Page 55 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
He had not been prepared for this.
The dress was ivory, simply cut, without the excess of ornamentation that the occasion might have invited and that she would never have chosen regardless. The garnets sat at her throat, warm against her skin. Her hair was dressed close and neat with a small comb. It was pale, and a thread through it caught the light when she moved. She was looking at the front of the church with the expression she used when she was composing herself. This particular stillness implied that she was deciding something about how she intended to carry what came next.
Then she looked at him.
The look of indecision faltered, and for a second, he saw her eyes light up with hope, before the composure resumed.
He was aware of Anthony beside him in the specific peripheral way that told him Anthony had noticed the same thing he had and was choosing not to remark on it.
She came down the aisle at the measured pace of a woman who did not hurry for rooms and would not hurry for this one either. Leander stood where he was and watched her come and felt, underneath the stillness he wore like a second skin, the return of tender feelings he recognized.
It was the same thing that had sat beneath the brandy that morning, the taste of what he had said when he had told Anthony what this marriage was. He had named it a transaction, and he had meant it as a boundary, and both of those things were still true, and the truth of them was doing extraordinarily little to address what was currently happening in his chest.
He filed it. He had a system for this. He had been filing things since he was fifteen years old, and the system had never failed him.
She reached the front and stood beside him. They turned to face each other. Julia looked him directly in the eyes for the exchange of vows.
The words the vicar used were the old words. Leander had heard them at other ceremonies and had never had occasion to consider them as anything other than the formal machinery ofa legal arrangement. He considered them now, standing beside Julia in a small stone chapel in the morning light, and found that they were more precise than he remembered.
To have and to hold.
He was aware of her eyes on him. The scent of something clean and faintly floral surrounded her and filled his nostrils. The steadiness of her breathing could be heard. The way she held her hands in front of her, composed and still, gave nothing away to the twelve people behind them.
For better, for worse.
He knew what this was. He had told Anthony, and he had told himself, and he intended to tell her, plainly and without pretense, before this day was out. An extension of their arrangement. A permanent one. She was not a woman who required softening, and he was not a man who offered it. They had built something functional and clear-eyed between them that would serve them both better than any warmer fiction.
He knew all of that.
To love and to cherish.
She looked up at him, and in the plain light of the chapel windows, he saw what he had been cataloging, piece by careful piece, for the better part of a week, and had not yet allowed himself to name in any language more specific than observation.
He held her gaze and said the words the vicar prompted him to say, and was aware, as he said them, that they did not feel like a performance. That was the problem. He had been prepared to stand in a church and say the correct words in the correct order and feel nothing beyond the satisfaction of a plan well executed.
Instead, he felt something considerably like he was meaning what you are saying more than he intended to.
He said the words.
She said the words.
The ring was on her finger.
The vicar spoke the final sentence, and Anthony exhaled beside him with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had been right about something and intended to be gracious about it. Behind them, Lady Bendon pressed her handkerchief to her face in earnest, and Poppy smiled the smile of someone who had been holding it back for the better part of twenty minutes.
Leander looked at his wife.
He knew what this was.
The bitter taste was back, and it was sharper than it had been that morning. The sensation had changed in character sufficiently so that he found it harder, standing here, than hehad in the billiard room, to be entirely certain what it was bitter about.
He offered her his arm.
She took it.
They walked out of the chapel and into the light.
Julia stood beside him at the front of the chapel while the vicar spoke the closing words, and she was aware of Leander's gaze in the way she had become aware of it over the course of the week. He watched her as though he intended to understand her completely. She had told herself several times that it meant nothing personal. It was simply how he was.
