Page 20 of The Duke’s Hidden Runaway Bride

She had expected panic when this moment came. Instead, beneath the fear, something in her chest unclenched, a bone-deep and exhausted relief. The running from him, at least, was finished.

Adrian let out a slow breath.

“You sat across from me while I told your worst moment as a dinner-table joke.” His voice had still not regained its usual ease. “I have thought of little else since I understood. I do not know how you resisted throwing the tureen at my head.”

“I considered it.”

For a moment he stared. Then the corner of his mouth moved.

“I would have deserved it.”

“Yes.”

“I find your forgiveness touching.”

“I have not offered it,” she noted.

Adrian inclined his head, rueful. “No. Quite right.”

He came farther into the room and took the chair opposite the writing table. A careful distance remained between them.

“You owe me no explanation,” he said. “But if you wish to tell me what happened, I will listen.”

Ophelia looked at him.

He did not ask why she had run. He did not tell her that he could help if only she would give him the truth. He simply waited and left the choice to her.

She sat down.

“My mother’s name was Shirin Sethna.”

She had meant to give him only the bones of it: enough to explain Markham, her father, and her flight. Adrian listened, though, in a way even Lady Elise never had, and far more came spilling out than she had ever planned to say.

Shirin had been born into a prominent Parsi family of Bombay shipbuilders. She had married Josiah James for love and lived with him first in India and then in England. Ophelia had been baptised and raised in her father’s church, but it was her mother who had taught her prayers, songs, and the conviction that faith without kindness was only pride in a fancy coat.

England had never known what to make of Shirin. She had been slighted in drawing rooms and stared at in the street, always expected to treat the insult as a misunderstanding. Her warmth had gone unanswered, and her gold bangles and soft, accented English were merely tolerated, never welcomed.

Year by year, she had grown quieter.

“The lung fever killed her when I was sixteen,” Ophelia said. “But I have sometimes thought it began when we came to England, five years before.”

Adrian’s face changed, but he did not interrupt.

She told him about her father.

Josiah James had loved his wife. Ophelia had never doubted that. Shirin’s family and their ships had helped make him rich, but affection rather than advantage had brought them together. After her death, however, grief hardened into ambition.

“He decided no one would ever look down upon me as they had looked down upon her. I was to rise so high that society would be forced to honour me. He would buy me a title if he could, so that those who would look down on me would be forced to give me precedence.”

Adrian’s mouth tightened.

“He meant it as love,” Ophelia said. She had found it in her, in the last six weeks, to understand what had driven her father, more than she ever had while living under his roof. “That was the worst of it. He never understood that in buying me a title, he valued me exactly as the Ton did. I was a fortune with a face, to be given to the best name in need of money.”

“And Markham needed money.”

“Yes.”

Crispin Hale, Viscount Markham, had been charming from the first. Her father had admired his manners, his title, and his willingness to overlook the source of the James fortune. The articles were drawn. The settlements were signed. Markham’s debts would be cleared, Josiah’s daughter would become a viscountess, and everyone concerned congratulated themselves upon an excellent bargain.