Page 224 of Courting the Wrong Duke

Everything else fell away.

Conversation faded as people turned toward the aisle, and William took his place with the peculiar sensation that the entire morning had suddenly narrowed to this one moment. Sunlight streamed through the windows, spilling across the aisle and warming the faces gathered on either side.

Then Rosalind appeared at the far end.

For one absurd instant, William remembered the first night they had truly spoken outside White’s. She had stood before him in the darkness, demanding answers about her father and accusing William of knowing more than he admitted. He had thought her impossible. She had thought him suspicious.

Neither of them had been entirely wrong.

Now she stood in the sunlight with the father she had crossed half the country to bring home, and when her gaze found William’s, she smiled.

He forgot how to breathe.

It was the same smile he had imagined beneath that impossible peach-colored sky at Bryn Hir, when he had dreamed of an endless road and awakened to understand that he did not want to walk it alone.

Rosalind was waiting for him.

Just as she had promised.

Edmund walked beside her until they reached the front, then bent to say something William could not hear, but Rosalind answered with a smile and kissed her father’s cheek before stepping toward William and taking his hand herself.

He closed his fingers around hers.

“Hello,” she whispered.

“You came.”

Her brows rose. “Were you expecting otherwise?”

“With you, I have learned never to assume anything.”

“Very wise.”

The ceremony began, and William heard most of it. Probably.

He knew he made the appropriate promises because Rosalind’s eyes grew suspiciously bright while he spoke them, and when she made hers, his own vision blurred enough that he briefly lost sight of everyone beyond her.

Then the final words were spoken, and somehow, after all his years of avoiding precisely this fate, Rosalind Carlisle became his wife.

William waited for the feeling he had always imagined would accompany marriage. The closing of a door. The uncomfortable realization that some part of his life no longer belonged entirely to him.

It never came.

Instead, he looked at Rosalind and saw gardens and arguments, long journeys and ridiculous games of battledore.

He saw mornings spent disagreeing over breakfast and evenings when she would undoubtedly tell him exactly where he had gone wrong. He saw a woman who would challenge him, infuriate him, make him laugh, and never allow him to confuse loving her with deciding what was best for her.

And suddenly, William understood something he should perhaps have realized long ago.

Marriage had not taken anything from him.

For years, he had imagined it as a narrowing of his life. A promise that would close doors, limit choices, and bind him to expectations he had spent most of his adulthood avoiding.

Yet standing beside Rosalind, he felt none of that.

She had never asked him to become less himself in order to deserve her love. If anything, she had demanded the opposite. She challenged him when he was wrong, laughed at him when he deserved it, and expected him to offer her the same honesty in return.

Perhaps that was the difference.