that you’re the one who gets to decide which of them you’ll accept from me.”

That evening, unable to sleep, Clara found him still awake in the library, a stack of old estate correspondence spread across the desk, searching — she realized — for anything that might explain why Silas had ever wanted her married into this family at all.

“You should be resting,” she said.

“So should you.” He looked up, and something in his face eased slightly at the sight of her. “I find I sleep poorly since my father died. I’ve never much minded it until now, when there’s someone in the next room who might hear me pacing.”

Clara sat across from him without being asked, drawing a second stack of papers toward herself. “My father used to say the only cure for a bad night was a worse column of arithmetic. Something dull enough to drown out everything else.”

“Your father sounds as though I would have liked him.”

“He would have liked you rather less, I think, at least at first,” Clara said, and something in her tone was almost fond. “He distrusted quiet men. Said they were either hiding something worth knowing, or nothing at all, and a man never let you find out which until it was too late to matter.”

“Which am I?”

“I haven’t decided,” Clara admitted. “Ask me again once I’ve read every ledger in this house.”

He laughed — a real one, low and surprised out of him — and for an hour after that they worked in companionable silence, her fingers quick and sure across old columns of figures, his slower, more careful, the two of them trading pages back and forth by candlelight until the space between them stopped feeling like a wound in need of tending and started, instead, to feel simply like a room two people were sharing on purpose.

Days passed in that same uneasy, watchful rhythm — Jane growing quieter as the date of her eighteenth birthday and the trust’s review drew nearer, Anthony pacing the study late into the night, Clara returning again and again to the library, certain the answer to all of it was written somewhere in ink she hadn’t found yet.

She was right.