Page 7 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

“Marriage was never my intention.” Even as he said it, he heard how thin the objection sounded held up against everything she had just laid out for him. “I have no wish for a wife, Lady Louisa. I have managed my household, my estates, and my ward without one for three years, and I do not require a marriage to manage them a fourth.”

“You have managed your ward for three years without reaching him even once,” Louisa said, not unkindly, though the words hit their mark regardless. “I do not say that to wound you, Your Grace. I say it because it is the reason I am sitting in this study at all. Whatever you have managed thus far has not been enough, or you would not have written to a stranger asking whether she might succeed where every tutor and physician in London has failed.”

He had no answer for that. It was, infuriatingly, true.

“You assume a great deal,” he said finally, “for a woman I met a quarter of an hour ago.”

“I assume only what your own letter told me, Your Grace. You would not have written to a stranger about your ward’s silence if pride still had any say in the matter. Pride lost that argument some time before I ever received your letter. I am merely the first person willing to say so to your face.”

Something flickered across his expression, gone before she could see it. “You are remarkably comfortable informing a duke of his failures.”

“I am remarkably comfortable informing anyone of anything, Your Grace. It is, I am told, one of my less attractive qualities.” A faint, dry note entered her voice. “I have found it useful regardless.”

“Employment solves one problem,” she went on. “It gives you a woman under your roof who might reach Kit, provided Society does not ask too many questions about her presence there, and provided I am willing to abandon the child I have sworn to protect for the length of my working hours. Marriage solves both. It gives Eleanor a name and a family that cannot be questioned. It gives Kit someone permanent, someone who is not merely paid to stay until the position grows tiresome, but who has bound herself to this household as thoroughly as you have. I do not offer it because I imagine myself in love with you, Your Grace. I have known you the better part of quarter an hour. I offer it because I have looked at the shape of my own problem and the shape of yours, and I find they fit together rather more neatly than either of us might prefer to admit.”

Julian studied her in the lengthening silence that followed, and found himself, for the first time in longer than he cared to examine, entirely without his usual certainty.

She was not what he had expected. He had pictured, if he had pictured anything at all, an earnest young woman grateful for the chance to be useful, perhaps a little overawed by the house, the title, the size of the request being made of her.

Instead, he had gotten a woman who sat across his desk and dismantled his careful solution in four sentences, who spoke of an infant not her own with the same fierce, unshakable loyalty most people reserved for blood, and who had somewhere in the last ten minutes made him feel less like a duke conducting an interview and more like a man being quietly, competently outmaneuvered.

He did not enjoy the sensation. He was somewhat alarmed to find he did not entirely dislike it either.

“You have thought this through with a great deal more thoroughness than most brides-to-be bring to a proposal of their own making,” he remarked.

“I have had two days to think of very little else, Your Grace. I did not arrive here on impulse. I arrived because I had already turned over every other possibility and found each of them wanting.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then I will go home and think of another way to keep my word to Nell, and you will go on writing to governesses who know a dozen signs and call it fluency.” Louisa’s gaze did not waver. “I did not come here to threaten you, Your Grace, only to offer you the truth of my situation and let you decide what it is worth to you.”

She is unmarried, sharp-tongued by her own admission, raising a child who is not hers by blood, and she has just proposed marriage to a man she met a quarter hour ago as though it were the most reasonable transaction in London.

And yet, turning it over, he could find no fault in her logic that did not also require him to admit his own solution had been the weaker one from the start.

“I need time to consider your proposal,” he said finally.

“Of course.” Louisa rose from her chair, smoothing her skirts with the same brisk efficiency she’d shown on arrival, betraying nothing of whatever she might have hoped to get out of this meeting. “I would think less of you, Your Grace, if you agreed to marry a stranger within the hour of meeting her. But I will tell you plainly, so there is no confusion later, that this is what I require. Not employment. Not a companion’s wage and a room in your servants’ quarters. Marriage, or nothing at all. I did not come here to negotiate myself into a smaller arrangement than the one I need.”

“I understand.”

“Good.” She dropped into a curtsy, brief and precise as the one she’d offered on arrival, and something in her eyes, some faint challenge, held his gaze a moment longer than the courtesy required. “I will await your answer, Your Grace. Whatever it may be.”

She left without waiting to be shown out.

Julian remained standing at the window long after the door had closed behind her, turning over the shape of a proposal he had not asked for and found, disquietingly, that he could not immediately think of a single good reason to refuse it.

* * *

“There you are. I have been sitting in this drawing room for three-quarters of an hour with nothing but your mother’s needlework basket for company, and I will have you know that I very nearly took up embroidery out of sheer desperation.”

Fiona Blackwood was sprawled across the settee in a manner no governess had ever quite managed to correct, one arm draped along the back cushion, her golden curls coming loose from their pins the way they always did within an hour of leaving her house, as though her hair shared her general opinion of rules.

She was, by any fair measure, extravagantly pretty, all wide blue eyes and a mouth built for mischief, and she had been Louisa’s dearest friend since the two of them were girls sneaking ratafia from a tray at their first ball and deciding on the spot that they suited each other far better than either suited polite conversation.

“You would sooner set the house on fire.”

“I considered it,” Fiona admitted, rising from the settee in a swirl of skirts. “Where on earth have you been? Your butler would tell me nothing beyond an infuriatingly serene ‘Lady Louisa had an engagement,’ which is the sort of sentence that means either something very dull or something very interesting, and I refuse to leave until I know which.”