Chapter 3
Chapter Three
“Too late?” Emmeline heard her own voice, but it did not sound like hers. It sounded thin, wrong. “No. No, that is absurd. He cannot simply leave because of gossip. Papa, this can still be fixed.”
Her father’s face crumpled in a way she had never seen before, not even in the bleakest months after her mother’s death. The sight of it made something cold and terrible spread through her chest.
They stood in the quieter strip of ground behind the chapel now, shielded from the road and most of the guests, but not from the ruin of the morning.
She could still hear movement at the front, carriage wheels shifting, doors closing, voices carrying in low, excited murmurs that no longer tried to hide themselves.
They were speaking of her.
It had happened so quickly that her mind had not yet caught up with it. One moment, she had still been a woman on the edge of marriage, standing within reach of the life she had chosen for practical reasons, and the next, she was something spoken about, stared at, pitied, perhaps mocked.
A feverish heat climbed her throat, spreading across her cheeks in a flush that felt like a crime.
She looked at her father’s trembling hands and tried to summon the crushing weight of their ruin, but her heart betrayed her. It beat with a rhythmic, terrifying lightness. She felt like a bird watching the cage door swing open.
But her father would not be able to handle this scandal. The fragile stability he had clung to was gone, and as she looked at the silver hair at his temples and the sudden, hollow slope of his shoulders, the lightness in her chest turned to lead. Her freedom had a price, and he would pay for it.
“We can still go after him,” she said, more urgently now, tightening her grip on her father’s hands. “He cannot have gone far. If someone explains that it was a misunderstanding, then he will see reason. He must.”
Lord Weston shook his head, with the slow defeat of a man who had already seen the door close and knew it would not open again.
“He was angry,” he said quietly. “And set in it. I tried to reason with him. He would not hear me.”
“This cannot be the end of it,” Emmeline whispered, though she could already feel that it was.
“It will not be.” A deep, steady voice came from beside them.
Emmeline turned sharply to see the Duke of Ironford standing just behind her shoulder, his expression unreadable save for the hard purpose in his gray eyes. He looked between her and her father and bowed his head slightly, the movement grave.
“My lord. Lady Emmeline. I must apologize.”
Emmeline’s mouth tightened at once. Apology. The word landed too gently for what had happened. He stood there like a man making a formal regret after knocking over a glass of wine, not like the man who had just wrecked her wedding and left her standing on the edge of public humiliation.
Her father answered before she could. “Your Grace, this has been an unfortunate tangle, but—”
“No,” the Duke said, and the calm force of the interruption made both of them fall silent.
“It has been my fault. My men intercepted Lady Emmeline and brought her where she should never have been brought. Because of that delay, this morning has been ruined, and the responsibility for repairing it is mine.”
Emmeline lifted her chin. “And how, precisely, do you propose to repair it?”
Her tone came out sharper than she intended, but she did not regret it. Let him hear the anger. Let him feel some portion of what his competence, his authority, his certainty had cost her.
His gaze settled on her at once, and she was infuriatingly aware of how direct it was, how little he seemed to blink when looking at her.
“I will find Foxdale,” he said. “I will speak to him myself, duke to duke, and I will make the circumstances plain. He will hear that what happened today was a mistake, and he will be given every reason to set this right.”
Her father exhaled with visible relief, as though the mere fact that a man of such rank had spoken with certainty should be enough to pull them all back from the brink.
“That is exceedingly generous of you, Your Grace.”
But there was something too hard in Emmeline’s chest still, something that refused to soften.
“He seemed very decided when he left,” her father added, almost apologetically. “I fear he took the matter rather personally.”
“I daresay he did,” the Duke said coolly. “Even so, it is my duty to try.”
The word struck Emmeline strangely. She knew that brand of duty; it was the arrogance of a man who believed he could rearrange the world to fit his conscience.
“And if he refuses?” she asked.
Her father turned slightly at the question, perhaps hoping she would not speak so plainly, but Emmeline could not stop now. She needed him to answer without hiding behind confidence and polished assurances.
“If he will not listen, what then? What happens to me?”
Something in the Duke’s face shifted. His heavy, stormy gaze pinned her in place until the chapel and the gravel and her own father dissolved into a blur.
There was only the sudden, sharp scent of his cedarwood cologne and the way the air between them seemed to vibrate, pulled taut by the gravity of his stare. It was a look that stripped away her defenses, leaving her raw and visible.
“Then I will marry you myself.”
Her breath caught.
Emmeline felt a hot shiver run down her spine. Her pulse leaped. Her fingers tightened in the folds of her gown.
For one moment, she simply stared at him, lost not in the offer itself, which ought to have horrified her, but in the way he said it. As though he had already decided he would do it if it came to that, and the world would have no choice but to move accordingly.
She did not know him beyond the hard cut of his voice, and yet the thought tore through her: if such a man touched her as though she belonged beneath his hand, he would not feel distant. He would not feel like a marriage of convenience, politely arranged at a gentleman’s convenience.
He would feel overwhelming.
The thought flashed through her so quickly, so vividly, that she nearly hated herself for it.
“My God,” her father breathed, all but sagging with relief. “Your Grace…”
The sound of his voice broke the moment apart.
Emmeline felt herself come back sharply. What was she doing? What was she thinking? This was the same fate given a different face—marriage to a stranger, this time one larger, harder, more unsettling than the first.
Still, her heart refused to settle.
Lord Weston was thanking him now with a gratitude that sounded perilously close to desperation, and Emmeline could hardly blame him.
A duke offering marriage was no small thing. It was salvation for a family like theirs. It was restoration. Security. And what right had she to stand there and think only of the danger of his eyes when her father’s entire future might depend upon this one man’s willingness to take responsibility?
She pressed her lips together and inclined her head. “That is… generous of you.”
The word felt inadequate, but she would not call it kind. Kindness implied softness, and nothing about him seemed soft.
He gave one short nod.
“I will speak to Foxdale first,” he said. “Nothing further needs to be decided before that.”
“Of course,” Lord Weston said immediately.
Emmeline did not miss the subtle relief in that either, as if the promise of delay, however brief, still mattered to him. Perhaps it mattered to her, too. She did not know.
“You should go, then,” she said, because standing there under his gaze felt increasingly like staring at the sun. “If there is any chance of reaching him, you ought not lose time.”
The Duke looked at her again, and this time there was something unreadable in it, something that seemed to pause over her face before moving on.
“Very well.”
“Take Emmeline’s carriage, Your Grace.” Her father gestured back toward the carriage with tired courtesy. “It is faster than sending for another.”
The Duke inclined his head. “Thank you.”
Then his attention returned to her, and for a second that stretched longer than it should have, they simply looked at one another.
Emmeline could not have said what held her there. Perhaps the heaviness of all he had just promised, or the fact that she could not seem to look at him without remembering the drop of his gaze to her mouth in the carriage.
Heat and unease moved together through her in a way that felt impossible to separate. She might have been curious what it would feel like to let a man like that come closer when she was younger, but not anymore.
The thought made her pulse jump again.
Then he bowed, turned, and went.
She watched him walk away before she could stop herself, watched the measured confidence of his stride, and only when he mounted the carriage and disappeared from view did she force herself to breathe properly again.
What on Earth had just happened?