Page 80 of The Duke's Auctioned Virgin
“Aye.”
“Are you going to tell me why?”
“Aye. After.”
“Edward.”
He looked at the vicar. At the roses. At the candles and the guests and Caroline’s tear-streaked face and John by the door and the sunlight on the stone floor. He looked at everything in the chapel except her.
“I’m sorry,” he sighed. “I had something I needed to deal with. It is dealt with. I am here, and I will explain everything, but not now. Not in front of everyone.”
He was still not looking at her. His jaw was tight. His hands hung at his sides, fists clenched, knuckles raw. He was holding himself together the way he always did—with effort, control, and the grim certainty of a man who believed that if he let go of one thing, everything else would follow.
She wanted to grab his face and make him look at her. She wanted to demand answers. She wanted to know whose blood was on his hands and why he smelled of hay and horse sweat and why his coat had dust on the shoulders that looked like it came from a wall.
Instead, she said, “Look at me.”
He did not.
“Edward, look at me.”
He raised his eyes, green and raw and full of something she recognized. Shame. He was ashamed. Not of being late. Not of the blood. But of whatever he had done in the hours before dawn that had brought him to the altar looking like a man who had just proven everything George Turner said about him was true.
She held his gaze. She did not flinch. She did not look at the blood or the dust or the untied cravat. She looked at his eyes and saw the man who had held her hand while she slept, and painted flowers on Gordon’s portrait, and let a little boy put a beetle in his coat pocket.
“We are getting married,” she said. “Right now. In this chapel. With blood on your hands and hay on your coat and the worst cravat I have ever seen. We are getting married because I chose you and you chose me, and whatever happened this morning does not change that. Do you understand?”
Something flashed across his face. The wall cracked. Not all the way, just enough.
“Aye,” he said. “I understand.”
The vicar looked at his Bible, looked at the blood on the groom’s knuckles, and decided that matters of the flesh were between a man and his God.
The ceremony began.
CHAPTER 29
The vicar cleared his throat. He was a small man with spectacles and the weary patience of a clergyman who had seen stranger things than a bloodied groom, though perhaps not many.
“Dearly beloved,” he began. “We are gathered here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony.”
Valeria kept her eyes on Edward. He was looking at the vicar now, standing very still, his hands hanging at his sides. The blood on his knuckles had dried to a dark rust. His coat was dusty. His cravat hung loose. He looked nothing like a duke and everything like the man she had chosen.
Caroline was crying behind her. Quiet tears, the kind that came without sound. Richard had moved closer and was holding her hand. John stood by the door with his arms crossed, watching Edward with an expression that was equal parts respect and warning. Bridget was sitting in the second row, calm and steady,her son on her lap. Evan stood beside her, face unreadable, as if standing at attention rather than attending a wedding.
The vicar asked whether anyone present knew of any just cause or impediment. The chapel was silent. Valeria half expected George to walk through the door. He did not.
The silence held. The candles flickered. Mrs. Grady blew her nose into her gravy-stained handkerchief, and three people in the back row turned around.
The vows followed. Edward turned to face her. His jaw was tight. His eyes were green and raw and steady, and he was finally looking at her the way she had been asking him to look at her for days. Not through her. Not past her. But at her. As though she were the only person in the room. As though the chapel, the guests, the vicar, and the roses had all dissolved, and what remained was just the two of them standing in sunlight, about to promise each other everything.
“I, Edward Langton, take thee, Valeria, to be my wedded wife.” His voice was low, rough, the burr heavier than usual. “To have and to hold from this day forward. For better, for worse. For richer, for poorer. In sickness and in health. To love and to cherish, till death us do part.”
He said love. He said it in front of the vicar and the guests and Caroline’s tears and John’s crossed arms and God and everyone. He said it as though it were a fact, not a feeling. A thing that existed outside of him, solid and immovable, the way a mountain existed or a river or the ground beneath one’s feet.
Now it was her turn.
She took a breath. The chapel was warm. The sunlight danced across the floor. She could hear Caroline sniffling. She could hear the vicar turning pages. She could hear her own heartbeat, steady and sure, and she held onto that steadiness the way she had held onto it in Gordon’s chapel, except this time the steadiness was not a defense. It was a foundation.
