Page 12 of The Duke’s Hidden Runaway Bride

Lying awake that night, she forced herself to examine it dispassionately. A danger named was a danger half disarmed.

She was beginning to like him.

Worse than like, even.

A charming man had been kind to her for a fortnight, and she was falling towards that kindness as the snow fell, inevitably. He had made her laugh. He had listened when she spoke of her mother. He had seen the questions she could not answer and chosen not to ask them.

She could not afford any of it.

She was Ophelia James, runaway bride and scandal, living under a false name, her safety staked on no one learning where she was. Adrian was a London duke, well acquainted with the man she had fled.

It is nothing, she told herself. An hour over a hoop of withies, no more.

The fire had long since burned down to embers, and still she lay watching the dark ceiling, tracing shapes in it that would not resolve into anything.

She lay awake for far too long trying to convince herself of it.

Chapter Seven

The Yule log had been cut before the snow, a great butt of seasoned oak left waiting by the stable wall. Now, in the blue cold of Christmas Eve afternoon, the men dragged it over to the house on ropes, with much shouting, slipping, and unnecessary advice from Miss Pettibone, who had wedged herself in the doorway in a state of high delight.

The duke hauled with the rest, coatless and with his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. Ophelia had come to the door only to persuade Miss Pettibone back to the fireside, but found herself unable to leave. The men’s laughter, the creak of the rope, Adrian with snow in his dark hair and his idle elegance forgotten in the plain effort of pulling: the sight held her transfixed.

He saw her. He always saw her now.

Instead of waving or calling out some gallant nonsense, he only grinned at her, breathless and conspiratorial, as if she were in on a great joke with him, and bent again to the rope.

Ophelia made herself look away. She took Miss Pettibone’s arm and went inside, her heart thumping foolishly.

The log was brought in, set in the vast hearth, and lit with a saved splinter of last year’s, for the luck of it, Bronwen explained. As darkness came down, the fire grew until the hall was washed in amber and the cold driven into the corners, though a draught still crept under the great door.

The wassail bowl arrived steaming, a great brown sea of spiced ale. Everyone exclaimed over it and to Ophelia’s dismay, Mrs. Probert promptly disclaimed all credit, insisting it had been made to Miss Jones’s special recipe. Adrian stopped with the cup at his lips, an arrested stillness catching his face, and Ophelia pretended not to see it.

Then the waits came, heard first as a thread of music in the frozen dark. The singers from the village below struggled up through the drifts with a lantern and a fiddle, as they had every Christmas Eve out of memory. The household crowded to the door and flung it open, and the carols came in on the cold: Ar Hyd y Nos in Welsh, then While Shepherds Watched in English, the singers’ breath steaming in the lantern light.

Lady Elise sent out gingerbread, hot wassail, and Christmas coin. Adrian stood beside Ophelia in the doorway watching the singers, and neither of them spoke.

It was the happiest she had been since her mother died.

She had not meant to let down her guard. The warmth of the season somehow got into her regardless: voices raised together in carols of praise, the sweetness of the wassail still on her tongue.

After the waits had been thanked and fed and sent home, the household settled into the lazy quiet that followed. Somewhere in the long evening, Ophelia found herself sitting with Adrian in the deep window seat at the end of the hall, where frost had begun to flower on the glass.

She never knew how it began or how it became so easy. They spoke first of the fine singing by the waits, and Sir Rhys’s dreadful coat. Then, by degrees she did not follow, they began to speak of true things.

Adrian told her, lightly and in fragments, of the fierce old grandfather who had thought Adrian a waste of space, and of the uncle who should have inherited. His own father had been charming, feckless, and dead by the time Adrian was twelve, after his uncle just a year earlier, still unwed, leaving Adrian the only surviving heir to the title, much to his grandfather’s fury.

He made a joke of it, but Ophelia had learned to hear what lay beneath his comedy, as he had learned to hear what lay beneath her silence.

“And so I became excellent at leaving rooms,” he said, turning his cup between his hands. “The moment anything grows heavy, I am gone, charming to the last. My aunt calls it my gift.”

He glanced at her, and for once his smile looked like an effort.

“I tell you this because you have the most disconcerting way of listening, and because you are the only person I have met in years who appears to want nothing from me. It is extraordinarily restful.” He watched her, thoughtful. “I cannot decide whether you dislike me or only mistrust everything I represent.”

The question was too close to the bone.

She felt the danger of it as one feels the edge of river ice underfoot. Safety required that she rise, make her excuses, and go upstairs.