Chapter Thirteen #3
As they prepared to continue their journey home, Marianne reflected on the strange turns life could take.
She’d gone to Worthington Manor expecting social warfare.
She’d found that, certainly, but also unexpected allies, hidden strengths, and most surprisingly, the moment when Adrian finally said the word she’d been longing to hear.
Love.
Not a perfect love, not an easy love, but something real and fierce and theirs.
The journey back to Harrowmere took several hours. As they rolled through the countryside, Marianne watched the landscape change from the manicured parks near Worthington to the wilder beauty of their own lands. It felt like coming home in more ways than one.
“What will happen to Venetia?” Catherine asked as the familiar hedgerows appeared.
“She will marry Worthington, live in his gilded cage, and no doubt plot revenge she can never enact,” Adrian said pragmatically. “He has effectively neutralised her.”
“It seems almost sad,” Catherine mused. “Such beauty and intelligence squandered on bitterness.”
“Do not waste pity on her,” Marianne advised gently. “She chose her path.”
“As we all do,” Adrian added quietly.
When Harrowmere finally came into view—its Gothic towers lifting into the evening sky—something eased in Marianne’s chest. This was home now: not merely the house, but the people within it.
The wounded duke learning to love, the sister finding her courage, the marriage begun in scandal and becoming something deeper.
“Welcome home, Your Grace,” Adrian murmured against her ear.
“Our home,” she added.
“Yes,” he agreed, his arm tightening around her. “Ours.”
Mrs Brightley and the staff waited at the steps, relief plain even on disciplined faces. The housekeeper’s usually stern expression softened as Adrian helped both ladies from the carriage with scrupulous care.
“Shall I have dinner prepared, Your Grace?”
“Something simple, in the family dining-room,” Marianne said. “We have had enough formality for a lifetime.”
That evening, the three of them dined at the smaller table, free of scrutiny. Catherine raised her glass.
“To surviving Venetia Carlisle.”
“To family,” Adrian said.
“To unexpected victories,” Marianne added.
They drank, and for the first time since that cursed invitation had arrived, Marianne felt wholly at peace. Venetia had been defeated not by violence or ruin, but by truth and honour.
Later, in the privacy of their bedchamber, Adrian pulled Marianne against him with newfound tenderness.
“I meant it,” he said without preamble. “What I said in the carriage. About love.”
“I know.”
“It does not mend everything. I’m still damaged, still difficult—still more beast than prince.”
“I am not in search of a prince.” She turned to face him. “I want a partner. Someone who counts my merchant blood as strength, not stain. Someone who trusts me to fight my own battles, yet stands beside me when I do. Someone who infuriates me, challenges me, and makes me feel alive.”
“And if I said I wished to lock you in this room and keep the world from you?”
“I should tell you that is fear speaking, not the man I married.”
He studied her in the firelight, wonder softening the harsh planes of his face. “How did I find you?”
“You did not. I found you—at the opera, refusing to look away.”
“The best night of my life,” he said quietly. “Even then, I knew that falling for you would change everything.”
“And has it?”
He did not answer in words. Instead, he showed her—with hands and lips and murmured vows that would have scandalised society yet delighted his wife.
He loved her wholly, reverently, with a fervour that spoke of awe as much as desire—as though he still could not quite believe she was real, was his, was staying.
Much later, as dawn crept through the curtains, Marianne woke to find Adrian at the window, the wolf figurine in his hands.
“Cannot sleep?” she asked softly.
“Thinking.”
“Of what?”
“Protection,” he said. “The wolf guards the pack, but tonight the pack guarded itself. Catherine faced her ghosts. You turned Venetia’s weapons upon her. And I—” He gave a rueful smile. “I managed restraint. Miraculous.”
“We are stronger than you thought.”
“You are. Both of you.” He came back to bed, drawing her close. “It terrifies me.”
“Why?”
“Because if you do not need my protection, what use am I?”
She framed his face with her hands. “Oh, Adrian. We do not need your protection. We need you. Your love, your partnership, your presence. Those are worth more than any shield.”
“I do not know how to be that.”
“You are learning. We all are.”
As the sun rose fully, bathing the room in golden light, Marianne thought about the journey that had brought them here. From that first shocking meeting at the opera to this moment, lying in the arms of a man who was learning to love despite believing himself incapable of it.
Venetia had been wrong about so many things, but most of all about this: Marianne wasn’t another wall Adrian had built around himself. She was the force helping him tear the walls down, brick by brick, scar by scar.
“What happens now?” Adrian asked, as if reading her thoughts.
“Now we live,” she said. “We help Catherine re-enter society. We face whatever gossip comes. We keep learning how to be married.”
“That sounds terrifyingly ordinary.”
“Does it? I rather think it sounds like an adventure.”
He kissed her then—deep and sure, full of promise and the familiar edge of possessive hunger that never quite faded.
“With you,” he murmured against her lips, “everything’s an adventure.”
“Even breakfast?”
“Especially breakfast. You have a talent for overturning social order between the eggs and the toast.”
She laughed, bright in the morning air. “Only when provoked.”
“Then I must be certain to provoke you often.”
“I am counting on it.”