Page 42 of The Duke’s Hidden Runaway Bride

Adrian rose.

At the door, his mother stopped him.

“If what you say is true, I have been a fool.”

Adrian thought of every time he had laughed at Markham or allowed silence to stand in place of courage.

“Then we have both been fools.”

“That is not comforting.”

“No. But it is company.”

He left Daventry House and went out into the wet January night.

Tomorrow Markham would receive the proposed agreement. Tomorrow Ophelia would decide whether to face the Marchioness and, after that, the glittering judgment of London.

Adrian could open doors for her. He could place money, rank, and influence behind her choice.

He could not walk through them in her stead.

For the first time, he understood what love actually asked of him: not to carry another person’s weight for them, but to stand near enough to take hold when they asked, and to trust them to say when.

Chapter Sixteen

Her steadiness lasted one night. By the next morning, London had begun presenting its account.

Markham had wasted no time. Three papers carried news of Ophelia’s return, each version further from the truth and nearer what London wished to believe. The runaway heiress had been discovered in Wales. The foreign-bred merchant’s daughter had crept back to town under ducal protection. Worse than either, one sheet declared, she had jilted a viscount and disgraced her father, and now hoped to force herself upon society once more, her eyes on the higher prize of a ducal coronet. The pages, still faintly damp with fresh ink, seemed soured to her before she had read a single line.

Lady Elise read the worst aloud so that Ophelia would not encounter it unprepared.

“It says here that you were found living among Welsh shepherds,” she said grimly. “Which would astonish the shepherds, if no one else.”

Ophelia almost smiled.

There was a caricature beneath the article. It showed Markham chained to an enormous money chest with Ophelia sitting upon it, her features distorted and her mother’s country reduced to jewels, feathers, and an elephant in the background.

Lady Elise folded the print twice and thrust it into the fire. “Cowards. They bite in ink because they would not dare do it to your face.”

Ophelia watched the flames take the paper. She had known, in the abstract, that London would make sport of her upon her return, yet knowledge and experience were different things. Choosing ruin in a quiet room in Wales was one matter; watching strangers sell it for a penny in the street was another.

Still, she could bear this much. She had chosen it with her eyes open, and nothing could make her regret she had walked away from Markham.

Then her father came.

He entered the Maddox parlour before noon, greyer than he had been the previous day. In one hand he carried a formal notice from Markham’s solicitors. In the other were two letters.

“The writ has not been issued. Not yet.” He laid the papers on the table. “But they mean to proceed. One of my bankers has written to ask whether the reports are true, and a Liverpool partner has delayed accepting a bill until the matter is clarified. Nothing is broken yet, but men are beginning to wonder.”

Ophelia picked up the banker’s letter. Its language was courteous and deadly. Confidence remained undiminished, subject only to clarification of certain unfortunate reports.

A business could die under such courtesies.

“Mr. Soane is preparing the releases,” she said. “Markham’s creditors give us an advantage.”

“Markham has refused the terms. He would not even read them through.”

She looked up sharply. “Already?”