Sophia cocked her head, a mischievous spark in her gray eyes. “I know what marriage is, Papa. I’m not a child.”
He wanted to argue that at eight years old, she was very much still a child, but he knew she would take it deeply in offence. Childhood sat strangely upon her these days, slipping away in one moment and returning in the next. He couldn’t help but blame himself for how quickly she’d been forced to grow up.
“I hope you will like her,” he said instead.
“I shall. You picked her.” Shrugging, she stepped back with hands on hips, looking at him critically. “That should do. Now you look handsome at last.”
The corners of his lips curled. “High praise,” he said gravely.
He did not tell her that he had notpickedMiss Fairbourne. She had simply arrived at Winchester Manor at the exact hour when his resolve was weakest. This marriage had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, led largely by need rather than desire, and the knowledge that it would be good for Sophia to have a mother figure, too.
Perhaps after he had seen Miss Fairbourne’s home conditions, he had been especially happy to provide her with a way out. Penance, in a way.
He refused to think on for what.
She slid her hand into his. “Are you ready?”
Nicholas rose and closed his fingers around hers. “Let’s go and fetch Miss Fairbourne.”
For the second time in her life, Isadora found herself processing down a church aisle. Her uncle had her arm, although she would have preferred to walk herself like the first time. But the instant she crossed the threshold, Uncle Vernon, the crowded pews, and every whisper in York slipped from importance.
The Duke stood at the altar.
He had come early.
The sight of him loosened something inside her that had been drawn painfully tight since her first wedding morning. And aside from his cravat looking a touch lopsided, he was impeccably dressed in his tailored obsidian coat. She rather suspected it was a state of his being at this point, like one might breathe or need water.
The announcement had gone out in the papers a few days ago, and everyone who was anyone in York seemed to have chosen to attend the venue.
The days leading to the date had passed in a whirl of solicitors, contracts, and guest visits. Nicholas’s man of business had spent an hour behind the study door with Uncle Vernon, after which her uncle emerged purple-faced and spoke to no one untilsupper, and her aunt had only consented to allow her to join them for dinner that evening because a seamstress had come to the house to dress Isadora, carrying silks fine enough to tempt a saint.
Ordinarily, the bride’s family paid for the bride’s clothes, but considering Isadora had turned up to the duke’s house in his late wife’s gown, she could hardly blame him for hoping to prevent that eventuality again.
In the end, however, in the privacy of her room that morning, Isadora had chosen instead to wear her mother’s old wedding dress, made up by Isadora’s own hand.
She had spent months mending the old ivory satin in secret after having Unity send it over, strengthening seams worn fragile with age and lifting the lace from the brown box that still carried the faintest breath of her mother’s citrus. The dress may be old-fashioned. But at least it belonged to her.
As she walked up the aisle, step by precious step, she felt the duke’s gaze on her and wondered if he would be angry that she had shunned his gift. No doubt it had been expensive.
But when she reached him, feeling out of place in this old gown beside his new, fashionable clothes, he took her hand and squeezed it briefly.
“No need to look as though I’m shackling you to a life of misery,” he murmured under his breath.
She glanced at the rector, the same kindly old man who had failed to marry her to Mr. Windham. He beamed at her, not seeming at all concerned by the fact that she was attending her second wedding in two weeks. “You dressed it up well enough for me to ever think it, Your Grace.”
He shrugged a single shoulder. “I suppose I did. We are marrying. Call me Nicholas.”
“Nicholas.” She tasted the word on her tongue, and to her surprise, a shiver ran through her. How intimate it was to say another man’s Christian name. Not having a brother, she had scarcely taken such liberties with other gentlemen.
And the way he looked at her now, as though the gown had slipped his notice altogether, or mattered nothing against the woman inside it. For a moment his composure thinned, and she glimpsed the man beneath it—startling in eyes the cold blue of a January morning. It kindled something under her ribs that had never been lit, and the warmth of it spread all the way down.
The ceremony passed in a blur of judgmental faces and her own scattered thoughts.Married. The start of my very own life.The words refused to attach themselves to anything real, so instead she anchored herself to her husband, who stood beside her, solid as the church stones. Nothing at all like the flighty Mr. Windham.
When the moment came for the ring, he lifted her bare hand in his gloved one. It was not customary for a gentleman to receive aring, nor to remove his gloves, yet she found herself wishing for his bare skin against hers all the same.
Intimacy. Now, there was a side of marriage she had not permitted herself to consider too closely. He had never spoken a word of it, but then, would a gentleman raise such indelicate matters with a lady before their wedding? Perhaps that conversation came after.
“I now pronounce you husband and wife,” announced the rector, and she turned to Nicholas in time to catch his gaze dip to her lips.
