Page 100 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

Louisa blinked and felt the heat slide down her cheeks. She did not wipe it away because her hands were in his.

“I began falling in love with you the afternoon at the Royal Academy,” she said. “You stood beside me in front of that painting and asked me what I thought, and you listened to my answer as though it mattered. Not politely. Not because you were performing attentiveness for an audience. You listened because you wanted to know.” She laughed, a short, wet sound that echoed in the marble hall. “Frederick never listened. He heard, and he catalogued, and he arranged what I said into categories that suited his plans. You listened. And every time you did, I became a little more myself, and a little less the woman I had been pretending to be for four years.”

Oliver freed one hand and touched her face. His thumb moved across her cheek, following the tear’s path.

“I should have told you,” he said then. “All of it. Instead I retreated and let you believe you had done wrong.”

“You were protecting yourself.”

“I was protecting myself from the wrong thing.” His thumb stilled on her cheek. “I was going to leave.”

“I know.”

“I was going to sit in that carriage and ride to Hampshire and spend the next thirty years convincing myself that I had done the noble thing.”

“I know that too.”

The tips of his mouth curled in a smile.

“You stopped me.”

“I had to.” She pressed her cheek against his palm. “Eleanor told me not to rehearse a speech. She said the words would come.”

“And did they?”

“They are still coming. I am fairly certain I will be saying them for a long time.”

He pulled her close. His arms closed around her and her face pressed against his travelling coat, and the wool smelled of cedar and horses and the cold air of an early morning. She could hear the house stirring below, a kettle set on a stove, a distant door closing, and his heartbeat through the layers of fabric, fast and unsteady.

“I cannot promise I will never be afraid,” he said against her hair. “I have been afraid for so long that I do not know whether the habit will break.”

“I am not asking you to stop being afraid.” She pulled back enough to look at him. “I am asking you to stop letting the fear decide.”

He looked at her, and she could see him choosing. His shoulders dropped, and the rigid line of his spine softened, and the careful distance he had maintained for nine years fell away from him the same way he had released the newel post earlier, one finger at a time.

The hall brightened around them as the sun crested the rooftops to the east and threw a bar of gold across the checkered marble. The candles in the sconces guttered in the draught from the open door, unnecessary now, and outside the coachman had stopped loading the carriage and was standing beside the horses, watching the doorway.

Oliver cupped her face between both hands and kissed her, and the kiss held nothing of the library, nothing measured or instructive or careful. She rose onto her toes and kissed him back, and her hands found the lapels of his travelling coat and held on, and the hired carriage waited at the curb, and the travelling trunks sat on the pavement and the morning continued around them, indifferent and ordinary and utterly changed.

When they separated, his forehead rested against hers.

“Your carriage is loaded,” she whispered.

“It can be unloaded.”

“Your household in Hampshire is expecting you.”

“They will recover from the disappointment.”

She laughed, and Oliver smiled, and it was the unguarded one, lopsided and warm, the one she had seen only a handful of times and wanted to see for the rest of her life.

“Phelps,” Oliver called, without taking his eyes from her.

The servants’ door opened. Phelps appeared at once, his composure immaculate, though his gaze moved from Oliver to Louisa to their tangled hands and back again before he allowed himself the shadow of a smile.

“Your Grace?”

“Tell Hargreaves to unload the carriage. I will not be travelling to Hampshire today.”