Her Sisters Were Presented to the Duke—But He Asked About the Daughter They Overlooked

Chapter 21

The Duke of Thornbury did not smile.

That was the first thing Wren noticed — that he understood, exactly, what she had just said, and that it was not a joke and not a challenge and not a test. She had spent her entire life being asked for things: for copies of letters, for a tenant’s rent, for a cup of tea at the right moment, for permission to exist in a room. Nobody had ever asked her a question that would cost them something.

He was, for the first time since she had met him, visibly uncertain.

“I should say,” he said, “before I ask — I will not ask you to save Thornbury. There is nothing at Thornbury to save; it is the one house in England that is not running out of money. I will not ask you to improve my reputation; it does not need improving, and I would not care if it did. I will not ask you to produce an alliance, or dine with the right people, or be useful, or earn a place beside me.”

“Then why—”

“Because I want you there.”

Wren did not move.

“I want you there,” said Atticus Vale, “at the end of a corridor, at a table, in the room where I am reading the accounts at midnight. I want to hear you say the thing nobody else will say. I want to watch you find a page that has been torn out of a ledger. I want to be told when I am behaving like an arrogant duke, and I want to be told it in the exact tone you used about the furniture.”

“Which was?”

“You know exactly which.”

She did. She had said it with her chin up in front of eleven people, and it had been the first honest thing said in that drawing room in a decade.

Wren had spent years believing that love arrived after worth — that a person became lovable by becoming necessary, and that she would one day have saved enough accounts and covered enough shortfalls and stood behind enough tea tables that somebody would finally turn round and notice that the house was still standing because of her.

The simplicity of being wanted with no task attached to it nearly undid her.

“And if I disagree with you?” she said, and her voice cracked on the second word.

“Frequently, I imagine.”

“If I insist on reading your estate accounts.”

“I will provide a key.”

“If I tell you when you are—”

“Behaving like an arrogant duke. Yes.” He considered this privately. “I have no intention of promising to enjoy it.”

Wren raised an eyebrow.

His smile came slowly, like a fire catching in damp wood.

“Then I appear,” he said, “to have chosen very badly.”

Wren laughed through her tears — a real laugh, an ugly one, the kind she had not made in years — and pressed her glove to her mouth again, and it did nothing at all.

“You haven’t asked me anything yet.”

For once, the Duke of Thornbury looked uncertain.

“Wren Ashby,” he said. “Will you marry me?”

She let him wait exactly three heartbeats.

Long enough for the coachman outside to cough again. Long enough for a hinge to creak somewhere upstairs. Long enough for her to be certain, and to know she was certain, and to take the full measure of what she was saying yes to.

“Yes.”

Only then did he touch her — both hands coming up to frame her face, the way a man holds something he has been told all his life is breakable, and then he kissed her, and Wren Ashby, who had been invisible in this house for twenty-two years, stood in the cold entrance hall of Ashmoor with her case by the door and was kissed in the full gray light of the fanlight, in front of nobody, which was exactly the way she wanted it.