Page 45 of A Highly Unlikely Duchess
“I will,” Emily said and immediately took in a sharp breath, pleased that she too had not stumbled. Her voice did not shake. She had been afraid it might.
“I pronounce that they be man and wife together,” the clergyman announced.
As the final blessing was spoken, a sudden, profound sense of calmness washed over Emily. She had not realized, until that precise moment, how much of herself she had been holding in suspension for the last several weeks, pulled taut between what she needed, what she feared, and everything in between. Now it simply, quietly let go. The tension left her shoulders. The cold settled weight of it all, the planning and the pretending and the walking on ground she could not trust, lifted in a single exhale.
It was over.
They were married.
Frederick was safe.
She looked at the ring on her finger and felt, with a clarity that surprised her, something very close to peace.
Theodore leaned slightly toward her as they turned to face the small gathering of guests, and said, quietly enough for only her to hear. “You make a beautiful bride, Emily.”
She looked at him.
At the blue eyes and the slight, genuine warmth in his expression, and she felt something move through her chest that was not the peace of a moment ago but something adjacent to it, something that sat closer to the surface and had considerably more warmth in it, and she wanted to say something back, something equal to it. But she looked at him, and the words did not come because he was looking at her in a way she did not quite know what to do with yet.
She smiled instead.
Then she looked away, and the moment passed. The clergyman was speaking again as they walked. People were saying things to them, her mother was pressing her hand with bright eyes, and her father was shaking Theodore's hand... all of it moved past Emily in a warm, gentle blur, like watching a river from the bank.
She said goodbye to her family. It was not the wrenching thing she had steeled herself for. Her mother held her a moment longer than usual and said nothing, which said everything. Her father cleared his throat and told her to write, and that was the whole of it. Her bags were already at the Carrowell Manor. Everything she was taking with her had been packed and sent ahead two days ago.
She climbed into the carriage beside her husband.
Her husband.
Emily sat with that word for a moment as the horses moved and London began to pass by the window. She thought that of all the things she had imagined feeling on this particular day, the quiet, settled, inexplicable sense of having arrived somewhere she had planned to be had not been among them.
“We should reach the estate by nightfall,” Thoedore noted. “The staff has been prepared for our arrival.”
“That is good to hear, Your Grace,”
Something was different with Emily.
He noticed it before the carriage had cleared the first street. She was sitting beside him with her hands folded in her lap, her faceturned toward the window, and she had been facing the window since they left the church, which in itself was not unusual.
What was unusual was that she had not looked at him for longer than a second.
He tried to think of a single occasion in all their years of acquaintance when Emily had not looked at him. Even when she was furious with him... especially when she was furious with him, she looked. Those steady brown eyes had been trained on him across dinner tables and ballrooms. It was one of the things that had always, quietly and without his permission, kept him interested.
She was not looking at him now.
He turned to look at her instead. At the white muslin and the roses woven into her hair. Some of them were loosening now in the warmth of the carriage. At the ring on her finger, his ring, plain gold, catching the light each time the carriage moved. At the line of her profile, the freckles, the jaw, the mouth that was not doing anything in particular at the moment except existing in a way he was finding distinctly inconvenient to ignore.
He turned back to the window on his side.
He was a married man.
If someone had told him a month ago, if someone had sat across from him and told him that within thirty days he would be amarried man with a child waiting for him at his estate and a wife sitting beside him in a carriage on the way to begin a life he had never once envisioned for himself, he would have said something sufficiently cutting to end the conversation and then left the room. He would not even have dignified it with a proper argument. It would have been beneath argument.
Yet...
He was a married man. The words sat in his mind with an odd quality... not with the catastrophe he had always imagined them to be. He found, turning them over, that he was not contesting it.
That surprised him slightly.
