Yes, whispered a voice in the back of her mind.It's completely different, and you know it.
Davies was cold, calculating, a man who saw her as nothing more than a means to an end. Sebastian was... something else entirely. Something she had spent seven years refusing to acknowledge, and was only now beginning to understand.
He had kept her poetry. He had spent hours searching through dusty documents to find something that might save her family. He had stood in a corridor and offered her marriage not because he wanted something from her, but because he wanted to help.
And last night, in the stable, he had said...
I did not refuse to buy you just to watch you sell yourself to someone else.
What had he meant by that? What feelings was he hiding behind his careful mask of duty and obligation?
It didn't matter, Harriet told herself firmly. Whatever Sebastian felt or didn't feel was irrelevant. This was a practical decision, nothing more. A solution to an impossible problem.
But if that was true, why did her heart race every time she thought of saying yes?
***
She found him in the library, of course.
It was nearly midnight, and the house had long since fallen silent. Harriet had left Mary to sit with her mother and crept downstairs, drawn by some instinct she didn't want to examine too closely. She knew she would find Sebastian here, in this room that had become their unofficial meeting place. She knew, and she came anyway.
He was standing by the window, staring out at the darkened gardens. He didn't turn when she entered, but she saw his shoulders tense slightly, as though he had been expecting her.
"You should be sleeping," he said.
"So should you."
"I don't sleep well. You know that."
"Neither do I, lately." Harriet moved further into the room, stopping near the fireplace where the embers still glowed faintly. "We seem to have that in common."
"We seem to have quite a few things in common." Sebastian finally turned to face her. In the dim light, his features were all sharp angles and shadows, his grey eyes gleaming like pewter. "Have you come to give me your answer?"
"I've come to ask you something first."
"Ask, then."
Harriet took a breath, steadying herself. "This afternoon, when you proposed, you said you weren't asking me to love you. You said we could maintain separate lives, separate households.You made it sound as though you expected nothing from me at all."
"That's correct."
"Why?"
Sebastian's brow furrowed. "I'm not sure I understand the question."
"Why would you offer to enter into matrimony with a woman who gives you nothing in return? Why would you shackle yourself to someone who, by your own admission, doesn’t love you and never will? What possible benefit could there be for you in such an arrangement?"
For a long moment, Sebastian said nothing. He stood by the window, his expression unreadable, and Harriet had the sense that he was wrestling with something, some truth he wasn't sure he wanted to reveal.
"Perhaps," he said finally, "I don't require benefits. Perhaps I simply want to help."
"No one is that selfless."
"You'd be surprised."
"Sebastian." Harriet crossed the room toward him, stopping just out of arm's reach. "I need the truth. I need to understand what I'm agreeing to. Because right now, this feels like charity, and I don't…" She stopped, struggling for words. "I don't want to be your charity case. I don't want to spend the rest of my life knowing that you wedded me out of pity."
"It's not pity."
