He paused at the door.
“Why me?” The question emerged before she could consider whether she wished to hear the answer. “There are a dozen women here this evening who would accept your proposal. Women with dowries. With connections. With—”Beauty, she did not say, but the word lingered between them nonetheless. “Why choose me?”
He remained silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was quieter than before—almost, she thought, uncertain.
“Because you quoted Dante when they asked for romance,” he said. “Because you did not flinch when they called it a parlour trick. Because when I asked whether usefulness had comforts, you told me it was the only answer you possessed.” He paused. “And because when you looked at me, you did not look away.”
Eleanor’s breath caught.
“Those are not practical reasons,” she whispered.
“No,” he agreed. “They are not.”
And then he was gone, the door closing softly behind him, and Eleanor was left alone with the dying fire and the echo of words she did not yet know how to interpret.
***
She did not sleep that night.
She lay in her narrow guest bed, staring at the ceiling, and catalogued every moment of their conversation with the precision of a scholar dissecting a text.
He chose me because I did not look away.
The words circled in her mind, refusing to settle into meaning. She had not looked away because… because looking away would have been discourteous. Because his scars were simply scars, not curses or contagions. Because she had spent her entire life being overlooked, and she knew—knew in her bones—how it felt to be the thing people avoided seeing.
She had not looked away because it had never occurred to her that she should.
Was that remarkable?she wondered.Was that worthy of a proposal?
Or was she reading too much into a practical man’s practical reasoning? Perhaps ‘you did not look away’merely meant ‘you were not visibly repulsed, and that is sufficient’.Perhaps the poetry and the drawing-room performances were simply evidence that she was the sort of woman who would endure her circumstances without complaint.
Endure.
The word from her mother’s fate. The word that meant tolerating without joy, surviving without thriving.
Is that what he is offering? Is that what I have accepted?
Eleanor pressed her palms against her eyes until colours bloomed in the darkness.
She had accepted a proposal from a man she scarcely knew, on the strength of a five-minute conversation and a litany of practical considerations. She had committed herself to a marriage without love, a household without warmth, a life defined by the absence of expectation.
It was, she supposed, no worse than what she possessed already. And in many respects, considerably better.
But somewhere beneath her careful reasoning, beneath the armour she had spent years constructing, something ached. Something wanted—foolishly, impossibly—to be more than practical. To be chosen for reasons that had nothing to do with usefulness or composure or the ability to withstand casual cruelty without flinching.
Because when you looked at me, you did not look away.
She turned the words over in her mind, searching for hidden meaning, for subtext she might have overlooked.
And despite everything she knew—despite every lesson Edmund Hale had taught her about the dangers of hope—she found herself wondering whether the Duke of Thornwood might have meant something more than he had said.
***
Benjamin stood at the window of his own guest chamber, watching the moon rise above Lady Rutledge’s immaculategardens, and attempted to persuade himself that he had done the right thing.
Miss Finch had accepted. The marriage would proceed. The legal requirement would be satisfied, and the estate would remain intact.
Business concluded,he thought.Duty fulfilled.
