Chapter 4
“Your Grace.” Lady Moreland’s voice was warmth and steel in equal measure. “What an unexpected—that is to say, we are very glad–”
“Mama.” The girl—Cecily—said it quietly, without looking away from him. Just the one word, and her mother sat back down.
He had expected resistance. He had prepared for it on the ride over, running through the likely shape of the conversation with the practical efficiency of a man who preferred to anticipate obstacles rather than be surprised by them.
There would be a mother—there was always a mother in these situations, and from everything he had gathered about the Moreland family, this one was formidable.
There would be a sister, who was a duchess and therefore not easily managed.
And there would be the girl herself, who had knelt in wet sand to take his pulse without flinching and then looked at him on the shore with those very blue eyes, and who had, in his considered estimation, never once in her life accepted a situation she had not first questioned thoroughly.
He had prepared for resistance, but he had not prepared for her face.
Her face, even with the evidence of a difficult twenty-four hours written plainly all over it—the slightly swollen eyes, the pinched mouth—was the kind of face that would stop a room on its best day.
On this particular day, with all the pretence stripped away and nothing between him and the full force of her expression, he found it considerably more arresting than he was prepared to account for.
She was slender, of medium height, with light brown hair that had been pinned up with more haste than usual and was doing what it apparently wanted regardless. A strand had escaped at her temple, and she hadn’t bothered with it, which for some reason he found immediately and inconveniently telling.
Her eyes were blue. Not the vague, polite blue of a great many blue eyes, but something more specific—clear and direct and currently trained on him with the focused attention of someone deciding what they thought of what they were seeing.
She was angrier than he had expected, which was fair. Her eyes were red at the edges. She had been crying, and the realization landed somewhere uncomfortable in his chest, in a way he chose not to examine.
She was also, despite the evidence of a difficult twenty-four hours, looking at him with an expression of such precise, contained fury that he found himself revising his plan slightly even as he was opening his mouth.
“Lady Cecily,” he greeted, pulling off his gloves. “I have come to make you an offer of marriage.”
He said it simply, because simplicity was generally more effective than an elaborate preamble, and because the situation was what it was, and decorating it would only waste time they didn’t have.
He watched her take it in. Watched the flash of something cross her face—not surprise, but more the expression of someone whose worst suspicion had been confirmed.
“Did you?”
“I did.”
She looked at him with those clear blue eyes, and he had the distinct impression she was deciding something—running him through some internal assessment he was not privy to and might not pass.
“And what,” she said, in a remarkably steady voice for a woman who had clearly spent the better part of a day crying, “makes you think I will accept a proposal from a man with your reputation?”
From the sofa, her mother made a soft, pained sound. The Duchess—the older sister, Beatrice—sat very still with the expression of someone watching a situation unfold that they have decided, wisely, not to attempt to control.
William kept his eyes on Cecily.
“I’m aware of my reputation,” he replied. “I won’t insult you by pretending otherwise.”
“That is something, at least.”
“What I will tell you is that I have never ruined a woman. In all the years the papers have seen fit to discuss my habits, that particular distinction has never applied to me, and I do not intend to allow it to begin now.” He kept his voice even, factual, the voice he used in business—not cold, but clear.
“The story is already moving faster than either of us can outrun it alone. By tomorrow, it will be in every paper in London, with your full name attached. I can stop that. A special license takes two days. After that, there is no scandal, only a marriage, and people will find something else to discuss within the fortnight.”
“How efficient,” Cecily scoffed. “You make it sound like resolving an accounting error.”
“That is not–” He stopped. Tried again. “I am not trivialising your situation.”
“You are describing my future as a logistical solution to your inconvenience.”
“With respect,” he pointed out, “it is considerably more your inconvenience than mine.”
That landed badly. He saw it the moment it left his mouth—saw the color rise in her face, saw her anger shift from contained to incandescent.
She took a single step toward him. “My inconvenience.” Not a question.
Each word was placed with care, the way one placed things down when one was deciding whether to throw them.
