Chapter 25
“ D orian! Dorian!” Cordelia shouted in what seemed like a futile attempt. She could hardly hear her own voice as the rain continued pouring down in sheets.
Oh, Dorian, where are you?
Overhead, the storm raged on, the sky an angry mixture of blue and purple that was punctuated by yellow and white bolts of lightning every few moments. Cordelia was half soaked through with rain as her poor horse fought against the rapidly strengthening winds. It was hard to see in front of her, but she had to find Dorian. If something had happened to him because she had refused him entry into her home, she would simply never forgive herself.
But the man that she loved was nowhere to be found.
How could they fix things and have even the slightest chance at their happily ever after if he was gone? She knew in her heart that he would not have left her doorstep by choice. He was far too stubborn of a man to simply give up like that. He would at least want to hear her first. Was she truly so wrong about him?
She had asked the footmen and the stable hands, who had pointed her toward where they had thought that they saw another carriage headed. It had to be wherever Dorian was. There was no time to waste.
Perhaps he managed to find shelter here?
The wind was freezing when she rode into the courtyard of Matthew’s home. She dismounted and pulled her horse toward the barn, roughly tying him and hoping for the best as she took off toward the main house. Her dress clung to her legs as she went, making moving difficult as she entered through the unlocked servant’s quarters.
“Matthew!” She called up the stairs. The whole house was asleep, but she could not allow herself to care. Her gut told her that this was where she needed to be. If anything, her cousin could help her in the search for Dorian. However, the same halls she used to play in as a child felt somehow sinister now. “Matthew, are you home?” She called again as she reached the main hallway, dripping all over the floor as she went.
Are there no servants around here? What is going on?
Slowly, she ascended the stairs, which got darker and quieter as she went.
Something is wrong here.
Then there it was—something soft was calling to her. It almost sounded like her name before the sound was so sharply cut off.
“Who is there?”
She moved blindly, looking in every open room that she passed and feeling very much like she was simply grasping at straws. If her cousin was indeed here alone, she was going to feel quite foolish and not have a single word of explanation to offer him.
But there, at the end of the hallway behind the library door, came a crashing sound. Not enough to have been a bookcase falling, but very close. She gathered up her heavy, soaked skirts and hurried toward the origin of the sound as her heartbeat started to climb anxiously up into her throat.
She pushed open the door slowly, but apart from the moonlight coming in from the very far windows, the library seemed otherwise wrapped in shadows. “Is everything all right?” She tried again. “Matthew?”
The door closed behind her with a soft click, and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the low lighting. She could not breathe. Why was she so scared? Adrenaline started to course through her as she moved, eyes straining around the corners until she crossed to the open seating area in the center of the library and promptly tripped over something very large and very solid.
Cordelia crashed into the floor and hit her elbow heavily at just the right angle to make her see stars burst along her clenched eyelids. Pulling her legs back toward herself, she caught a better glimpse of what she had tripped over—a prone male form. She crawled closer, ignoring the pain in her arm, and started to roll the man onto his back—and gasped. Dorian ! He was unconscious, it seemed, with a swollen knot on his forehead and a bleeding cut in the same area. Her fingers probed against the tender skin gingerly.
“Oh no… what happened?” She whispered, hoping that somehow her cold hands would soothe the pain enough to rouse him… but nothing changed.
“Leave him,” a dark voice said, startling her.
Cordelia whipped around, straining for the source just as Matthew leaned forward in one of the chairs, showing just enough of his sinister seeming face in the moonlight to frighten her. She had never seen him make that face before.
Keeping herself between Matthew and Dorian’s unconscious body, she tried to summon whatever strength and courage she had left, even if her teeth chattered with cold when she spoke. “What have you done? Why is he here? What did you do to him?”
“Nothing more than what society ought to do with unruly mutts like him. Animals like that do not deserve land and titles, and they certainly do not deserve wives like yourself, Cordelia. Do you truly not understand how far beneath you he is? I should have never allowed you to marry him,” Matthew said pityingly.
