Page 17 of The Duke’s Hidden Runaway Bride

“It will blow itself out,” Adrian said, catching his breath. She heard him put some lightness back into his voice for her sake. “An hour, perhaps two. The others will have reached the nearer cottages and be sitting snug beside someone’s fire, saying what fools we were to take the high path.”

He found the driest corner and pulled down loose hay to make a seat. Then he removed Sir Rhys’s enormous greatcoat, revealing his lighter London coat beneath it, and held the heavier one out to her.

“Take this.”

“You will be cold,” she protested, though her teeth were already chattering.

“I have another, and I am warm from carrying the box. You are shaking.”

There was no point denying it. Ophelia let him wrap the greatcoat around her and sank into the hay. The coat was warm from his body and smelled faintly of wool, snow, and the Christmas greenery they had cut five days before.

Adrian sat beside her, leaving a careful foot of cold air between them.

They talked because the alternative was to listen to the storm and wonder whether anyone would come to look for them. Adrian told her about riding a horse into the foyer of a London club for a wager, an exploit that had ended with a broken vase, a furious steward, and the horse acquiring a taste for sugared almonds.

Ophelia told him that she had never seen deep snow before coming to Wales.

“What did you have instead?”

“Rain. Heat. Ships.”

She gave him small pieces, chosen ones. The Bombay shipyards at dawn, when the first hammers rang out through the mist. The forests of masts and the smell of salt, tar, and wet timber. The time she had found an error in a cargo account, when she was only nine, and been rewarded with a coin by a clerk who had first laughed at her and then discovered she was right.

“My mother made him apologise as well,” she said. “She considered that the more valuable part of the reward.”

“She was right.”

“She generally was.”

Adrian asked nothing about where her mother had lived or why Ophelia had left those shipyards behind. He received each small truth and did not reach for another.

The not-asking was its own kind of intimacy.

After a while, he said, “I told you I became excellent at leaving rooms. I did not tell you when I decided to.”

Ophelia waited.

“When my father died, I was twelve. They put me in black and stood me beside my grandfather at the funeral. The church was colder than this, or so I remember it. He looked down at me and said, ‘Well. You are what is left to us.’”

His voice remained light, but only just.

“What is left,” he repeated. “As though I were scrapings at the bottom of a dish. I decided then that I would be the lightest, easiest thing ever left to anyone. If I wanted nothing and attempted nothing, I could never disappoint him as thoroughly as he expected.”

“That was a terrible thing to say to a child.”

“It was the kind of thing my grandfather said.”

“And he was wrong.”

Adrian gave a quiet laugh. “My history rather supports him.”

“You carried half the valley’s Christmas on your back today.”

“A single afternoon does not make a useful life.”

“No.” Ophelia turned towards him beneath the greatcoat. “But it proves you capable of one.”

He went very still.