“Your reputation is safe with me.”
He turned then, catching her hands in his. “Is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You are dangerous, Celine.” His thumb brushed her knuckles, almost absently. “You make me want things I have trained myself not to need. You make me imagine possibilities I have deliberately excluded.”
“Such as?”
“Such as happiness. Companionship. A marriage that amounts to more than a ledger entry.”
“They sound like very reasonable desires.”
“Good things are the most perilous of all,” he said quietly. “They render one vulnerable. They give others power.”
“Or they give you something worth defending that is not merely survival.” She held his gaze. “There is strength in that as well.”
He studied her for a long moment, then lifted her hands to his lips and kissed each palm in turn, slowly, deliberately. “You almost make me believe that.”
“Give me time,” she said softly. “I shall make you certain of it.”
“Twenty-six days?”
“Or a lifetime. Whichever you decide to be generous with.”
Something flickered in his expression—surprise, perhaps, or hope, or the wary recognition of both. Before he could reply, Morrison appeared in the doorway.
“Dinner is served, Your Grace, my lady.”
“Thank you, Morrison,” the Duke said, releasing her hands. “Shall we, wife?”
“Lead the way, husband.”
Dinner was different that night. They still occupied opposite ends of the long table, but the distance felt less like exile and more like space in which to breathe. They spoke of books, of the accounts she had reviewed, of improvements he contemplatedfor the estate. It might almost have been an ordinary dinner between an ordinary husband and wife—if one disregarded the awareness that sparked each time their eyes met.
After dinner, they withdrew to the blue drawing room—his mother’s room—where a fire glowed against the evening chill. Celine took up her long-neglected embroidery (a sampler which stubbornly refused to improve), while he opened what appeared to be a treatise on agricultural innovation.
It was… peaceful. Companionable. The soft crackle of the fire, the whisper of turning pages, the occasional clink of embroidery scissors—it all wove together into a quiet that felt startlingly right. This, she thought, might be what marriage was meant to contain as well: not constant drama, but shared space. A presence one did not have to fill with words.
“You are staring,” he said after a while, without looking up.
“I am thinking.”
“About?”
“How very unlike my expectations you have turned out to be.”
“Better or worse?” He kept his eyes on the page, but she heard the genuine curiosity.
“More,” she said after a moment. “More complex. More interesting. More…” She hesitated, searching. “More possible.”
He did look up then. “Possible?”
“When I signed that contract, I believed I was binding myself to a marble statue. Cold, perfect, impervious.” She laid the embroidery in her lap. “But you are not marble. You are flesh and blood and temper and a thousand contradictions, held together by will and properly tied cravats.”
“My cravats are unimpeachable.”
“Your humanity is more so.”
