She Gave a Lost Stranger a Ride Home—Hours Later, the Duke Knocked on Her Door

Chapter 14

“I was not raised to inherit,” Rowan said, to the fire.

He said it into the hearth rather than to her, which she understood — it is easier to say the difficult true thing to a fire.

“My brother James was the heir. He was extraordinarily well suited to it. Sociable. Politically engaged. Entirely at ease in the sort of drawing room that I find unbearable.”

A pause.

“He died of a fever eighteen months ago. Very suddenly. In a week — an entire life.”

He turned the cup in his hands.

“I was in Edinburgh, managing a property dispute. I came south to a title, a household that had been systematically stripped by the people I had trusted to maintain it, and a county full of neighbours who expected me to perform a version of aristocracy that James had mastered and I have never understood.”

“And an estate manager who was stealing from you,” Nell said.

“Yes. And an estate manager who was stealing from me.” He turned and looked at her. “And then there was the rain.”

She looked at her cup.

“You were not hiding who you were,” she said slowly. “That first night. You were testing whether it would change anything.”

He was very still.

“Yes.”

“And does it?”

“The title,” he said, “does not make me a different man than the one who fell in a ditch and was driven home by a woman who spoke about the rain as though it were reasonable company. But it changes what everybody else sees when they look at me.”

He paused.

“You see the same thing you saw that night. I do not entirely know what to do with that.”

Nell set her cup down on the tray.

She looked at the fire for a long quiet moment. She thought about eighteen years old and no money, and the choice between two kinds of invisibility. She thought about the satisfaction of a correctly balanced ledger, and the specific physical pleasure of a chimney drawing cleanly for the first time in years. She thought about a cart road in the rain, and the particular unexpected comfort of a silence shared with a stranger.

“Rowan,” she said.

She said his name plainly, the way he had given it to her, in the rain, at a gate, with no title attached to it.

“I am your housekeeper.”

“You are,” he agreed. “And I find it increasingly difficult to pretend that that is the only relevant thing in this room.”

She looked at him. The hard, careful, tired man who had laughed in her kitchen at a watercolour of his own gates. Who had burned Lady Thornbury’s letter in an ink tray as though it were the obvious and only possible response. Who said everything he meant, and nothing that he did not.

“I am not a romantic proposition,” Nell said. “I am practical, and I am capable, and those are the things I have always been. I am not going to pretend otherwise to make a situation easier to navigate.”

“I know,” he said. “So am I.”

He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.

“I am not asking for a performance. I am asking whether what I believe is occurring between us is actually occurring.”

It was the plainest possible way of saying a very complicated thing. She could have deflected. She was accomplished at deflecting. She had been deflecting since the world informed her, at eighteen, that her options were narrow and that she should be grateful for what she had.

“Yes,” she said. “It is actually occurring.”

Rowan exhaled a long, slow breath. He set his cup down.

“Then I need to say something, and I need to say it plainly, because I am not capable of saying it any other way.”

He held her gaze.

“I want to ask you to marry me. I have wanted to for three weeks, and I have been trying to find a version of the asking that does not sound like an employer making a transaction.” A pause. “I have not found one. So I am going to say it, and you will do with it whatever you think is right.”

Nell looked at him across the library. Across the firelight, and the tea tray, and six weeks of ledgers and guttering and burnt watercolours.

“You pulled me out of that ditch,” she said, because she needed a moment, and that was the truest thing she could think of.

“You pulled me out of the ditch,” he corrected. “I have been trying to work out the appropriate proportionate response ever since.”

She looked at the fire.

She thought about the word invisible, and how long she had applied it to herself, and how it had never once felt like protection. It had always felt like a wound she had learned not to touch.

She thought about Mrs. Tandy’s face when Rowan laughed in the kitchen. About Craddock crying at the church at Christmas over a carol. About a cup of dark tea placed at an elbow on a dark night without a word of performance.

She stood up. She walked to the window and looked out at the snow coming down soft and absolute, covering the moors in something clean.

Then she turned around.