“I was on a walk. I found a man unconscious in the tide, and I chose to help him rather than leave him there, and my inconvenience is the result.”
Another step. She was close enough now that he could see the brightness at the corners of her eyes. Not tears… Or not only tears, but also fury, which was its own kind of light.
“Yes. You are correct. I see the distinction very clearly.”
“Lady Cecily–”
“I did nothing wrong.” Her voice was steady and absolutely certain.
Beneath the anger, there was something rawer that he recognized, not because he had heard it before, but because he understood it—the sound of someone who had been punished for the right choice and could not make it make sense.
“I did nothing wrong, and I am the one who will suffer for it, and you walk in here as though you are doing me a considerable favor by–”
“You’re right,” he interrupted.
He had not planned to say it quite like that, but it was true, and she deserved the acknowledgment. Besides, the only thing that was going to stop her was the unexpected.
“You did nothing wrong. You are entirely correct. If anyone ought to suffer the consequences of that morning, it should be me, and in a just world, it would be.” He held her gaze.
“Unfortunately, we do not live in a just world. We live amid London society, which operates on entirely different principles, and according to them, the consequences of that morning will fall on you regardless of how blameless your conduct was. I will not stand by and allow that.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly. Still angry, but listening.
“I have two younger sisters,” he continued.
“Sixteen and fourteen. I have spent the better part of a decade ensuring that their names remained untouched by the particular kind of talk that follows women for the rest of their lives.” He paused.
“I know what it costs. I know how quickly it spreads, how little it takes to start, and how much harder it is to stop once it has gathered speed. I will not pretend I don’t know, and I will not pretend that I don’t understand exactly what the next month will look like for you if this is not resolved. ”
Her expression shifted. Not softened—Cecily Moreland did not seem to be a woman who softened quickly or without reason—but the razor edge changed slightly, became something more complicated.
“I don’t know another way to protect you,” William said. “I’ve looked for one. There isn’t one.”
She said nothing. Her chin was still lifted, and her shoulders were still set, but the silence was different from the one before.
The room was quiet. Her mother and her sister had, with considerable wisdom, decided to become part of the furniture.
William stood where he was and looked at her.
She was not what he had expected. He had expected her to be frightened, or calculating, or one of the wide varieties of performance that women deployed in difficult drawing rooms. Instead, she was simply present.
Entirely herself, red-eyed and furious and achingly honest, looking back at him with the directness of someone who had decided that pretence was more trouble than it was worth.
He thought of the shore. The pale early light. Her face so close to his, the stillness of the moment before everything had shattered, and the way she had looked at him then—startled but not afraid, which had struck him even through the fog of the pain.
He remembered thinking, in the vague way of a man whose head was splitting and whose judgment was operating at reduced capacity, that she had the most honest eyes he had ever seen.
He had been right about that, at least. He was still thinking it now, with his head perfectly clear and no excuse available.
He became aware that he had been looking at her for slightly longer than the conversation strictly required and that the room had taken on the specific silence that meant other people were noticing things he would prefer they didn’t notice.
He became aware, a fraction of a second later, that she had not looked away either, that her chin had dropped slightly, and that the color that had risen in her face was no longer entirely attributable to anger.
He straightened, pulling himself back into the shape of the conversation.
“You have two choices.” His voice came out steady, which he appreciated.
“You become my wife, and in a fortnight, this is nothing more than a rather interesting story about how the Duke of Blackmoor met his Duchess on a Brighton shore at dawn. Or you decline, I leave, and by the end of the week, your name is in every paper in England, and every door in London closes, and there is nothing I or anyone else can do to stop it.”
Cecily looked at him for a long moment. Her jaw was set. Her eyes were very bright.
“I am not threatening you,” he clarified, before she could speak. “I am telling you the truth, because I think you are a woman who would rather have the truth than a comfortable version of it.”
She was working through the full architecture of her objection—he could almost see it, that precise and principled mind of hers turning over every angle, looking for the exit he already knew wasn’t there.
He waited.