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He turned his hand over and gripped hers, hard, once. Then the carriage stopped, and he let go, and put on his hat.

St. Anselm’s was a small gray chapel with a leaded window and a yew tree in the yard, and it held, that morning, no more than a dozen people.

She had known it would be thin. She had not expected the quiet. It came over her like a cool hand as she stepped out of the light of the porch. There were her mother and her brother in the front pew, her mother already dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief and her brother, who had come up from Newmarket in a state of the most profound bewilderment, looking as though he expected to be asked for his opinion. There was Augusta, in a very fetching shade of green, who lifted one gloved hand and mouthed something that looked encouragingly like breathe. There were three of the Duke’s elderly cousins, and a portly gentleman in a purple waistcoat who was, she was fairly sure, the Archbishop’s man, and no one else.

And at the far end of the aisle, beneath the little window, stood Gregory.

He wore a coat of dark blue that made his shoulders look as though they had been built to hold up the chapel. His hair had been brushed, and had already begun to rebel. And beside him, in gray, with the resigned expression of a man who has been told to stand still and has decided that the least he can do is do it well, stood the Duke of Ravenhill.

It was, of course, absurd.

The peculiarity of it did not escape her. She had very nearly married the man at one side of that altar, and she was now walking toward the man on the other, and both of them were watching her come. Ronan’s face was so carefully blank that it was practically a smile. She thought that if she looked at him she would laugh. She thought that if she began to laugh she would never stop.

So she did not look at Ronan. She looked at Gregory.

He had turned. She had not seen him do it. He was simply facing her, the way one faces a door that has opened, and every line of him had gone still. The look on his face was not polished. It was not charming, or teasing, or dry. It was the look of a man who had been carrying something a very long way and had put it down for a moment to see what it was.

He smiled. It was small, and a little unsteady, and entirely for her.

She hitched, for perhaps half a pace, as though the floor had shifted, and her father’s arm tightened under her hand, and she caught it at once and went on. Nobody noticed. Nobody but the two of them, and her father, and God.

This is my choice, she told herself.

She said it to the beat of her steps, to the slow tread of the organ, to the small scrape of her own slippers on the stone.

This is my choice. This is my choice.

A marriage of convenience, for the sake of the children. She was giving away her life, again, exactly as she had once sworn she never would. But it was not the same. It was not for the sake of a title, or a settlement, or a guest list, or because someone had told her what a good girl ought to do. She was doing it because it was worth it. Because a small brown-haired boy would wake up tomorrow with a mother in the house, and forty-three children in a leaking building would have a roof, and she had looked at every side of the matter with her eyes open, and this was where she had come out.

She reached the front of the church.

Her father put her hand into Gregory’s. He did it slowly, with a look that said a great deal, and Gregory took it and bowed his head to the older man very slightly, and something passed between them that she did not understand and did not need to. Then her father stepped back into the pew beside her mother, and it was only the two of them, and the parson clearing his throat.

Gregory’s hand was warm. She could feel the pulse in his wrist. It was going every bit as fast as her own.

Well, she thought, with a strange, light clarity. At least we are neither of us calm.

“Dearly beloved,” said the parson, and the chapel fell perfectly still.

There was no going back now.

She found, to her considerable surprise, that she did not want to.

CHAPTER 10

“Daydreaming, Your Grace?”

Mrs. Glenn said it without any particular reproof, the way she might have observed that it looked like rain, and set a fresh pot of tea at Phillipa’s elbow before she had entirely noticed the housekeeper had entered the small parlor at all.

“Forgive me.” Phillipa looked down at the household ledger open before her, at a column of figures she had been staring at for some minutes without adding a single one of them. “I was only thinking.”

“About the wedding breakfast, I expect.”

“Was it so obvious?”

“I could tell, yes.”

It had been a fortnight, and Phillipa still had not finished turning it over.