Chapter 35
Chapter Thirty-Five
“Ibeg your pardon, Your Grace?” The innkeeper said as he hobbled over toward Ambrose from behind the counter, grabbing a monocle from his pocket and holding it to his eye for a better look. “Are you quite all right, Your Grace?”
“Where is she?” he roared once more at the innkeeper. “Miss Lewis!”
The man startled, dropping his monocle. “I thousand apologies, but she is gone, Your Grace!”
“Gone?”
“She took a hackney not twenty minutes ago. Said she had a ship to catch.”
“Gone?” Ambrose turned and stormed out of the inn without another word as he bolted back to the carriage.
“Where is she, Your Grace?” The footman asked, clearly enthralled by their mission.
“To the docks! I’ll give you a hundred pounds if you make it before the tide turns! She cannot board that ship to Liverpool!”
The drive from the polished facade of Mayfair to the grimy depths of the East End was a frantic blur of soot-stained stone and rattling iron against the cold.
The coachman drove like a man possessed, his whip cracking a sharp rhythm against the leaden sky as he swerved to avoid the slow-moving carts and the pedestrians who scattered like pigeons before their path.
Ambrose sat on the edge of the leather bench, his fingers dug deep into the velvet upholstery, watching the city transform. The grand buildings and shoppes vanished, replaced by the leaning tenements and jagged shadows of the docklands.
When the carriage finally lurched to a violent stop, the wheels shrieking against the wet cobbles, Ambrose was hit by the thick, briny tang of fresh tar, and the metallic breath of the Thames.
He didn’t wait for the dust to settle. He threw himself into the swarm of humanity that crowded the dock, scanning the horizon where the world ended in a tangled forest of masts and rigging. His eyes darted across the hulls until they locked onto a familiar silhouette.
There it was, the Atlantic Star. Even amidst the harbor’s frenzy, the ship looked like an animal ready to slip its leash in Ambrose’s eyes.
Its gangplank was a hive of desperate motion, choked with a stream of huddled passengers and shouting sailors who hauled the final crates onto the deck with a frantic sort of efficiency.
The heavy thrum of the tide against the wood sounded like a countdown, only eclipsed by Ambrose’s beating heart.
I am close, close enough to smell the bloody coal smoke from the ship’s funnel as it chokes my throat. Yet, the distance between the pier and the deck feels like a mile of impossible ground. How will I ever find her amongst all these people?
He tightened his eyes to focus, seeking out the dark brown hair and emerald eyes that had stolen his heart. After a few moments of searching, there she was.
Imogen stood near the base of the ramp, her tiny trunk at her feet. She looked frail against the backdrop of the massive ship, her shoulders hunched as she clutched her cloak.
“Imogen! Imogen!” He cried out with a roar.
His voice carried over the hum of the crowd, the creaking of timber, and the cries of gulls that flew over them. He watched Imogen freeze as she searched the crowd for him.
She turned slowly, her eyes widening in disbelief.
Imogen looked up. She felt the color drain from her face as if she had seen a ghost or perhaps the Duke of Welton. For a fractured second, the name trembled on her lips, but the reality before her refused to align with the memory of all that she was trying to put behind her.
Can it really be him?
The man tearing through the dockside crowd was not the pristine, dashing Duke she had known in Welton House.
Gone was the effortless poise and the sharp, tailored silhouette of the aristocracy.
This man was a specter of desperation. His fine wool coat was stained with the grime of the East End, and there was no cravat at the collar.
He was hatless. His golden brown hair was whipped into a chaotic frenzy by the gale.
His cerulean eyes, once cool, distant, and calculating, were now wide and burning with a terrifying, singular heat that burned only for her.
She watched with wide eyes as he moved with a jagged, animalistic urgency that sent porters scurrying and crates toppling in his wake.
As he sprinted toward her, a frantic silhouette against the towering hull of the Atlantic Star, Imogen realized with a jolt of pure ice in her veins that the polished veneer had finally shattered.
What remained was a man stripped of his titles and his pride, propelled by a madness she had never dared to imagine.
He wasn’t just coming for her. He was reclaiming her from the very edge of the world.
I have never wanted anything more, she thought to herself as her hands began to tremble.
“Oh, Ambrose?” she whispered, almost to herself in sheer disbelief. He skidded to a stop in front of her, his hands reaching out to catch her shoulders as if to anchor her to the earth. “What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here!” She shouted over the whipping wind.
“I am exactly where I belong,” he panted, his broad chest heaving up and down.
People began to stop and stare then. Porters paused with their loads, and travelers peered from their carriages at the spectacle of a Duke confronting a lowly woman such as herself in the mud of the docks.
“You have to go back,” she cried, tears welling. “The boys, the scandal. This is too public, too much!”
“I will do no such thing,” he rasped, his shoulders square as he looked down at her.
“Ambrose, please, I’m doing this for you! Don’t make this any harder than it already is.”
