Page 25 of The Duke’s Hidden Runaway Bride

There was no audience to admire him here: no society hostess to charm, no mother angling a marriageable daughter into his path, no grandfather to defy. There was only a sick child and a frightened family, and hours of unglamorous work that would not do itself.

Adrian remained.

By the afternoon of the second day the fever eased. No one said they had conquered it. They waited, hardly breathing, until the boy woke clear-eyed and asked for bread.

Mrs. Pritchard began to cry.

She tried to kneel to Ophelia, who caught her by the arms before she could. Adrian found bread and sliced and buttered it, playing at grave ceremony, before informing the child that any man who had caused so much trouble ought to eat at least two pieces.

The boy demanded three.

“A born negotiator,” Adrian said. “He will be in Parliament before he is twenty.”

Mrs. Pritchard laughed through her tears.

Ophelia looked at Adrian across the small room.

She had believed that charm was what men used when they wished to be excused from substance. In Adrian, she saw something else entirely. He could make fear easier to bear, could turn a child’s tears into indignation over bread. He could stay awake, carry wood, and learn the same Welsh rhyme twenty times over because someone needed it done.

He had spent years calling himself useless, and she had begun to suspect that the only person who still believed him was Adrian.

She loved him.

The knowledge came without drama. It was simply there, quiet and complete.

She loved not the idea of him, but the foolish, brave, unfinished man himself. The runner, learning to remain. The man who had been told he was merely what was left, and had decided, at last, to become something better.

It was the most dangerous truth Ophelia had ever admitted.

They walked back to Plas Eira through the snow, tired enough that silence came easily. Instead of offering his arm for her support, Adrian took her hand in his and held it, all the way back. The heat of him reached her even through the thickness of both their gloves.

That night, when the house had gone quiet, Ophelia came down to the small library in search of a book she did not want.

Adrian was already there, pretending to want one too.

Neither of them remarked upon the coincidence.

They sat beside the dying fire and spoke softly until the candle guttered low in its own wax. Then Adrian walked with her to the foot of the stairs.

The kissing bough turned overhead in the draught.

He lifted one hand, then stopped.

“May I?”

Ophelia nodded.

His fingertips touched the side of her face.

She turned her face the smallest fraction into his palm, and closed her eyes.

They stood that way for a long moment, breathing as though they had climbed the mountain again.

“I must not,” she whispered.

The words held no refusal in them, only a confession of how much she wanted what she could not yet have.

“I know,” Adrian said. “Not like this. Not in hiding, while another man claims the right to punish you and I have nothing to offer but another secret.”