Page 16 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“I am well aware, indeed.”

“Then why do you?”

His smile changed. The ease left it. “Because since September I have been thinking of nothing else, and a title feels like a locked door.”

Ellen’s breath caught.

He took a single step nearer, though still not near enough to alarm anyone who might look in. “Will you make me stop?”

She should have said yes. A sensible young lady would have said yes, and perhaps smiled, and perhaps restored the world to its proper arrangement before it became too sweet to bear.

She did not make him stop.

“I have thought of you also,” she said, and the words left her so softly that she scarcely recognised her own voice. “More than I ought.”

“There is no ought between us.”

“There is always an ought.”

“Then let there be a little less of it for five minutes.”

She looked at him, and the smile she had meant to resist came anyway. “You are very persuasive.”

“I am trying to be honest.”

“That is worse.”

“Worse?”

“Persuasion may be resisted. Honesty makes a coward of one.”

His expression warmed, and Ellen had the terrible sensation that he was seeing her, truly seeing her, beyond the worn gown and the careful housekeeping and the girl everyone had begun speaking around instead of to.

“I have something I wish to say to you,” he said.

The room seemed to become very still.

“Then say it,” Ellen whispered.

“I have not yet the standing to say it as it ought to be said.”

The words pricked, though gently. “I see.”

“No, do not look like that.” He reached as if he meant to take her hand, stopped himself, and then lowered his arm with visible care. “I do not mean that I am uncertain. I mean that I am not yet in a position to come to you properly.”

“Properly,” she repeated, because the word seemed to hold all the dreams she had refused to name.

“My great-aunt has hinted at a kindness. The promotion will come. When it does, when I can come to you as a man with something in his hands instead of a list of things he hopes for, I will say it as it deserves to be said.”

Ellen tried to answer and found she had no answer prepared for happiness. Misery one could manage. Misery had rules. Happiness arrived with all the subtlety of a carriage through a garden wall and expected one to be graceful in the wreckage.

“Will you wait until then?” he asked.

She looked at him through the soft blur of a feeling she would have died before confessing to anyone else. “I have been waiting since May.”

Vance’s face changed.

All his brightness quieted. He looked younger for an instant, and more earnest, and so dear to her that she had to grip the edge of the table to remain as she was.