“I want to ask you something,” he began. “And I need you to understand that I am asking because I want you to have a choice. Not because I have doubts.” He paused. “That is important. I want that stated clearly at the outset.”
Megan watched him. There was something very serious in his face. “All right.”
“When we agreed, that is when I asked you to marry me, and you said yes—” He exhaled slowly. “That was in different circumstances. You were in danger. You were dependent on me in a way that I hope very much you are no longer, and I want to make certain that what you said then was not colored by that.”
She was quiet. The warmth that had carried her down the staircase began, slowly, to cool.
“You have choices now,” he continued. “You have your family. You have your mother, and your brother, and your father’s name and title, which is no small thing. You could have a season.” He said the word as though he had carefully rehearsed it. “You could meet other men. Men who have not dragged you through a Welsh forest or held you at gunpoint or?—”
“You never held me at gunpoint,” she said carefully.
“The principle stands.” His jaw was tight. “You deserve to make this choice from a position of freedom, not necessity. So I am asking you now, when you have everything, you need regardless of your answer, do you still want to marry me?”
Megan stared at him.
She understood, in the part of her mind that was working clearly, that he believed himself to be giving her something. That he thought this speech was generous. But what she heard, underneath the careful construction of it, was a man building himself a door. Giving himself a dignified means of exit while appearing to hand her the key.
“I see,” she said.
Something flickered across his face. “Megan?—”
“You want to be certain I’m not marrying you out of desperation.”She kept her voice very steady. “That I haven’t mistaken gratitude for something else.”
“That is not what I said.”
“It is very much what you said.”
“I said you deserve a choice.”
“You said I should meet other men.”
A muscle moved in his jaw. “Because you should be able to if you want to. You’ve never had that opportunity.”
“I don’t want other men.” She turned slightly toward the window. The back of her throat had gone tight in a way she absolutely refused to give in to. “But I think I understand what you are telling me. That you feel the circumstances of how we met perhaps bound you to an offer you might not otherwise have made, and you are finding a gracious way to?—”
“That is not—” He stopped. Then, with considerable feeling: “Good God, is that what you think this is?”
She didn’t answer, which was an answer in itself.
She heard him move. Then she heard something she had never heard before. The unmistakable sound of Oliver Sommerset, Marquess of Astor, hitting the floor.
She turned.
He was on his knees.
Not in the vaguely romantic attitude of a man staging a proposal. He was on both knees on the sitting room rug, looking up at her with an expression so entirely stripped of its usual composure that it might have been someone else’s face entirely. He looked, she thought with a sudden fierce ache behind her sternum, as frightened as she had ever felt.
“I am not finding a gracious exit,” he said. His voice had gone rough. “I am terrified that I asked you in a moment of danger and that when the danger passed you would realize you had agreed to spend your life with a man who is admittedly not easy to live with, who does not say the right things, who—” He stopped. Swallowed. “I am trying to give you a way outbecause I am not at all certain I deserve you. That is the truth of it.”
Megan looked at him for a long moment. Her throat was still tight, but for an entirely different reason.
“You absolute fool,” she said softly.
He let out a breath.
She crossed to him and he reached into his breast pocket, his hands not quite steady, and produced a ring. It was old, she could see that immediately, the gold darkened with age and the setting elaborate in a style from an earlier era, a deep green stone surrounded by a cluster of small diamonds that caught the candlelight in the small room.
“It was my mother’s,” he said quietly. “Her betrothal ring. It has been in the family for three generations.” He held it up to her with the studied steadiness of a man willing himself not to fumble it. “I have been carrying it for two days and I have not managed to give it to you because I kept talking myself out of it, which in hindsight was considerably more foolish than anything I said just now.”
