3. CHAPTER 3
T he storm on her wedding day had been a bad omen.
Grace stood at the altar of St. Saviour's Parish Church, the scent of wet stone and garden roses drifting through the open windows, and tried to breathe.
The rector's voice rolled over her in practiced cadences, warm and melodious.
She fixed her gaze on the modest stained glass above the altar and willed her hands to stop trembling.
It was not supposed to be this way. After seven years of not having a past, she had finally taken the first step toward building a future.
She had agonized over this decision for months, ever since Paul had knelt beside her chair in his surgery, held her hand with the same steadiness he used to set a bone or stitch a wound, and asked her to be his wife.
He had not dressed the proposal in poetry.
He had said, simply: I know what you need, Grace, and I can provide it.
A home. Stability. Children of your own.
Children. Something had shifted in her chest at the word.
She was fond of him. She trusted him more than any person she could remember knowing — which was, admittedly, not a vast field.
Seven years ago, he had saved her life and cared for her when some sailors brought her to him, half drowned and delirious, her body battered and her mind a blank.
He was her friend. His kindness made her feel safe.
For that alone, marrying him should have been easy. Natural. Like the instinct for survival.
Yet it was not .
She could not silence the doubt that insisted this was wrong. That she should not be doing this. The feeling had no name, no memory attached. It was just a deep, bone-level wrongness.
So was her life. She could read and write, set a table, mend a hem, recite the Lord's Prayer, and play three hymns on the rectory's ancient pianoforte without looking at the keys.
She could do these things and not remember learning a single one.
Her body remembered; her mind did not. She would sometimes enter a room and sense she had been somewhere like it before, and yet have nothing to attach it to.
Just the feeling, rootless, untethered… and useless.
The reason was no doubt buried in the mystery of her past. A turbulent and scary past she only caught glimpses of in her nightmares. A past she feared with the same intensity she yearned to unveil.
Last night, the dream had come again. She had been running down a narrow stone passageway, her bare feet slapping against the cold floor, and someone had been behind her — close, so close she could feel the heat of him, hear the deliberate rhythm of his breathing.
Not hurried. Patient. As though he knew she had nowhere to go.
She had woken with a cry lodged in her throat and a strange, shameful warmth pooled low in her belly.
She had lain in the dark afterward, staring at the ceiling of her small room at the rectory, and thought: I am marrying Paul Harrison in twelve hours, and I dreamed of being chased by a man whose face I cannot see.
But seven years of useless fragments had taught her nothing.
She had almost resigned herself to the possibility that she might never recover her memories.
That her past would remain shrouded. That Grace Harper was all she would ever be — a woman built from the kindness of strangers, standing on a foundation of nothing.
Paul could give her something. Not the sort of love the poets wrote about, not the consuming force she sometimes glimpsed in the pages of Margaret's novels that gave her a pang of recognition she could not explain.
But he could give her friendship. Companionship.
A life. A name that was legally hers. And children — someone who would be truly her own.
Connected to her by blood rather than by charity .
It was enough. It had to be enough.
The rector's voice brought her back.
"Forasmuch as Paul Harrison and Grace Harper have consented together in holy wedlock, and have witnessed the same before God and this company…"
Oh God. It was happening. She was promising her life to this man in front of God and the entire congregation.
Margaret, the rector's mother, who had taken her in when she was barely more than a ghost, sat in the front row.
The fishermen's wives who had brought her soup during those first terrible months were here too.
All of them watching, warm and expectant.
She could not disappoint them. She would not.
"…I pronounce that they be man and wife together, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."
It was done.
Her heart lurched. The church bells broke loose overhead, a clatter of peals that echoed through her ribs and amplified the thudding of her pulse.
Paul reached out and took her cold hands in his warm ones.
Always practical and attentive, reading her body's distress before she voiced it.
So like him. Her gratitude was fierce enough that she could almost mistake it for something more.
She looked up at his face, and he offered her a steady smile. She smiled back. His head dipped to claim his kiss, and she closed her eyes, accepting the soft brush of his lips over hers. Gentle. Undemanding. The kiss of a friend who hoped to become more.
When the bells subsided, the rector spoke again. "I give you Mr. and Mrs. Harrison. Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder."
The church doors flew open with a violent crash, slamming against the walls in a thunderous boom that echoed through the cavernous space, drowning out the congregation's applause.
A man — or more like an apparition from her nightmares — invaded the church. His face was a mask of fury. His hair wild, his clothes splattered with mud, as if he had crawled from hell itself to reach out and take her with him.
But it was his eyes, dark and burning, that pinned her to her spot, made her breath catch in her lungs, and her heart beat double time. He did not look at Paul or the rector. He looked only at her. Blood pounded at her temples.
"I will put them asunder." His voice, low and savage, carried through the nave. The stone walls caught it and threw it back until it seemed to come from everywhere at once.
Everyone turned to gaze at the newly arrived stranger. The rector stepped forward, pale but resolute. "Who might you be, sir?"
She already knew the answer. Not his name, but something deeper that her mind could not reach and her body understood at once.
This man was her past.
The hairs on her arms stood on end. Her pulse doubled. And beneath the terror, beneath the shock, the feeling from the nightmare. The one she could never explain.
He came down the aisle in long strides, his mud-caked boots ringing on the stone. She saw Paul square his shoulders and step in front of her. She heard the whispered commotion spreading through the pews.
The stranger stopped three paces from the altar. His gaze had not moved from her face. Not once.
"I am Valentine St Aubyn, the Duke of Dalton," he said. Quieter now. No less certain. "This woman's husband."
Her husband.
She was aware, distantly, of the rector's face going white. Of Paul's hand tightening on her arm. Of the congregation breaking open, the whispers turning to something closer to a roar.
But these things reached her from far away, muffled and dim, because the church was tilting.
Her vision was narrowing. Her temples throbbed, and the darkness from her nightmares was closing in from the edges, eating the stained glass, the candle flames, the faces of every person she had ever known, until only his remained.
Sharp and furious and familiar in a way that frightened her more than anything else.
Her knees buckled.
She was falling.
And the last thing she noticed before the darkness took her was the stranger's arms catching her — sure and immediate, as though he had been waiting seven years to reclaim her.