Page 20 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

The room held very still around them.

Ellen heard the clock ticking on the mantel, then a cart in the street, then a dog somewhere beyond the window, then the impossible insistence of her own pulse. A laugh escaped her, one short, disbelieving sound, because Henry had plainly got something wrong. It was a misunderstanding, or a cruel jest badly timed, or fever talking through a brother who had come home with death in his face.

Then she saw him properly, and the laugh stilled upon her lips before it could become anything else.

“Say it again,” she whispered.

Henry’s mouth trembled. “The Duke of Rosanne will settle the debts. All of them. You are to be wedded to him in three weeks.”

Ellen stared at him, her fingers tightening on the chair until the carved wood pressed into her palm. “Who is to wed him?”

“You are.”

“Do not answer as if I am being slow. I am asking because what you have said cannot be true.”

“It is true.”

“The Duke of Rosanne,” she said carefully, as though the title itself might betray the absurdity if spoken with enough precision.

“Yes.”

“I have never met the Duke of Rosanne in my life.”

“No,” Henry said, lowering his gaze.

“He has never called upon me.”

“No.”

“He has never spoken to me, written to me, danced with me, or even been introduced to me.”

“No, Ellen.”

“He has never set eyes on me.”

Henry hesitated. “No.”

She did not correct him, and afterward she could not have said why. Something stirred at the edge of her memory and refused to come forward neatly. A man in the hall, three days past. She had seen him for half a second from the turn of the back stairs, a tall gentleman standing very still by the newel, and she had taken him for a creditor before going on with the vases. For one cold instant she wondered whether he had been something else entirely, then stopped herself, because that wondering led down a stair she could not yet make herself descend.

“Henry,” she said, and the sound of his name had changed in her mouth. “What have you done?”

He lifted both hands slightly, helplessly. “I have tried to save us.”

“No.” She shook her head once, slowly. “That is the sentence men use when they have done something they cannot bear to name.”

“Ellen, if you knew the whole of it, if you understood how near we are to ruin, you would see that I had no other course.”

“I understand ruin better than you think,” she said, her voice still quiet. “I have watered soup, dismissed servants kindly, mended curtains where guests would not look, and smiled at tradesmen who knew precisely how little we had left. Do not speak to me as if ruin is a room you discovered this morning.”

Henry winced at her words. “The debts are beyond anything you know.”

“Then you should have told me.”

“I could not.”

“You could offer me to a stranger, but you could not speak to me?”

He looked away.