“I know.”
She turned to look at him, and he saw the fear beneath her composure—the understanding of what this meant, what it would cost her. She had survived her father’s disgrace, her family’s ruin, the slow suffocation of a society that had decided she was no longer worth acknowledging.
She would not survive this.
And Oliver—Oliver would be drawn into the scandal as surely as the tide followed the moon. The child’s mysterious caretaker, found alone with his guardian in a darkened library. The whispers would multiply, metastasize, become something monstrous. Every door that might have opened for him would close.
Thaddeus saw it all with terrible clarity: the path ahead if he did nothing, the destruction it would bring to the two people who had somehow become his responsibility. He thought of his mother’s garden, overgrown and wild, a monument to grief he had never learned to tend. He thought of his father’s study, where he had stood as a boy and sworn to himself that he would never let emotion overrule reason.
He thought of Oliver’s small hand, reaching for Maribel’s.
You will not make her go?
The decision crystallised in his mind with the finality of a door closing.
“There is a way,” he said.
Lady Maribel looked at him. Her dark eyes were bright with unshed tears, her chest rising and falling with shallow breaths. She looked fragile in a way he had never seen her look—not upon her arrival at Blackwood, not when he had hurled accusations at her head, not when she had stood before him and offered to subject herself to his authority for the sake of a child.
She looked, for the first time, as though she might break.
He would not allow it.
“What way?” she asked.
Thaddeus held her gaze. His heart was pounding—a steady, insistent rhythm that seemed to echo through his entire body—but his voice, when it emerged, was perfectly controlled.
“We will marry,” he said. “Tomorrow, if it can be arranged. Before the gossip spreads beyond management.”
The colour that had drained from her face did not return. Her lips parted, but no sound emerged.
“There is no other option,” he continued, each word precise as a blade. “Your reputation will be salvaged by the legitimacy of the arrangement. Oliver will have a proper household, a proper mother?—”
“I am not his mother.”
“You are the closest thing he has.” Thaddeus hesitated before continuing. “You told me yourself that you would not leave him. That you would not teach him that love is something people are afraid to claim. Well, Lady Maribel—” He gestured toward the door through which Lady Forsythe had disappeared. “They have just ensured that remaining in my household without the protection of marriage will be impossible. You may claim all the love you wish, but if you are driven out in disgrace, what good will it do him?”
She said nothing. Her hands had stopped trembling; they hung at her sides now, motionless, as though all the life had gone out of them.
“I do not offer you affection,” Thaddeus said. “I do not offer you romance or tender feeling or any of the things that women are told to expect from marriage. I offer you stability. Protection. A legitimate place in my household and in Oliver’s life.” He paused, his chest tight. “I offer you the chance to stay.”
The silence stretched between them. The fire crackled in the grate. Beyond the library walls, the orchestra played on, oblivious to the lives being reshaped in this quiet room.
When Lady Maribel finally spoke, her voice was barely audible.
“You would marry me to prevent a scandal.”
“I would marry you to protect Oliver.” The admission emerged rough, unpolished. “And yes. To protect you as well, though I suspect you would rather cut out your tongue than admit you require protection.”
She drew a breath, and then another, and Thaddeus watched her reassemble herself piece by piece: the straightening of her spine, the lifting of her chin, the return of that stubborn, infuriating pride that he was beginning to admire.
“You realise,” she said, “that this is the most graceless proposal in the history of matrimony.”
“I have never claimed to possess grace.”
“Nor charm, nor warmth, nor any quality that might recommend you as a husband.”
“Indeed not.”
