Page 99 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

“And I suppose…” she continued, pushing through the fear. “Well, you can’t marry someone when you’re… in love with someone else.”

His eyes found hers, and widened.

“I did not choose Frederick because I loved him.” Her voice was steady. The effort cost her, and she let it. “I chose him because I was afraid. I was afraid that if I admitted what I truly felt, I would be reaching for a man who did not reach back, and I could not survive being overlooked by you the way I had been overlooked by everyone else. Frederick was safe. Frederick was possible. You were terrifying.”

“Louisa…”

“Let me finish. Please.”

He closed his mouth. His fingers tightened on the newel post and then deliberately released, one at a time, until his hand hung at his side.

“I spent four years wanting Frederick to see me,” she said. “He never did. He saw a capable woman, a sensible woman, a woman who would manage his household and agree with his opinions and stop speaking when he changed the subject. He saw the outline of a wife and never troubled himself to look at who was standing inside it.”

She took a step toward him. “You saw me, Oliver. From the very first evening, when I was standing at the edge of a ballroom holding a glass of vile lemonade, you saw me. Not the version I had rehearsed, not the version I performed for Frederick. You saw the real one, and instead of looking away, you told me she was worth seeing.”

Oliver turned from her. He walked to the console table and braced both hands on its edge, his head bowed, his shoulders rigid beneath his travelling coat. When he spoke, his voice was stripped of the charm, the deflection, the careful ease she had grown accustomed to hearing from him.

“You did nothing wrong,” he said. “After the kiss. After Dacre. You did nothing wrong. I left because I was afraid of what I was becoming.”

“Then tell me.”

He pushed back from the table and faced her. His hands hung at his sides.

“When I hit Dacre, I enjoyed it.”

She waited.

“I have spent nine years trying to become a man my mother would have been proud of. Kind. Patient. Controlled. And in one second, in a corridor, I drove my fist into a man’s face, and I felt relief. Not shame. Not regret. Relief. And the part of me that I have been trying to outrun since I was nine years old, the part that remembers every sound I heard through that study door, told me that relief was his. My father’s. That the satisfaction I felt standing over Dacre was the same satisfaction he felt standing over a woman he was supposed to protect.”

His voice had grown quiet. He stood at the center of the checkered marble, the morning light from the fanlight falling grey across his shoulders.

“I could not go near you while that was true. Because if I loved you, and I do, Louisa, I love you in a way that makes the word feel insufficient and terrifying, then I was capable of becoming the man who destroyed my mother. I believed that the kindest thing I could do for you was to let you go.”

Louisa crossed the remaining distance between them. She took his hands. His fingers curled around hers, as though he’d been waiting to hold on to her as desperately as his next breath.

“Oliver, listen to me.” She looked up at him. “I cannot tell you why your father would ever have hurt your mother. But I can tell you that I know in my heart of hearts that you will never hurt me.” She tightened her grip on his hands. “You didn’t hit him to hurt me. You tried to protect me.”

He pulled one hand free and pressed it over his eyes.

“The man who protected me in that corridor,” she said, and she reached up and drew his hand down from his face so he had to look at her, “is the same man who crouched beside a painting hung too low in a gallery and told me that poor positioning did not diminish worth. The man who handed me a parasol and sat on a bench for ten minutes while I talked to a botanist about ferns, and who told me afterward that he was proud of me.” She held his gaze. “That man could not become his father. He does not have the capacity for it. He never did.”

Oliver looked at her for a long time. His hand was still in hers, and she could feel the tension in his grip shifting, loosening, releasing by degrees.

“You sound very certain,” he muttered, his voice tinted with uncertainty. Louisa smiled.

“I am very certain.”

“Even after the version of me that you saw in that corridor? Even after I put a man on the ground in front of you.”

“Especially after that.” She stepped closer. “Do you know what frightened me that night? Not you. Not your anger. I was frightened by how alone you looked when it was over. You stood in that corridor, and you looked at your own hand as though it belonged to a stranger, and I wanted to reach for you, and you would not let me.”

He said nothing. He swallowed hard, and his fingers tightened around hers.

“I am reaching for you now,” she said. “Let me.”

Oliver’s hands turned in hers. His fingers laced through her fingers and held.

“I fell in love with you before the kiss,” he said, and his voice broke on the word, and he let it break. “I fell in love with you in the park, the afternoon we wrote the rules. You were wearing mended gloves and arguing about how many dances constituted a credible courtship, and I looked at you across that bench and somehow knew that I was lost. Not because you were beautiful, though you are. Because you laughed at me and challenged me when every person in London accepted whatever I offered them without question. You treated me as though I were a man and not a title, and no one had done that since my father died.”