"Would you prefer 'detonated'? Because that is closer to the truth. Your letters detonated every careful wall I had built around my heart. They destroyed years of carefully cultivated indifference. They made it impossible for me to continue pretending that I did not want you more than I have ever wanted anything in my life."
"You are being dramatic."
"I am being honest. There is a difference." He released her hands and stepped back, creating a small distance between them. "Now. We have established that I read your letters, that I used them shamelessly to pursue you, and that I intend to make you my wife at the earliest opportunity. Is there anything else you wish to discuss?"
"I…" She paused, considering. "What happens now?"
"Now we return to civilisation. I shall call on your father this afternoon and request permission to court you formally. Your mother will be delighted as she has been throwing eligible young ladies at my head for years, but I suspect she always hoped I would choose you. Edward already knows, so that particular conversation is mercifully behind us. And then…" He smiled."Then I shall court you properly. With flowers and poetry and all the romantic gestures you wrote about wanting."
"You do not have to…"
"I want to." His voice was firm. "You deserve to be courted, Vanessa. You deserve grand gestures and passionate declarations and everything those letters dreamed of. I may have had an unfair advantage in knowing your feelings, but I intend to earn them regardless. I intend to make you fall in love with me all over again, without the aid of stolen words."
"I never stopped holding you in my affections.”
"Then I intend to make you fall deeper." He offered her his hand, a formal gesture, almost courtly. "Shall we? Your father awaits, and I find I am eager to begin the rest of our lives."
She took his hand. "You are very confident that he will say yes."
"I am a duke. I am obscenely wealthy. I have excellent teeth and tolerable manners when I choose to employ them. Why would he say no?"
"Because you are insufferable?"
"That has never stopped anyone before." He tucked her hand into the crook of his arm and began leading her toward the front of the shop. "Besides, if he refuses, I shall simply elope with you. I understand Gretna Green is lovely this time of year."
"Martin!"
"What? I told you I was persistent." He paused at the end of the aisle, turning to look at her with an expression that made her heart skip. "I have waited six years for you, Vanessa. I am not about to let a little thing like parental disapproval stand in my way."
"That is not romantic. That is alarming."
"The two are often indistinguishable." He pressed a quick kiss to her forehead…swift, almost chaste, but it sent warmthflooding through her entire body. "Come. Let us go face our future. I find I am rather looking forward to it."
They emerged from the alcove together, hand in hand. Mr. Haberton looked up from his ledger, took in their linked fingers and flushed faces, and smiled with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had seen a great deal of human drama play out among his shelves.
"Found what you were looking for, I take it?"
"Yes," Martin said. "I rather think I did."
***
The carriage ride to the Wayworth townhouse was brief but significant.
Martin had insisted on escorting her home had, in fact, refused to hear any argument to the contrary. His own carriage had been waiting outside the bookshop, his driver unsurprised by the addition of a female passenger. Vanessa suspected this was not the first time Martin had collected a young lady in his carriage, but she found she did not care. Whatever his past, his future was hers.
"You are quiet," he observed, as the carriage rattled through the streets of Mayfair.
"I am thinking."
"About?"
"About how strange this all is." She turned to look at him, taking in the familiar lines of his face, the grey eyes that had haunted her dreams for years. "Yesterday morning, I woke up convinced that my life was over. That the letters had ruined everything. And now…"
"And now?"
"Now I am sitting in a carriage with the Duke of Montehood, who has just declared his intention to enter into matrimony with me." She shook her head slowly. "It does not seem real."
"It is real." He reached for her hand, lacing his fingers through hers. "More real than anything I have ever experienced."
