Chapter 20
Megan had spent the day with her mother’s dressmaker getting a completely new wardrobe ready. As it was too risky to be seen out and about, the dressmaker had come to her with all the material and designs. It had been quite the most exhausting thing she’d had to do.
As they worked, she had one of the girls make her a dress for the family dinner tonight. She wanted to look her best because Oliver was coming.
Oliver, the Dowager Duchess and Duke of Saxton would be joining them. She couldn’t wait to see Oliver and introduce him to her mother. Of course, Margaret already knew who he was, but not who he was really.
Her mother had said as long as Megan loved him, she was happy.
Her mother had asked her what name she wanted to be known by.
She wanted to keep Megan for it was Megan’s life that shaped her.
While her mother wasn’t happy, she hadn’t kicked up a fuss.
All she said was Megan would always be her Hope.
But she could choose the name that she was most happy with.
And she was happy. She couldn’t believe she’d ever be this happy.
Quite frankly, she couldn’t care what happened to Penharrow now. She didn’t want to bring him to justice if it meant ruining what she had now, or putting anyone she loved in danger.
She’d overheard what her brother wanted to do, and she would absolutely forbid it. She suspected Oliver had already thought of a duel to.
Her new lady’s maid, Claire, was putting the final touches to her dress when Megan heard the carriage pull up. Excitement skittered over her skin and her face flushed with color at the idea of Oliver seeing her dressed like this. For the first time she felt worthy enough to stand by his side.
The sound of footsteps in the entrance hall below carried up the staircase, and Megan pressed her palms flat against her skirts to still the trembling in her hands.
Claire stepped back, tilting her head to one side, and declared the effect satisfactory with a quiet smile that Megan suspected meant considerably more than satisfactory.
“You look beautiful, my lady,” Claire said simply.
Megan turned to the looking glass one final time.
The gown was deep sapphire silk, cut in the fashionable empire style with a delicate overlay of ivory lace at the bodice and sleeves.
Her hair had been dressed high with soft curls framing her face, and her mother had sent up a simple strand of pearls that had once belonged to her grandmother.
She looked, Megan thought with a startled jolt, like herself.
Not the hollow creature who had existed in the shadows of Penharrow’s estate, not the wild-haired fugitive who had stumbled through the Welsh countryside, but a woman.
A lady. Someone who had every right to descend that staircase and take her place among the people gathered below.
She straightened her spine and went to the door.
The voices rose to meet her as she reached the top of the staircase. Her mother’s warm laugh, the deep rumble of her brother Harry’s voice, and beneath it all, quieter than the rest, the voice she had been listening for all afternoon. She found Oliver before she had taken the second step down.
He was standing at the foot of the stairs speaking to Harry, one hand resting at his side with that easy, unhurried confidence that she had come to know so well.
He had not yet looked up. She watched him for just a moment.
The breadth of his shoulders in his dark evening coat, the line of his jaw as he turned his head slightly to hear something Harry said, and then someone in the room noticed her, and Oliver looked up.
He went very still.
It was not a polite, measured expression of approval, the kind she imagined gentlemen produced in drawing rooms when convention required it.
It was something else entirely. His gaze moved over her slowly, from the pearls at her throat to the fall of sapphire silk, and when it reached her face again there was something raw and unguarded in his expression that made her breath catch.
Whatever composure he had assembled, it had come apart at the seams.
Megan descended the remaining stairs with her chin lifted and her heart hammering in a manner wholly unbecoming a duke’s daughter.
“Lady Megan.” His voice was slightly rougher than usual as she reached the bottom and held out her hand. It’s the first time he’d addressed her as lady and she liked it.
He bowed over it with perfect propriety, but his fingers closed around hers a moment longer than was strictly necessary, and when he straightened the raw desire in his eyes had not entirely disappeared.
“My lord,” she said.
“You look—” He stopped. Started again. “You are—”
“Thank you,” she said, taking pity on him.
Harry coughed behind his fist.
