Page 14 of The Duke’s Hidden Runaway Bride

She got into bed and lay looking at the ceiling, the sheets cold enough to sting until her own warmth beat it back.

She had allowed herself one warm evening. She had given him something willingly, a truth placed deliberately in his hands rather than a secret let slip by accident.

He had found the flaw in it all the same. Worse, he had warned her and asked nothing more.

I cannot decide whether you dislike me or only mistrust everything I represent.

Neither, she thought into the darkness.

That was the danger.

For this one night, she would not make herself think of the thaw, or of what still waited for her in the world beyond the snow. Tonight she would only remember his hand warm in hers as she freed him from the ribbon, and how easy it had felt to be simply Olivia Jones.

Chapter Eight

They walked to the Plygain in the darkness before dawn, the whole household together, each carrying a candle. The half-buried lane led down to the little stone chapel of Llanfechan, where one lit window burned against the black mountain.

Adrian had attended Christmas services at St. George’s, with the fashionable crush and the verger bowing him into the Calder pew, and supposed he knew what Christmas in a church was.

He had not expected anything like this.

The chapel was cold, and lit only by the candles the congregation carried. Men and women rose alone or in small groups to sing the old Plygain carols, unaccompanied and in Welsh, the winding tunes filling the stone chapel to its rafters. Mr. Pugh, a gentle, stooped curate with a country voice, said the prayers between them. The flames bent in the draught, and Adrian stood beside his aunt with snow melting from his borrowed coat and his throat unexpectedly tight, a hymn book he could not read held loosely in one hand.

He looked, as he had taken to looking at every turn, at Miss Jones.

As one of the carols ended, her lips moved. Adrian was near enough to catch a few low notes, soft and private, words sung in a language he did not know. Then she pressed her lips together and was still, looking at the floor, her dark eyes bright with unshed tears.

He understood that he had glimpsed something not meant for him. Miss Jones carried another language inside her, along with memories no one in the valley shared, and for a moment she had allowed them to rise to the surface.

He no longer wanted to unmask her. He wanted her to open the door to him, of her own volition.

The distinction frightened him, or it should have.

They walked back after the service under a sky the colour of iron, their candles guttered out and the cold gone into their bones. The others strung out ahead and behind along the trodden path, Bronwen lending Miss Pettibone an arm, someone laughing softly over a joke Adrian did not hear.

Adrian fell into step beside Ophelia. For a little while they walked without speaking, their breath steaming in the icy air.

“I heard you singing in the chapel,” he said at last. “Not one of the Welsh carols, I think? It did not sound like Welsh, anyway.”

“No.” She watched her boots in the snow. “It was my mother’s.”

“A Christmas song?”

“Yes. She converted to Christianity when she married Father, and she loved Christmas. She put the words into Gujarati when I was small. I do not know whether anyone else has ever sung it as she did.”

He wanted to ask which hymn it had been and what the words meant. He asked neither.

“Will you sing it again?”

She glanced at him. “You would not understand it.”

“No. But I should understand that you had chosen to sing it to me.”

She looked at him for a long moment in the grey light, weighing the request. Then, so quietly that he had to bend his head to hear, she sang.

It was only a few phrases, a simple melody meant for one voice rather than a chapel. She stopped almost at once, as though she had frightened herself.

Adrian did not praise it. He did not ask for a translation. She had given him the song; he would not turn the gift into another question.