Chapter 19 #3
"I intend to marry her and I came here today to ask your blessing," Damon said. "And I intend to ask her properly, and soon — while the narrative is still in our favor, before the papers find some new scandal to distract them and the goodwill curdles into something else."
Charles regarded him for a long moment. Then, with the particular gravity of a man about to deliver terrible news, he said, "I am not certain that is wise."
Damon felt the words land somewhere he had not braced for. "You do not think—"
Charles held his stern expression for another three full seconds before it broke entirely into laughter.
"Good God, Damon, your face." He wiped his eyes, still chuckling. "I have fooled the great Duke of Ravenshire. The man who reads an entire room before he has finished removing his coat."
Damon exhaled, something between relief and irritation moving through him in quick succession. "You are enjoying that considerably more than you ought to."
"Immensely," Charles agreed. "Though I confess, I am somewhat gratified to learn you can still be caught off guard. I was beginning to think you had become unbearable."
"I believe," Damon said dryly, "I am losing a fair portion of my usual faculties, where she is concerned."
"That," Charles said, settling back into his chair, "is generally what people mean when they say they are in love.
You will grow accustomed to it. Eventually.
" He folded his hands. "Now. If you are serious about this — and I gather you are — there is a practical matter you have likely not considered. "
"Tell me."
"If you ask for her hand, she cannot go on serving as my assistant on this case.
Not openly. It would create precisely the kind of complication the opposition would delight in exploiting — the Duke's intended, working the very case that names his enemies.
It would be presented as bias, however unfair that framing might be. "
Damon was quiet for a moment, the weight of it settling in him properly.
"I had not considered that," he admitted. "So in order to be with me, she must set aside the very thing she has fought for her entire life."
"For a time," Charles said. "Not forever."
"How do I ask that of her?" Damon said. "How do I stand in front of her and ask her to give up the one thing this whole world has already denied her, simply because I have finally arrived to claim what I want?"
Charles studied him, something almost gentle in his expression now.
"I imagine you will find a way to arrange a room in your own house where she might continue her work unofficially — where no one need know the hand behind it belongs to her, precisely as it has always been.
And once the dust from this case has properly settled, there is no reason she cannot return to me as my assistant again, as before. "
"I wish she could return as something more than an assistant," Damon said, quieter now. "The world we live in does not permit that. Not yet."
"That pains me as well," Charles said simply. "More than I generally allow myself to admit."
"I will find a way toward that too, eventually," Damon said. "But for now — do not tell her anything of this. I want to surprise her properly."
Charles raised a brow. "What precisely do you have in mind?"
Damon's mouth curved, the first real mischief he had felt in weeks.
"I would like your help staging something.
A witness — invented, of course — claiming to hold proof against Harwood and Alderton, but threatening to sell it to their solicitors instead of bringing it to us.
Something urgent enough that she comes here the moment she hears it.
Something that frightens her, just slightly, about the case — never about us. "
Charles considered this for a long moment. "You want to manufacture a crisis."
"I want to give her something to be alert and sharp about, rather than something to grieve.
She is at her most herself when she is fighting for something.
Let her believe, for a few days, that she is about to save the case one more time.
And then let her find, instead, that there was never any threat at all — only me, waiting for her, with a question. "
Charles was quiet a moment. Then he began, slowly, to smile. "You are a genuinely diabolical man, Your Grace."
"I prefer resourceful."
"So this is how you operate," Charles said, "in matters of the heart."
He reached for a fresh sheet of paper and uncapped his pen, murmuring the words aloud as his hand began to move across the page — an anonymous man claiming proof of Harwood's involvement, unwilling to wait, demanding to be received at the office itself at midnight three days hence, or the evidence would find its way into the opposition's hands instead.
Damon watched him work, something quietly satisfied settling over his features as the letter took shape beneath Charles's pen — the bait that would, in three days' time, bring her running not to grief, but to him.
He rose, straightening his coat, as Charles folded the finished page and set it aside to be delivered.
"You have learned one of my few remaining secrets, Charles," Damon said. "Use it wisely."
And then he left the office.