Page 10 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“And when he does, you may inform him that I will write.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

Theodore took back nothing of his composure. He inclined his head, turned, and went out into the street. The door closed behind him with the soft completeness of a door recently rehung.

He walked back the way he had come.

The thought would not arrange itself into anything useful, which was unlike his thoughts. She was young. She moved through her own house like a woman holding something together with both hands, holding it so steadily and for so long that no one inside had noticed it was being held. Least of all the brother who had come to a stranger’s study that afternoon to sell her.

An hour ago, she had been a name on a report and three lines of fact. Twenty years of age. No fortune. Keeps a house well.

Now she was a person who had crossed a hall carrying an empty vase, ordering the withered flowers thrown out before they could spoil the air for whoever came next. Seeing her had not made the thing easier to do. It had made it worse.

He had known it would, and he had gone to look anyway.

That was the part he would have to live beside.

Back at Grosvenor Square, he gave the footman his coat and hat.

“Will Your Grace require anything further?”

“Brandy.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

In his study, Theodore poured himself a measure before the decanter had properly settled against the tray. He did not want it. He drank it standing.

Then he rang for Pearce.

The secretary entered with quill and pocket-book already in hand. “Your Grace?”

“Draw up a settlement on Miss Middleton.”

Pearce’s quill hovered for the briefest moment before it touched the page. “Miss Middleton.”

“The full sum against the brother’s debts, every note and every private one of them, paid clean and paid at once.”

“At once, Your Grace?”

“Once verified.”

Pearce wrote. “Every debt verified and satisfied.”

“The matrimony at St George’s, within three weeks, by licence. No banns and no fuss made of it.”

“Within three weeks, by licence,” Pearce repeated, writing steadily. “Shall I prepare the usual language regarding the lady’s allowance?”

“No.”

The quill stopped.

Theodore turned from the window. “Mark this part particularly, Pearce. Her allowance comes from my own purse. Not from an estate, not from a trust, not from any settlement that lawyers can argue over.”

“From Your Grace personally.”

“From me,” Theodore said. “So that it answers to no one living and can be taken from her by no one, whatever should one day become of me.”

Pearce wrote it all down without expression, which was why Theodore kept him.