“Then stop, Imogen! Just stop,” he commanded, his voice dropping to a low, fierce register that silenced the immediate crowd.
He took her face into his hands. “Listen to me. I have spent my life being the Duke. I have spent every waking moment worrying about the Welton name and the propriety of my house. And in one week without you, I realized that a name is nothing but breath and air… if you aren’t there to hear it. ”
“Ambrose, the world will eat us alive!”
“To hell with the world!” he shouted, and for a moment, he wasn’t a peer of the realm, but a man stripped bare. Imogen could feel it in the marrow of her bones.
“Oh, Ambrose,” she said once more, tears prickling her eyes.
“I love you, Imogen. I love you with a desperation that frightens me. It’s a feeling I have never known,” he began. “The house is an Egyptian tomb without you, filled with finery and frippery but no life. You bring life to my world.”
“And you to mine,” she cried as the tears began to stream down her cheeks.
“The boys are broken. I am broken. I cannot imagine a single day of the rest of my life where I don’t see your face across the breakfast table. Put us back together, Imogen.”
“It is not that simple, Ambrose. Much as I want it to be…”
He reached into his coat and pulled out a piece of parchment, pressing it into her trembling hands. “Read it. This is for you.”
Imogen opened the parchment and squinted at the script, her breath hitching as her eyes scanned the rows of text.
“Is this what I think it is?”
“Yes, it is.”
“A declaration of… legitimacy? Lady Presholm signed it? She recognized me as a Marden?” She looked up at him, stunned. “How? She hates me more than I can even articulate, for my entire life. How did you do this?”
“It doesn’t matter how it was done,” he said, his thumb brushing a tear from her cheek. “I would go to the ends of the Earth for you.”
“She will not stand for this. She will fight. You cannot imagine my despair when she shattered all my prospects!”
“I assure you that she is truly gone, Imogen. She will never trouble you again. You are no longer a woman of an uncertain reputation. You are a lady by blood, and you will be a Duchess by marriage.”
“A Duchess?” She asked, the words catching in her throat as she began to realize what he was proposing.
“I will protect you. I will protect the boys. No one will ever whisper a word against you again, or they will answer to me. You. Are. Mine.”
The crowd was silent now, caught in the gravity of the moment. The ship’s whistle let out a mournful blast, signaling imminent departure.
Ambrose ignored it. He dropped to one knee right there in the dirt and grime of the London docks.
“Miss Imogen Lewis,” he said, his voice ringing with absolute certainty. “I am a difficult man, and my wards are a pair of terrors that rival the Devil himself at times, but we are yours. Entirely. Will you come home? Will you marry me and make me the happiest man alive?”
Imogen looked at the ship, then down at the man who had humbled himself before the world for her sake, his knees deep in mud. The weight that had been crushing her chest for weeks finally shattered as she let herself be swallowed by his sparkling blue eyes.
“Oh, how I love you,” she sobbed, throwing her arms around his neck, pulling him up as he stood to meet her. “I love you so much. And the boys… oh, I missed them so. Do you truly mean it?”
“More than anything, my angel,” he whispered as his lips brushed her cheek.
“Yes, Ambrose! A million times yes!”
Any residual distance between them vanished in a single, desperate embrace as they held each other tight. The kiss was a violent collision of two worlds that should never have met, and yet here they were.
“Oh, how I missed you,” she cried as she took her lips off his and planted a firm kiss on his bearded cheek.
“And I you, My Angel,” he said as he brought her lips back to his with his strong grip. “Kiss me like no one is watching.”
“Who am I to deny a Duke as handsome as you?” She teased, her anxiety quelled by their proximity.
“Or your husband, for that matter?”
“I like the sound of that.”
The kiss was desperate and starving as their mouths met in a clashing of tongues and lips. It tasted like the harbor’s salt spray, the tang of his brandy, the heat of her tears, and the future that stood before them.
“Ambrose,” she gasped against his mouth after a few moments, her hands clutching the rough wool of his coat as if he were the only solid thing in a world made of water.
For the first time in her life, the air she drew into her lungs didn’t feel like dead weight.
The terrifying vastness of the water behind her shrank until it was nothing more than a backdrop to the man standing before her.
They were no longer the Duke of Welton and the governess who had dared to look him in the eye.
Those were costumes they shed on the muddy cobbles of the Thames with that searing kiss.
As the gangplank began to groan and the sailors shouted for the final boarding, Ambrose pulled back just enough to look at her. She liked the way she looked in his gaze, his wild-eyed desperation settling into a terrifyingly beautiful clarity.
“Let us go home now, Imogen,” he commanded, though it sounded more like a gentle request.
She didn’t look at the ship. She didn’t look at the trunk containing her meager life’s possessions. She looked at the man who had ruined his reputation in a single afternoon just to stand in the mud with her.
“If I am in your arms,” she whispered. “Then, I am home.”