The Duke Thought He Was Marrying an Ugly Girl to Save His Crumbling Estate—Until the Veil Lifted, Revealing a Beautiful Bride Trembling Beneath a Hand-Shaped Bruise, Certain Her New Husband Would Hurt Her Just as Her Father Had

 PART 5

The true test of their fragile truce came on a Tuesday in late February, in the ruined quiet of an ordinary afternoon.

Gifford was in the front parlor with a local magistrate, listening to a dull dispute over a hedgerow boundary. Brunwin was alone in the library with her botany book and a pot of tea going cold. The room smelled of woodsmoke and old paper. Rain ticked against the windows, gentle as fingertips. It was, for the first time since November, a room in which a person could forget herself.

A newly hired housemaid, sent to dust the upper shelves, dragged a heavy wooden stepladder across the floor. One leg snagged on the edge of the Aubusson rug. The girl panicked and yanked. The ladder swung backward into the towering oak bookshelf, and two dozen leatherbound encyclopedias came down in a violent, percussive explosion that shook the floorboards.

To a woman whose father had kicked doors from their hinges in his rages, it sounded exactly like a man breaking his way toward her.

Gifford abandoned the magistrate in the middle of a sentence. He did not remember crossing the hall. He threw open the library doors to find the maid on her knees among the fallen books, weeping and apologizing to no one. And in the farthest corner, wedged between the mahogany globe and the wall, Brunwin sat with her knees pulled to her chest and her arms wrapped over her head. She was shaking so hard her teeth chattered. Her eyes were open but they were not in this room. They were in a corridor in Kent.

“Out,” Gifford said to the maid, low and hard.

The girl fled. The door swung shut.

He stopped twenty feet away. He forced his hands, which had curled into fists, to open, and he spread his fingers wide where she could see them.

“Brunwin.”

His voice was nothing like the snarl of a moment before. It was calm and flat, the voice of a man reading a column of figures.

“Look at me.”

She did not move. A ragged, whimpering breath escaped from behind her arms.

He lowered himself to the floor slowly and sat cross-legged exactly where he was. He made himself smaller. Less. Safe.

“It was a ladder,” he said. Slow, rhythmic, patient as a metronome. “A maid tripped on the rug. The encyclopedias fell. That is all. There is no one in this room but me. You are at Alderly. The doors are shut and the gates are locked.” He waited. Her shoulders shook. “I am sitting on the floor by the desk. I am not going to move. I will not come near you. Take as long as you need.”

For ten excruciating minutes the only sound was her jagged breathing and the rain.

Gifford did not speak again. He did not shift. He looked at the fire, not at her, so that she would not feel watched. It was the hardest thing he had ever done. Every instinct he owned was screaming at him to cross the room and gather her up. He held still like a man holding a door against a flood.

Then, slowly, the shaking began to ebb.

She lowered her arms. Her face was chalk white, her pupils wide and black, and when her eyes found him sitting quietly on the carpet across the room, a dark flush of humiliation washed up her throat. She scrambled to her feet, leaning hard against the wall, unable to meet his gaze.

“I apologize.” The words came out thick. “I know it is foolish. I know I am safe.”

“You have nothing to apologize for.”

He stayed on the floor.

“Fear is not a failing, Brunwin. It is what a body does when it has survived something.”

She looked at him then. Really looked. There was no pity in his sharp features and no disgust, only a quiet, unwavering acceptance of exactly who she was and everything that had been done to her.

“He used to throw things.”

The words were out before she could catch them. It was the first time she had ever spoken of it aloud.

“When the rage took him. Chairs. Decanters. Books.” Her fingers rose, without her knowing, to the side of her jaw. “If you did not run fast enough —”

She stopped.

Gifford felt something cold and murderous calcify in his chest. He wanted to ride to Kent that night and beat the baron until he stopped breathing. But he kept his face perfectly blank, because she did not need his rage. She had endured enough rage to last a lifetime. She needed his stability.

“He will never throw anything again,” he said.

Not a comfort. A fact.

“Not in your vicinity. If he ever comes near this estate, I will have the groundskeeper shoot him for trespass. I have already drafted the order.”

A startled, breathless sound escaped her, halfway between a sob and a laugh. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand and something in her shoulders let go.

“You would hang for murder, your grace.”

“I would claim it was a hunting accident.” He pushed himself up from the floor and dusted his trousers. “The magistrates in this county owe me entirely too much money to look closely at a dead baron in my woods.”

Brunwin smiled.

It was a tiny, fragile thing, barely tilting the corners of her mouth. But it struck Gifford with the force of a physical blow. The absolute beauty of it knocked the air out of his lungs, and he turned away abruptly and bent to gather the fallen encyclopedias, needing the labor, needing somewhere to put his hands.

He stacked them one by one. Britannica. Johnson. Diderot. The names blurred. Behind him he could hear her crossing the room, unhurried, and lowering herself into the winged chair. She picked up her cold tea and drank it, as though a moment ago had been only weather.

The maid, whose name was Nell, was found weeping in the scullery. Gifford did not dismiss her. He told Mrs. Gable that the girl was to have an extra week’s wages and a warm supper, and that the ladder was to be chained to the wall.

Then he went to the window of the empty parlor, where the magistrate had long since left his hedgerow to fend for itself, and stood with both hands braced against the sill.

The realization had lodged beneath his ribs like a splinter.

He was no longer managing a transaction. He was protecting something he could not bear to lose.