Page 106 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

“My brother rarely grew angry. She brought me a sandwich. Ham and mustard. She passed it up through the branches and told me I could have twenty more minutes, but after that I was to come inside and apologize to Mr. Alderton, and I was to mean it.”

Louisa smiled. “She sounds wonderful.”

“She was.”

They walked in silence for a few paces. The path curved toward the lake. The water lay flat, and silver beneath a sky streaked with high cloud, and at the far end a heron stood motionless in the shallows, one leg raised, its patience absolute.

Oliver stopped walking. His hand found hers. The ring was in his waistcoat pocket, a sapphire flanked by seed pearls. His mother’s ring. He had taken it from the safe a week ago, and it had been pressing against his ribs ever since.

“Louisa.”

She turned to face him. The wind moved a strand of chestnut hair across her cheek, and she pushed it back.

“I rehearsed this,” he said. “I stood in my bedroom last night and spoke to a mirror, and every version sounded like a man performing a proposal. I do not want to perform.”

Her eyes found his, and she tilted her head.

“Then don’t.”

“I love you. I love that you argue with me and that you read novels upside down and that you told Phelps his tea was too weak on your first morning in this house, and he looked at you as though you had handed him a personal revelation.”

“His tea was too weak.”

“It was. He has since corrected it, and I believe he respects you more than he respects me, which is saying a great deal because Phelps has known me since I was a boy, and he watched me become a Duke… And he’s been there for every step. Even though I may have made some of those steps rather tedious for him.”

Her mouth twitched. “You are stalling.”

“I am.” He reached into his waistcoat pocket. “I am stalling because this is the most important question I will ever ask, and I would prefer not to ruin it.”

“You are not going to ruin it.”

“You do not know that.”

“Oliver.” She stepped closer and looked up at him. “Ask me.”

He opened his hand. The ring gleamed in the sunlight.

“I am not asking because it is expected. I am not asking because it is practical or convenient. I am asking because I cannot imagine the rest of my life without you standing in my garden, criticizing my tea and my hedgerows and whatever else displeases you.” He looked at her. “Will you marry me?”

Louisa looked at the ring, and he turned it. “It’s a star sapphire,” he explained gently. “The asterism is invisible until the light catches it at the right angle…”

She looked up at him. Her lips pressed together, and for one terrible second he thought she might cry, and then she laughed, a sound that carried across the water and startled the heron into flight, its grey wings beating once, twice, before it lifted above the tree line and vanished.

“Yes,” she said. “Naturally, yes.”

He slid the ring onto her finger. It fit.

She kissed him beside the lake, her hands gripping the lapels of his coat, and his arms closed around her, and the morning was warm and still and full of birdsong.

* * *

They married in September.

The chapel at Ashford Hall was built of flint and chalk, its windows narrow and its pews worn smooth by two centuries of the parish. Louisa wore her mother’s veil. Oliver wore a cravat Phelps had tied four times before declaring it acceptable.

“You look like you are about to faint,” Sebastian said beside him at the altar.

Oliver swallowed dryly. “I am not going to faint.”