Page 81 of How Not to Marry a Duke

One hundred and seven reasons why this is an extraordinarily bad idea. None of them seemed sufficient.

"You remembered," he breathed.

"I remember everything about that day." Her hand emerged from her bodice clutching a folded piece of paper—smaller than his, the handwriting visible even from this angle as tight and precise as her voice. "The way the stable smelled. Hay and horses and a scent I could not name until years later, when I realised it was simply you. The way my heart beat so hard I thought I might actually die of nerves. The way you looked at me—" Her voice cracked. "The way you looked at me as though I had done a remarkable thing, when all I had done was be too stubborn to let fear stop me."

She unfolded the paper.

"One hundred and seven reasons why marrying Frederick Hartwell, Duke of Carthedge, is an extraordinarily good idea."

Her voice carried through the silent church. Strong and clear, with only the faintest tremor to betray the tears still tracking down her cheeks.

"I shall not read them all. Most of them are embarrassing, and Charlotte is already taking notes for future blackmail purposes." A ripple of laughter from the congregation; Frederick caught Charlotte's unrepentant grin from the corner of his eye. "But I shall read you three. The first, the last, and the one that matters most."

She lifted her chin. Met his eyes. Held them with the same fierce determination she had shown at seventeen, when she had marched into his stable and changed everything.

"Reason one." She glanced at the paper, then back at him. "He counted the gold threads in my hair, and instead of being horrified, I found it desperately romantic."

Frederick's throat closed.

"Reason one hundred and seven." She turned the paper over. "He makes me feel brave enough to be barefoot."

He looked down. At her pale feet against the worn stone floor. At the faint smudge of dirt across one arch where she had walked through the garden to reach the church. At the delicate bones of her ankles, unadorned and unashamed.

"And the reason that matters most—" She set the paper aside. Took both his hands again. Her fingers were cold; his were burning. "I love him. I have loved him since I was seventeen years old and too foolish to know that love does not require scientific verification. I have loved him through nine years of silence and two months of impossible proximity and one tower and twenty-nine letters that I shall keep until I am old and grey and my own counting has lost all meaning."

Her voice broke on the last word. She pressed on anyway.

"I love him. That is the only reason that matters. That is the only reason there has ever been."

Frederick did not wait for permission.

He kissed her.

In front of the vicar, who made a small sound of protest. In front of Margot and Lord Raventhorn, who made no sound at all. In front of Edward and Ella and Charlotte and James and little Charles, who had woken from his nap and was now demanding to know why everyone was crying. In front of the Dowager, whose rigid posture had softened almost imperceptibly somewhere during his recitation of the letter. In front of Caroline, who had pressed a handkerchief to her eyes and was weeping with an abandon that seemed to speak of more than wedding sentiment.

He kissed her, and she kissed him back.

Her mouth was warm. Her tears were wet against his cheeks—or perhaps those were his tears; he could not tell anymore and did not care to try. She tasted of salt and champagne and indefinably of Florinda, and he thought he might happily spend the rest of his life learning the precise flavour of her happiness.

Her hands fisted in his lapels. His found her waist, pulling her closer, and someone in the congregation gasped at the impropriety but the sound was distant, unimportant, belonging to a world he no longer inhabited.

"I have not yet pronounced you—" the vicar began.

"Pronounce us later," Frederick said against her mouth.

"I really ought to⁠—"

"Later."

Florinda laughed into the kiss. Her body curved toward his with the same unconscious trust she had shown in the tower, when she had let him carry her down the stairs and refused to let go even when they reached solid ground.

One, he thought, the counting starting again without his permission. One kiss. One wife. One life.

It was, he realised, the only mathematics he would ever need.

The vicar did eventually pronounce them husband and wife.

He managed it approximately three minutes after the kiss began, during a brief moment when Frederick and Florinda had separated long enough to breathe. His voice carried a note of exasperated resignation that suggested this was not the first unorthodox wedding he had performed and would likely not be the last.