Page 76 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

“I know why you believe you did it. I am asking you to consider that the cost of your protection is becoming higher than I can afford.”

He stared at her. His hand found the edge of the desk and pressed flat against the surface, and she watched the tension travel up his arm and into his shoulder before she caught herself and looked away.

“What does that mean?” he asked.

She dug her thumbnail harder into the seam of her glove. It meant that she had lain awake until four o’clock replaying the corridor: not Dacre’s grip, which had been frightening but brief, but the look on Oliver’s face when he rounded the corner. The look before the punch. Before the rage. The moment he had seen Dacre’s hand on her wrist and his entire body had reorganised itself around a single, absolute intention, and she had felt, in spite of everything, safe.

She let out a shuddering breath and folded her arms around her chest, as though she could protect herself in this manner.

“It means that I cannot become the woman who needs rescuing,” she managed. “Every time you step between me and the world, I lose ground I fought to gain. People will see me as a woman who requires a duke’s intervention to navigate a corridor, and they will see the protection and assume I am helpless without it.” She paused. “And the worst part, Oliver, is that I am beginning to wonder whether they would be right.”

He flinched, a quick involuntary motion he controlled quickly, but she saw it and understood that she had found the nerve she had been afraid to touch.

“Are you angry with me?” he asked, his voice quieter now.

“You struck a man.”

“He was hurting you.”

“I never asked you to save me.”

He looked at her across the width of the morning room, six feet of Persian carpet and accumulated silence between them.

“I protected you,” he retorted.

“I never asked you to.”

A silent minute followed her words. Oliver looked at his bandaged hand. He turned it over, studying the stained cotton, the swollen ridge of his knuckles visible through the wrapping. When he spoke again, his voice had changed, stripped of the composure he had been holding in place like plaster over a crack.

“I would do it again.”

“Oliver.”

“If I walked into that corridor tomorrow and saw him standing over you, I would do exactly what I did. I would not hesitate. I would not stop to calculate the cost to your reputation or mine or the arrangement or the opinion of a hundred guests.” He looked up from his hand. “I would hit him again, Louisa. And I am telling you this because you deserve honesty, and the honest truth is that I do not trust myself to do otherwise.”

Her heart skipped a beat, and she took an involuntary step towards him.

“That frightens me,” she said quietly.

His gaze snapped to her face. “I would never hurt you.”

“I know that. That is not what I mean.”

“Then tell me what you mean.”

At once, a part of her wanted to cross the six feet of carpet and taken his bandaged hand and told him the truth: that she was not afraid of his fist, or the gossip, or the ruin of her careful plans, but that no one in twenty-two years of living had ever made her feel as protected as he did, and she had no idea how to survive losing that when the arrangement ended and he walked out of her life.

Instead she straightened her shoulders. “I mean that I cannot afford to rely on someone who might not always be there.”

Oliver was quiet. The clock on the mantelpiece counted the seconds, and in the kitchen passage below them a pot lid rang against a stone floor, and a servant’s voice muttered a mild oath.

“You are right,” he said at last.

The agreement stunned her. She had braced for an argument, for the stubborn, charming pushback she had come to expect from him, and he gave her nothing to push against.

“I overstepped,” he continued flatly, each word laid down like a brick in a wall she could watch him building between them. “I allowed my judgement to lapse, and the consequences have fallen on you, and that is precisely what I swore would never happen. You are correct that the arrangement requires boundaries. You are correct that I cannot appoint myself your protector. And you are correct that the gossip will cause you harm.”

She tried to interrupt him. “Oliver, that is not what I meant.”