Page 97 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

“Yes.”

“He will be gone by morning.”

She pulled back from the glass. A circle of fog remained where her breath had touched it, already fading at the edges.

“You must stop waiting for life to happen, Louisa,” Eleanor said softly. “You must make it happen. Whatever it is you want, you must fight for it.”

“I… want him,” Louisa admitted.

“Then go,” Eleanor encouraged. “His carriage leaves at dawn. Grosvenor Square. You know where Ashford House is.”

Louisa hesitated and Eleanor reached forward, taking her hands. “You can do this. You have walked across every room I have ever pushed you toward. This is the last one.”

Louisa looked down at Eleanor’s hands around hers, then at her own bare finger where the sapphire used to be.

“What if he will not listen?”

“Then you will have told the truth, and it will be yours regardless.”

“What if I am wrong? What if you are wrong, and he feels nothing, and I arrive on his doorstep at dawn making a complete fool of myself?”

“Then you will be a fool who told the truth, which is better than a coward who kept it.” Eleanor squeezed once, firmly, and released her. “Do not rehearse. Do not prepare a speech. Just go.”

Louisa stood at the window. The rain continued against the glass. The lamplighter’s flame moved along the street, small and stubborn against the grey.

She pressed her thumb against the pale band on her ring finger and let herself remember. Oliver in the library at Ashford House, his fingers finding her jaw, the word slowly suspended between them before his mouth found hers. She turned that image over, and beneath it found another: Oliver crouching beside a painting hung too low for anyone to notice, looking up at her, telling her that poor positioning did not diminish worth.

Eleanor was right. None of it belonged to a man who felt nothing. She lifted her chin.

“Eleanor.”

“Yes.”

“I will need the carriage before dawn. I… must find the right words.”

“Yes,” Eleanor agreed. “You will need the carriage, and the words… will come to you.”

She squeezed Louisa’s hands once more before leaving. The front door opened and closed, and the sound of rain swelled briefly before the house sealed itself shut again.

Louisa swallowed.

Tomorrow Oliver would be gone. He wanted to leave.

She would not let him.

CHAPTER 31

The carriage turned onto Grosvenor Square at a quarter past five. A breathless Louisa pressed her face to the glass and counted the houses in the grey light until she found his.

Ashford House stood at the far corner, its Portland stone facade pale against the overcast sky. Two lamps burned in the entrance hall, visible through the fanlight above the door. Below, on the pavement, a coachman and a footman were loading a trunk onto a travelling carriage. A second trunk sat on the flagstones beside the mounting block. The horses stood in their traces, stamping and blowing clouds of white breath into the June chill.

Her breath stopped for a second, then relief flooded through her. She was not too late.

Her own hired carriage stopped twenty yards short. The driver had been reluctant to take her at this hour, a young woman alone, no maid, no companion, wearing a day dress buttoned crookedly at the collar because her hands had been shaking too badly to manage it properly. She had promised him double the fare and climbed in before he could refuse.

Louisa stepped down onto the pavement. The morning air was cold and sharp against her bare neck. Her shawl hung on the parlour chair. Her gloves sat on the hall table. She had not brushed her hair but pinned it in a rough knot that was already slipping at the left temple, and she crossed the pavement toward Ashford House without stopping to fix it.

The coachman noticed her first. He straightened from the trunk he had been securing, his hands still on the buckle, and watched her approach in open confusion. The footman turned. Louisa ignored them both and climbed the front steps.