The Dowager Duchess of Saxton, who had been deep in conversation with Megan’s mother across the room, appeared at Oliver’s elbow with the unerring instinct of a woman who had never missed a significant moment in her life.
“Splendidly done, my dear,” she said to Megan, with a smile that managed to be both approving and deeply amused at the same moment.
She patted Oliver’s arm. “Do close your mouth, dear.”
“I wasn’t—” He stopped at the look on his grandmother’s face and surrendered. “Yes, Grandmother.”
Her mother crossed the room and tucked her arm through Megan’s, drawing her gently away to make introductions to the Duke of Saxton, and Megan allowed herself one glance back over her shoulder.
Oliver was watching her still, with an expression that made her feel warm from her collarbone to her hairline.
Dinner was announced within the half-hour, but before the little party began to move toward the dining room, Oliver appeared quietly at her side.
“Lady Megan.” He spoke low enough that it didn’t carry. “Might I have a private word with you before we go in?”
She looked at him curiously. His expression had settled into something harder to read than the unguarded shock on the staircase. Careful and deliberate, the way it looked when he was choosing his words with great precision.
“Of course.”
Her mother gave them a benevolent and entirely transparent glance as Oliver offered Megan his arm and led her to the small sitting room just off the entrance hall.
He closed the door softly behind them and then stood for a moment with his hands behind his back, which Megan had learned was what he did when he was gathering himself.
“I want to ask you something,” he began. “And I need you to understand that I am asking because I want you to have a choice. Not because I have doubts.” He paused. “That is important. I want that stated clearly at the outset.”
Megan watched him. There was something very serious in his face. “All right.”
“When we agreed, that is when I asked you to marry me, and you said yes—” He exhaled slowly.
“That was in different circumstances. You were in danger. You were dependent on me in a way that I hope very much you are no longer, and I want to make certain that what you said then was not colored by that.”
She was quiet. The warmth that had carried her down the staircase began, slowly, to cool.
“You have choices now,” he continued. “You have your family. You have your mother, and your brother, and your father’s name and title, which is no small thing.
You could have a season.” He said the word as though he had carefully rehearsed it.
“You could meet other men. Men who have not dragged you through a Welsh forest or held you at gunpoint or—”
“You never held me at gunpoint,” she said carefully.
“The principle stands.” His jaw was tight. “You deserve to make this choice from a position of freedom, not necessity. So I am asking you now, when you have everything, you need regardless of your answer, do you still want to marry me?”
Megan stared at him.
She understood, in the part of her mind that was working clearly, that he believed himself to be giving her something.
That he thought this speech was generous.
But what she heard, underneath the careful construction of it, was a man building himself a door.
Giving himself a dignified means of exit while appearing to hand her the key.
“I see,” she said.
Something flickered across his face. “Megan—”
“You want to be certain I’m not marrying you out of desperation.” She kept her voice very steady. “That I haven’t mistaken gratitude for something else.”
“That is not what I said.”
“It is very much what you said.”
“I said you deserve a choice.”
“You said I should meet other men.”
A muscle moved in his jaw. “Because you should be able to if you want to. You’ve never had that opportunity.”
“I don’t want other men.” She turned slightly toward the window.
The back of her throat had gone tight in a way she absolutely refused to give in to.
“But I think I understand what you are telling me. That you feel the circumstances of how we met perhaps bound you to an offer you might not otherwise have made, and you are finding a gracious way to—”
“That is not—” He stopped. Then, with considerable feeling: “Good God, is that what you think this is?”
She didn’t answer, which was an answer in itself.
She heard him move. Then she heard something she had never heard before. The unmistakable sound of Oliver Sommerset, Marquess of Astor, hitting the floor.
She turned.
He was on his knees.
Not in the vaguely romantic attitude of a man staging a proposal.
He was on both knees on the sitting room rug, looking up at her with an expression so entirely stripped of its usual composure that it might have been someone else’s face entirely.
He looked, she thought with a sudden fierce ache behind her sternum, as frightened as she had ever felt.