Page 50 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“Then come and help me with this window before you kiss me, because it sticks, and a duke ought to be good for something.” She was laughing through the tears now, a sound she had nearly forgotten she owned. “I find I should like the first thing we do in this room to be a small ordinary thing done together, rather than a grand one performed at each other across the floor.”

“I am not certain I know how to do small ordinary things.”

“You will learn them. You managed the hard one, and the small ones come easier after, or so I am assured by people who began in the proper order, which neither of us did, and never mind that now. Take the left sash.”

He took the left sash. They got the old window up another inch between them, and only then, with the work done and the light pouring in, did he kiss her in the flood of it. It was not the careful, offered thing of a wedding night but a question answered fully on both sides. When she drew him down the stair to the chamber she had so lately half abandoned, it was she who closed the door, and he who, for the first time in his guarded life, let himself be freely needed within it. Neither stood across a door from the other again.

***

In the grey of the morning he was still there. She marked it before she opened her eyes, by the unfamiliar weight of a husband who had not risen at dawn to be useful elsewhere.

“Stand up with me,” he said, when he saw that she was awake. “Not behind me, and not as something I am shieldingfrom the room, and not as an ornament a duke is expected to acquire on his way up the aisle. Beside me, where I can see you and the county can see that I do. The Duchess of Carrington in the one way the title was ever worth the having, which is what you asked me for in a cold library two months ago, when I was too great a coward to give it to you. Stand beside me, Renae. I am asking you properly this time, and I find I am not afraid of the asking.”

She held his eyes a long moment, this man who had learned, very late and at great cost, the one sentence that had been wanting all along. She gave him the answer she had held ready since a pond, since a library, since the first cold morning she walked into his house and decided, against all the evidence, that it might still be warmed.

“Try and make me stand anywhere else,” she said.

Epilogue

One year later

The library at Carrington had been the coldest room in the house the first winter Renae kept it, and it was the warmest now, which she took as a fair measure of the year between. A fire she had not had to count the coal for burned steady in the grate. The water stain above the window had been mended in the spring, the shelves had their books back from the pawnbroker, and the long table that had once held nothing but a single account-book turned face down held, this morning, a stack of papers tied in pink legal tape and a solicitor who had driven a long way to untie it.

“It is done, Your Grace. Signed, witnessed, entered, and beyond your cousin’s reach or any other man’s.” Fenwick set the last of the papers across the table with the quiet satisfaction of one who had waited a year to do it. “The whole of the trust stands in your own name now. Forty thousand pounds and the interest it has gathered, held by you and answerable to no one. I have not had the pleasure of writing that sentence for a lady more than twice in thirty years of practice.”

Renae read every line before she touched the quill twice, in the slow deliberate way of a woman who had once owned nothing and had learned the cost of signing the foot of a page she had not read to the bottom. The words held. They went on holding, line after line, and somewhere about the third page the thing in her chest that had braced for a trap a whole year quietly let go of its grip.

“And the duke has no claim on it whatever,” she said. “None at all. Not the smallest portion folded quietly into the estate where it might be useful.”

“None. His Grace was most particular on the point. Insultingly particular, I might say, had I not been so relieved to write it down.”

She turned one of the pages without reading it, only to have somewhere to put her hands. “Twice in thirty years, you said. Who were the others, Mr. Fenwick, if a lady may ask?”

Fenwick gathered his case as he answered. “A widow and a spinster, Your Grace, both of whom had to outlive a houseful of men to come into what was always theirs. You are the first I have served who came into it with her husband standing in the room insisting upon it. I confess I did not know the species existed, and I am glad to have met one before I retire. I shall enjoy telling my grandchildren that I once observed a duke argue a fortune away from himself across this very table, lose the argument on purpose, and look the happier for the losing.”

“He was, was he?”

Declan stood at the window with his back to the room, and from the set of his shoulders she could tell he had heard every word and meant to pretend the lawn had taken the whole of his attention. “I was clear with Fenwick and that is all. The money is yours. It was always yours. I will not have one shilling of it crossing into Carrington and giving some future historian the idea that I wedded a fortune and dressed it as a housekeeper to disguise the theft.”

“You did rather wed a fortune.”

“I entered into a matrimony with a woman who had been robbed of one. There is a difference, and I find I mind the difference enormously.” He turned from the window at last. “You wedded me before I had handed you a penny of it back. Before you knew the trust would ever come open at all. I should like that remembered, since the account now says I gained nothing by you.”

“You wedded me before I had any of it.”

“I am aware.”

She folded the last page and set her hand flat upon it, and left it there, because the table between them was the right width for the saying of it and she had learned not to close a distance before the words were across it. “I wedded you before I understood what I had already been given. The money was always the smaller fortune, Declan. I simply could not see the larger one for the want of it. A starving woman counts the bread, and does not always see the table it is set upon, or the company at it, until she is no longer starving.”

Fenwick discovered something requiring his attention in his case, and let himself out with the soft tact of one who could tell when a room had stopped needing a solicitor in it. The door closed softly behind his retreat, and the latch slipped into its groove, and for a moment there was only the fire and the snow beginning again past the window and the two of them on either side of a table that no longer had any business between them.

“You could leave now,” Declan said, lightly, when the door had shut. The lightness was how she had learned he said the things that frightened him most. “You have your name back and your money in it. There is a house in Bath you admired, with the bow windows you said you would never afford, and the means to take it twelve times over. Nothing holds you here that you did not put here yourself. I have spent a good deal of the year aware of that, and I would rather you knew that I know it than pretend the door is locked.”

“You are asking me whether I stay because I must.”

“I am telling you that I have removed every reason you ever had to, and I am standing here to see what is left when the reasons are gone.”

“What is left,” she said, and came round the table now, because the saying of this wanted no width at all, “is the only reason that was ever worth anything. I stayed when staying wasmy employment. I stayed when staying was a contract with your solicitor’s seal on it. And I am still here on the one morning in my life when there is not a single account in the world that requires it of me, and I find the staying weighs exactly the same as it did, which is to say it weighs nothing at all, because it was never a duty. It was only ever a preference. You. For no use whatever.”