“I appreciate directness, Your Grace.”
“Good.” He paused, and something flickered across his expression—hesitation, perhaps, or discomfort. It vanished before she could name it. “I require a wife.”
Eleanor blinked.
Of all the openings she might have anticipated, that had not been among them.
“I… see,” she managed.
“The requirement is legal rather than personal,” he continued, as though he were discussing crop yields or tenant disputes rather than matrimony. “My father’s will contains a clause stipulating that I must marry before my thirty-fifth birthday or forfeit a significant portion of the estate. I am four-and-thirty. My birthday is in eleven months.”
“That is… an unusual clause.”
“My father was an unusual man.” The words were flat, devoid of affection. “He anticipated, correctly, that I would resist marriage. He merely ensured that resistance would prove costly.”
Eleanor found herself oddly grateful for his bluntness. It was clarifying in a way social niceties rarely were. He was not here to court her. He was not here because their earlier conversation had moved him, or because he had perceived in her something others had missed. He was here because he required a wife, and she was… what? Convenient? Available?
Desperate enough, her mind supplied.A woman in your position.
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked carefully.
“Because I am proposing to you.”
The words fell like stones dropped into still water. Eleanor felt the ripples spread through her—shock, confusion, and beneath them both, something perilously close to hope, which she crushed at once.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I am proposing marriage,” he repeated, as though she had simply failed to hear him the first time. “I have observed you over the course of this evening. You are intelligent, composed, and evidently accustomed to managing difficult situations. You do not appear to require excessive conversation or social performance. You are—” He paused, and again that flicker of something crossed his face. “You are practical.”
Practical.
Eleanor very nearly laughed. But the sound caught in her throat, tangled among too many conflicting emotions to emerge cleanly.
“Your Grace,” she said, when she trusted her voice, “we have been acquainted for approximately three hours. You cannot possibly—”
“I can, and I am.” He took a step forward, then appeared to reconsider and halted. “I am not proposing a love match, Miss Finch. I am not capable of offering romance or… sentiment. What I offer is a practical arrangement. Financial security. Independence within the marriage. A household to manage, if that appeals to you. And my word that I will never make demands you are unwilling to meet.”
The fire crackled in the silence that followed. Eleanor could hear her own breathing, too loud in the quiet room, and she concentrated upon steadying it.
He is offering security, she told herself.He is offering a home. He is offering everything you have spent the past seven years pretending you did not want.
And he is offering it because you are practical. Because you are useful. Because you will not expect anything more.
The realisation ought to have wounded. Perhaps it did, somewhere beneath the numbness spreading through her chest. But Eleanor had spent too many years armouring herself against disappointment to allow it to show.
“What are the expectations?” she heard herself ask. “Specifically.”
Something shifted in his expression—surprise, perhaps, that she had not refused outright. “You would manage the household. Handle correspondence and accounts, should you wish, though staff exist for such purposes. Appear with me at social functions when absolutely necessary, though I avoid them whenever possible.”
“And heirs?”
The question emerged steadier than she felt. It was the question a practical woman would ask—the question that must be asked, given the nature of his proposal.
“Eventually, yes. The estate requires an heir.” His jaw tightened, almost imperceptibly. “I would not… I understand that such matters require consideration. I would not rush you, or press you beyond what you were willing to offer.”
What you were willing to offer.
As though she would be granting him a favour. As though her participation in the most intimate aspect of marriage were a concession rather than a requirement.
