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 8

She was standing by his massive oak desk when he came in.

She had not lit a lamp. The afternoon light fell gray and even through the mullioned windows and picked out the gold leaf on the spines of the books. Her hair had come partly loose from its pins, and she had not fixed it. She reached out and pulled open the heavy center drawer, and took out his private ledger, the black leatherbound book where he kept the accounts no steward ever saw. She opened it without searching, to a page she clearly already knew. She must have found it months ago, and said nothing.

On that page, in his own slanting hand, Gifford had once reduced their marriage to a calculation. The seventy thousand pounds. The repaired roof. The woman acquired in exchange.

She set the open book on the desk between them.

Behind her, through the tall window, the last dust of the baron’s carriage was still settling on the oak-lined drive. Neither of them looked at it. Somewhere in the house a clock struck the half hour, and a footman’s hurried steps crossed the flagstones and stopped, as though even the servants had understood that this room was not to be entered.

“I want that page gone.”

He looked at the ink and did not touch it.

“The money is in a secure trust,” he said carefully. “It is safe. He cannot touch it.”

“I do not care about the money.”

Her dark eyes lifted and locked onto his.

“I care about the math. I care about the transaction.”

Gifford stiffened. “Brunwin. We made an agreement.”

“I was a hostage when we made that agreement.”

Her voice was gaining strength with every word, ringing quietly in the tall room.

“I was terrified and broken. You paid for a ghost to haunt your halls so you could fix your roof. That was the ledger.”

He closed his eyes. Each word turned like a blade under his ribs. He had told himself for months that honesty was a kind of mercy. He had never once asked what it cost her to hear it.

“But the roof is fixed.”

She took a step toward him.

“The debt is paid.”

Another step.

“The ghost is gone.”

The distance between them vanished. She was close enough that he could feel the heat of her skin through the thin muslin, close enough to see the gold flecks scattered through the dark of her eyes.

“So what happens now, Gifford?”

Her voice dropped to a fierce whisper.

“What happens when the bargain is fulfilled? Do we walk these halls for the next forty years avoiding each other? Do you go on treating me like glass that might shatter if you speak too loudly?”

“I am trying to keep you safe.” His voice cracked on the last word.

“You coughed outside my door for four months.”

It was so unexpected that he almost laughed. “I —”

“Every morning. Every evening. Before you entered any room I was in.” She swallowed. “I used to count your footsteps in the corridor. In Kent I learned every step in that house, because one of them meant run. Do you know what I learned in yours?” A breath. “That yours meant I could stay.”

Something in his chest gave way, slow and terrible, like a floor under too much weight.

He thought of four months of soft slippers and slowed latches, of every door he had closed gently so that she would not hear him coming. He had believed he was hiding his footsteps. He had only been announcing himself, quietly, again and again, until she had learned the sound of safety.

“I told you I would never touch you,” he said hoarsely. “I meant it as a promise. Somewhere along the way it became a wall. I stood behind it because I was afraid that if I crossed it, I would be the same as everyone who ever took something from you.”

“I don’t want to be safe.”

Her hands came up and rested flat against his chest, directly over his hammering heart.

“I have spent my whole life trying to be safe. I want to live, Gifford. And I cannot live if you keep me on the far side of a line you drew to ease your conscience.”

The air in the library felt impossibly thin.

“I am a ruined man.” It came out of him like a confession. “I have a crumbling house and a cynical heart. I bought a wife with a stranger’s money and I told myself it was arithmetic. I have nothing left to give you but my title.”

“I do not want your title.”

Her fingers curled into the front of his shirt.

“I want my husband.”

His restraint snapped.

The ledger, the rules, the cold logic he had survived on for thirty years all burned to ash in a single second. He pulled her against him and kissed her, and it was not gentle. It was desperate and bruising and deeply human, a collision of two people who had survived the dark and had finally found the door. She kissed him back with equal ferocity. Her hands slid up to grip the back of his neck, anchoring herself to the man who had bought a monster and found a woman.

When they finally broke apart, both of them were shaking.

He rested his forehead against hers. His hands were tangled in her hair, and the last of her pins fell to the carpet one by one, ticking against the wood, until the dark waves spilled loose over his wrists.

“The bargain is over,” he whispered against her lips.

Brunwin smiled. It was not the tiny, fragile thing from the library floor in February. It was a true and radiant smile that reached all the way to her eyes, and in the gray afternoon light it seemed to Gifford that the whole room had turned gold.

“Burn the page, Gifford.”

She lifted the open ledger from the desk and pressed it into his hands.

“We do not need it anymore.”