Cordelia could not believe what she was hearing. “Allow me? I was not aware that you had any influence on my choices!”
Matthew smirked in a way that made her skin crawl. “You were always meant to belong to me, Cordelia. It might take some time for you to come around to the truth, but you were meant to be with me.”
Cordelia turned and started to shake her husband; she needed him to wake up, and she needed him to be awake now . Her hands fumbled with the bindings on his hands behind him, untying him as best as she could. “Have you lost your mind, Matthew? Do you think that I could ever be with a person so cruel to another?”
Matthew laughed mockingly. “How can you say that? Your husband is a murderer!”
“You do not know anything about him!” Cordelia nearly shouted back at him.
Matthew shrugged. “I know the end result, that is all that matters. Just as I know that he would never have been enough to deserve you, not like I do.”
“How did you even find out about all this?”
“You would be surprised by how much you can find out at this pub with a few shillings. I knew that there was something off about your duke and this sham of a marriage the moment he said that he knew your father.”
“Since you found out that he was involved in my father’s death, then you must know the whole story. Dorian acted out on instinct to protect the barmaid. My father’s death was practically an accident.”
Matthew let out a scoff. “I care little for a nameless barmaid. What I wanted and managed to prove is that your swine of a husband killed a man, your own father, and hid the evidence.”
Cordelia’s eyes narrowed. “The only thing that you have proven is that you are insane. I hate you.”
Matthew rose from his chair and started advancing toward her. “It is such a fine line between love and hate, is it not? You will come to forgive me; you have forgiven him . And if not, then you can take the rest of our lives learning how to live with it, to accept that your rightful place is by my side.”
“I will do no such thing!”
“You do not have a choice,” Matthew sneered, his hand jerking out as if to grab her, but a flurry of movement behind her stopped his hand. Blood dripped down Dorian’s face; the rage that had contorted his features had opened the cut on his forehead once more. Dorian squeezed Matthew’s arm so tightly that even in the low lighting, Cordelia could see his face pale. He winced and tried to thrash away from Dorian, but it was of no use.
“Take your hands off my wife,” Dorian seethed, speaking through his clenched teeth.
Matthew tried to speak, tried to snarl in rage as Cordelia scrambled away quickly from the two men.
“She is not some possession for you to claim, and she most certainly and will not ever be yours. It does not matter if I am dead or not; she will never be your little possession,” Dorian continued to seethe.
It was perhaps somewhat inappropriate for her heart to flutter at his words, but she could not help herself.
Matthew swung wide, his arm arcing toward Dorian’s face but was swiftly blocked with his other arm. Dorian attempted to subdue Matthew, twisting his arm behind his back and lifting it as Matthew cried out in pain. She wanted to look away from the struggle, but she could not.
The men were a flurry of movements, grunts, and punches as they moved over to the floor until she could take it no more and had to close her eyes. Cordelia curled into as small of a ball as she could manage, shaking with the cold as she covered her ears against the sounds.
The next thing she knew, she was being touched softly on the shoulder, but she flinched anyway until she noticed that it was Dorian on his knees in front of her.
“It is all over now, Cordelia? Are you all right?” Dorian asked softly.
Clearly, he was very unaware of the state of his face to actually be asking her if she was all right. Her chest tightened before she threw herself at him, wrapping her arms around her husband’s neck and pulling him close to her until her arms ached from holding onto him so tightly.
She risked a glance over his shoulder to where Matthew lay on the floor, his arms restrained with what appeared to be bits of fabric torn from his shirt. But he was unmoving, and his eyes were closed. She could still see the shallow breaths that he took, but he was wholly unconscious.
“It is all over now; I am here, I promise. But we need to summon the constables at once,” Dorian reasoned, speaking gently so as not to frighten her more as he pulled out of her arms and pulled his jacket off. There was blood on the collar. She could not stop staring at the spot as he wrapped the coat around her shoulders, rubbing at her arms softly to warm her.
