Page 30 of How Not to Marry a Duke

I have tried counting other things—floor tiles, dinner courses, the number of appropriate topics for polite conversation. It does not help. You have colonized my arithmetic.

He paused, rereading. "You have colonized my arithmetic" sounded like the ravings of a bedlamite. He considered crossing it out. He left it.

Do you remember the stable?

Of course she remembered the stable. She had been seventeen and terrifying, and she had marched in with her list of one hundred and seven reasons and kissed him anyway.

For science, she had said.

He had been thinking about that kiss for nine years. Nine years of battlefields and ballrooms and perfectly sensible women who never once made him lose count of anything.

You kissed me in a stable and called it an experiment. I have been attempting to replicate the results ever since. (Unsuccessfully. I suspect the variable is you.)

This was mortifying. He was a grown man, a decorated soldier, a duke, and he was writing about kisses in stables like some sort of gothic heroine.

He kept writing.

I should have called on you before I left for war. I told myself I was being noble—sparing you attachment to a man who might not return. The truth is simpler: I was a coward. I was afraid of wanting what I might lose.

I lost it anyway. Nine years of it. And now here you are, three doors down a corridor, and I find I am still a coward—only now I am also engaged, which adds hypocrisy to the list of my failings.

The fire crackled. Somewhere in the house, a floorboard creaked. Frederick's pen hovered over the paper, and he wondered if dukes could be committed to asylums for writing letters to women they had no business writing to.

Probably not. Dukes were permitted eccentricities. This was merely an extremely private eccentricity that no one would ever see.

I counted the gold threads in your hair today. Fourteen. I counted the times you laughed. Seven. I counted the seconds you looked at me. Forty-two.

I am losing my mind, and I find I do not care.

He should stop. He should burn this, go to bed, and pretend in the morning that he had never been fool enough to commit his foolishness to paper.

Instead:

You looked at my horse and knew his breeding from fifty yards. You count the stairs with me. You told Lord Ashworth that kindness was only threatening to people who lacked it, and I wanted to applaud.

You see me. Not the title. Not the estate. Me—the man who counts things and breeds horses and cannot seem to stop making lists of reasons to stay away from you.

Forty-three reasons. I wrote them all down. Duty. Honor. Promises made. Reputations. The fact that I am, objectively, a terrible prospect for any woman with sense.

None of them matter.

I shall not send this. I am not so far gone that I would compromise you with written evidence of my complete moral failing. But I needed⁠—

He stopped. What did he need? To confess? To purge the wanting through ink? To have proof, however private, that these feelings existed outside the echo chamber of his own skull?

I needed to say it. Even if only to paper.

I have loved you since you were seventeen and told me you had made a list of reasons not to kiss me.

He stared at the sentence. It was the most honest thing he had written in years, and it looked absurd on paper.

He kept going anyway.

I have loved you through a war and a decade and an engagement I do not remember agreeing to. I shall love you tomorrow, when I carry you down fourteen stairs and count your breaths and pretend I am merely being helpful.

This is not poetry. I am not capable of poetry. This is simply the documented descent of a duke into complete irrationality.

Yours (inappropriately, impossibly, irrevocably),