Page 16 of The Duke’s Hidden Runaway Bride

He loved her.

He had not meant to. He had taken no care against it, because he had not believed himself capable of falling in love. Yet there it was, plain and undeniable, sitting across the table from him in borrowed candlelight.

She was Ophelia James, the runaway bride of a man Adrian knew well. She was living under his aunt’s protection, frightened and dependent, with scandal and legal danger waiting beyond the snow. Whatever Adrian felt, he had no right to burden her with it.

He could still escape. The old door stood open at his back, as it always had. He could say nothing, allow the snow to melt, and return to London with his honour technically whole. He could spend the rest of his charming, weightless life feeling the draught left by this Christmas.

He looked across the candles at Ophelia. She would not meet his eyes.

“Tomorrow is St. Stephen’s,” Elise was saying to Mr. Vaughan. “We will carry the boxes round to the tenants, snow or no snow. They will look for us.”

Adrian heard himself answer that he would sooner carry boxes through every drift in Wales than face his aunt’s displeasure.

The table laughed. Ophelia almost smiled.

Adrian smiled too, and knew, quite suddenly, that it no longer mattered that the door stood open behind him.

He wasn’t leaving, not this time.

Chapter Nine

On St. Stephen’s Day they went out with the Christmas boxes, and Ophelia was glad of the work; it was the one thing that had always kept her from thinking.

There was plenty to do. Every tenant and servant must have the coins, meat, candles, and mended clothes Lady Elise had set aside, and with the lanes buried too deep for any cart to get through, everything had to be carried by hand, boxes and sacks balanced on hip and shoulder up paths that had been hedgerows a fortnight before.

They set out in pairs and threes. By some rearrangement of the parties that bore Miss Pettibone’s unmistakable hand, Ophelia found herself paired with Adrian for the cottages in the side valley while the others took the nearer lane.

They crossed the white shoulder of the hill together beneath a hard blue sky, each carrying a box, and Adrian several sacks slung from his shoulders, their breath hanging white in the air ahead of them. The silence between them was not quite comfortable and not quite otherwise.

The village children were out with the wren, a ragged procession carrying holly and ribbons from door to door and shouting the old rhyme. Ophelia and Adrian stood aside to let them pass. He watched them go, delight open on his face, a London duke thoroughly undone by a pack of Welsh children, and her foolish heart turned over again.

She looked hard at the snow instead of at his face.

“You told me you grew up among ledgers and clerks,” he said when the children had gone shrieking down the hill. “I begin to understand what that means. Six weeks here, and you know this valley better than I know estates I have possessed all my life.”

“One learns quickly when one wishes to be useful.”

“One does. You have made a study of it.”

He shifted the box on his hip and looked out across the dazzling valley. When he spoke again, the lightness had left his voice.

“I know you have reasons for keeping your past your own. I will not ask for it, nor make it mine against your will.” He glanced at her. “But I should like you to know that you need not face whatever comes entirely alone. I am not without influence; should you like me to exert it on your behalf, you need only ask.”

Her throat closed. Cruelty she knew how to answer; this left her defenceless.

She nodded once, unable to speak, and they went on up the hill.

They had delivered all the bags and Ophelia’s box and were on their way to the very last cottage when the weather turned.

A wind struck out of the north. The light thickened to yellow, and then the snow came level into their faces. The valley vanished. One instant the far cottage stood a half-mile above them beneath its white burden; the next, the world had closed to a roaring arm’s length.

Ophelia had grown up first in India, then in London, and did not understand the danger. Adrian did. His manner changed at once, every trace of lightness gone, and his gloved hand closed around her wrist.

“The croft. There.” He pointed towards a dark shape barely visible through the driving white. “We cannot go on or back. Come.”

He hauled her from the path and across a buried field. She stumbled after him, half-blind, until they struck the low wooden door together. Adrian dragged it open against the wind and thrust her through ahead of him.

The door slammed behind them, and Ophelia peered around into the half-darkness inside. It was hardly more than a shepherd’s croft, bitterly cold and smelling of old hay and lanolin. Snow streamed past the cracks in the boards, but the walls held off the worst of the wind.