He started to pull away, and she latched onto his arm. “No! Do not… do not leave me here with him!”
“I promise you; he is unconscious,” Dorian assured her, but she was still not convinced. “All right, here.”
He pulled her to her feet, and arm in arm they walked down the stairs.
It took a few hours for the constables to finish their business. A physician was called to check on both Dorian and herself to ensure that there was no lasting damage. Presently, Cordelia was seated close to a roaring fire to help stave the chill out of her bones. Dorian was finishing giving his statement to the constables, but she could not listen to a word that they were saying.
It was only when the very last constable left that Dorian came to rejoin her. Instead of taking the seat beside her, he knelt in front of her just between her knees. His hands hovered over her thighs and waited for her soft nod of permission before he touched her.
“We ought to get you home, and changed out of these wet clothes before you catch a cold,” Dorian said softly.
Her hand lifted between them, ghosting over the knot on his brow. “Are you truly all right?”
“I have endured far worse than this, I assure you. I am perfectly fine,” Dorian told her.
“I do not see how you can be all right when your forehead is dented and your eye is swollen…” Cordelia spoke around the knot of emotion in her chest.
He grabbed her hands softly and lowered them. “The only thing that would have hurt me, was not seeing you again. I cannot believe that you braved your fears to come after me. You continue to surprise and impress me every day.”
She threaded her fingers through his, scooting closer to him on the chair as she shook her head. “No, I–”
“I do not deserve you. I have done nothing to deserve a love like yours, Cordelia. I–”
“I am sorry that I did not believe you, Dorian. I was so afraid of what it might mean if you were right. You were trying to be honest with me and at the first test of my loyalty to my husband, I failed. If it were not for me then–”
Cordelia’s frantic speech was cut off by Dorian’s impossibly gentle hands on either side of her face, pulling her closer so that he could kiss her. A soft, tender press of his lips against hers seemed to say all the things that words were unable to. She arched into his hold, letting her hands wrap around his shoulders as she pulled close enough to feel the warmth of him through her dress. Their kiss broke only as she pressed her forehead against his, breathing him in.
“Never apologize to me again, Little Flower. I am the one who needs to make amends, and I–”
“No, let me finish. I… I have something that I need to tell you. You were honest with me, and if I am to be perfectly honest with you as well… there is something that I will share that I am afraid you will not like,” Cordelia said quickly.
It was the same news that had been sitting heavily on her heart since she had asked him to stay the whole night with her. She had wanted to be closer to him before sharing the news that she was so certain of. Only, she did not know if this was going to cause more issues…so before they left this house, before anything else happened between the two of them… he deserved to know.
“Anything; you can tell me anything,” Dorian said.
He might believe so, but she was directly violating one of his wishes. “I… Dorian, I am with child.”
She studied his face, carefully watching for any sign of rejection or anger. She did not know what she would do if he was cross with her. She knew that he had no desire to have an heir or to be a father, but she had been hoping so desperately that he would change his mind on the issue… she had been dreaming of having a family with him.
Dorian said nothing for a long moment, his hands dropping from where he cupped her face down to her belly, pausing over her womb as if he could feel their child through her skin.
“I am not very far along… and of course, there will be plenty of time left to figure things out…” Cordelia continued, speaking too quickly.
“Shh, Little Flower, I am thrilled ,” Dorian said with a bright smile so wide that it made her heart ache. “You have made me the happiest man in the whole world… I was wrong about so many things. I want to leave the past behind me. And have a family with you. If you will have me.”
“You mean it?” Cordelia could hardly believe her ears; how lucky she felt.
Dorian nodded. “I am absolutely, wildly in love with you.”
“And I you, husband.” Cordelia beamed. “Take me home.”
Dorian stood and scooped her up into his arms, her head cradling against his chest. “I would love nothing more. Let me show you how much I missed you.”