“I did nothing wrong.” Her voice was steady and absolutely certain.
Beneath the anger, there was something rawer that he recognized, not because he had heard it before, but because he understood it—the sound of someone who had been punished for the right choice and could not make it make sense.
“I did nothing wrong, and I am the one who will suffer for it, and you walk in here as though you are doing me a considerable favor by–”
“You’re right,” he interrupted.
He had not planned to say it quite like that, but it was true, and she deserved the acknowledgment. Besides, the only thing that was going to stop her was the unexpected.
“You did nothing wrong. You are entirely correct. If anyone ought to suffer the consequences of that morning, it should be me, and in a just world, it would be.” He held her gaze. “Unfortunately, we do not live in a just world. We live amid London society, which operates on entirely different principles, and according to them, the consequences of that morning will fall on you regardless of how blameless your conduct was. I will not stand by and allow that.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly. Still angry, but listening.
“I have two younger sisters,” he continued. “Sixteen and fourteen. I have spent the better part of a decade ensuring that their names remained untouched by the particular kind of talk that follows women for the rest of their lives.” He paused. “I know what it costs. I know how quickly it spreads, how little ittakes to start, and how much harder it is to stop once it has gathered speed. I will not pretend I don’t know, and I will not pretend that I don’t understand exactly what the next month will look like for you if this is not resolved.”
Her expression shifted. Not softened—Cecily Moreland did not seem to be a woman who softened quickly or without reason—but the razor edge changed slightly, became something more complicated.
“I don’t know another way to protect you,” William said. “I’ve looked for one. There isn’t one.”
She said nothing. Her chin was still lifted, and her shoulders were still set, but the silence was different from the one before.
The room was quiet. Her mother and her sister had, with considerable wisdom, decided to become part of the furniture.
William stood where he was and looked at her.
She was not what he had expected. He had expected her to be frightened, or calculating, or one of the wide varieties of performance that women deployed in difficult drawing rooms. Instead, she was simply present. Entirely herself, red-eyed and furious and achingly honest, looking back at him with the directness of someone who had decided that pretence was more trouble than it was worth.
He thought of the shore. The pale early light. Her face so close to his, the stillness of the moment before everything had shattered, and the way she had looked at him then—startled but not afraid, which had struck him even through the fog of the pain.
He remembered thinking, in the vague way of a man whose head was splitting and whose judgment was operating at reduced capacity, that she had the most honest eyes he had ever seen.
He had been right about that, at least. He was still thinking it now, with his head perfectly clear and no excuse available.
He became aware that he had been looking at her for slightly longer than the conversation strictly required and that the room had taken on the specific silence that meant other people were noticing things he would prefer they didn’t notice.
He became aware, a fraction of a second later, that she had not looked away either, that her chin had dropped slightly, and that the color that had risen in her face was no longer entirely attributable to anger.
He straightened, pulling himself back into the shape of the conversation.
“You have two choices.” His voice came out steady, which he appreciated. “You become my wife, and in a fortnight, this is nothing more than a rather interesting story about how the Duke of Blackmoor met his Duchess on a Brighton shore at dawn. Or you decline, I leave, and by the end of the week, your name is inevery paper in England, and every door in London closes, and there is nothing I or anyone else can do to stop it.”
Cecily looked at him for a long moment. Her jaw was set. Her eyes were very bright.
“I am not threatening you,” he clarified, before she could speak. “I am telling you the truth, because I think you are a woman who would rather have the truth than a comfortable version of it.”
She was working through the full architecture of her objection—he could almost see it, that precise and principled mind of hers turning over every angle, looking for the exit he already knew wasn’t there.
He waited.
CHAPTER 5
She asked for it before she had entirely decided why.
“I would like to speak with the Duke alone, please.”
The words were out, and the room reacted immediately and exactly as expected. Her mother’s expression shifted into something cautiously hopeful.
Beatrice, who had been sitting with the patient watchfulness of someone awaiting developments, straightened at once.
