Page 19 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

The question arrived unbidden and unwelcome, exactly as it had arrived at intervals over the last week.

A marriage built on convenience, on a written agreement rather than any courtship a man might recognize. I know she is the best chance Kit has, but I do not know that either of us fully understands what we are binding ourselves to.

He had repeatedly told himself that it did not matter. That the marriage required no more than what was written on the document they had both signed—protection for Eleanor, assistance for Kit, mutual respect standing in for whatever else other marriages were built upon. He had told himself this so many times in the last week that he had very nearly believed it.

The organ began.

The doors at the rear of the church opened, and every head turned. Julian, despite his composure, turned with them.

Louisa walked toward him on her father’s arm, and every carefully ordered thought in Julian’s head simply scattered.

She wore ivory, simple, unadorned but for a scattering of small pearls on the bodice, her dark auburn hair dressed high beneath a short veil that did nothing to obscure her face. She walked the length of the aisle with the same unhurried composure she had walked into his study, chin level, gaze steady, meeting the eyes of everyone she passed as though this were the most natural thing in the world rather than a marriage negotiated across a desk in the space of one conversation.

She is not what I expected.

Julian watched her come and knew distantly that he had thought some version of that same sentence every time he had seen her, and had not yet managed to arrive at a conclusion that satisfied him.

Lord Henswick delivered her to the altar with a final, lingering press of his hand over hers and stepped back. Then she was there, close enough that Julian could see the faint flush on her cheekbones, the only visible sign that she felt anything at all about the moment.

“You look as though you have seen a ghost, Your Grace,” she murmured, too quiet for anyone but him to hear.

“You look considerably better than that,” he murmured back, and watched with satisfaction as the flush deepened.

The vicar began.

Julian had attended enough weddings to know the words by rote. He had expected to hear them today the way he heard most ceremony—present but somehow distant, saying the right words at the right intervals while his mind ran ahead to Kit, to the household, to the thousand practical arrangements still requiring his attention. Instead, he found himself properly listening to every word as though he had never heard them before.

“Do you, Julian Alexander Cavendish, take this woman⁠—”

“I do.”

His voice sounded steadier than he felt. He had not expected the words to cost him anything. He had rehearsed them the previous night with the same detachment he brought to reviewing a contract, certain they would land the same way when spoken aloud, two sentences signifying an arrangement rather than any deeper commitment.

They did not hit that way. They hit him, instead, with a weight he had not anticipated, settling somewhere beneath his ribs he had not known was waiting for them.

“And do you, Louisa Anne Everly, take this man⁠—”

“I do.”

Her voice did not waver either. She spoke the words the same way she said everything, plain and certain.

Julian found himself watching her mouth form the words rather than listening to them, some part of him tracing the details he had not allowed himself to notice before now—the steadiness of her breath, the steady way her eyes held his and did not once drop away, even as the whole church watched.

“The ring, Your Grace.”

Julian took Louisa’s hand. Her fingers were cool, slightly trembling despite her composure, and he steadied them with his own before sliding the ring onto her finger, feeling the small catch of her breath as he did.

“With this ring,” he said solemnly, “I thee wed.”

Julian, standing at the altar of a church with thirty witnesses to a marriage he had entered for the most practical reasons a man could name, found himself entirely, inconveniently incapable of remembering a single one of those reasons.

This is a practical marriage, he told himself, the thought arriving with considerably less conviction than it had when she sat in his study. Nothing about this moment need be anything more than what we agreed to on paper.

Nothing about the moment felt practical at all.

“You may kiss your bride, Your Grace.”

Julian felt Louisa’s hand tense slightly in his and understood in that instant precisely what she expected to happen next, and precisely why some contrary instinct in him refused to let it.