Page 45 of The Duke’s Hidden Runaway Bride

Ophelia lowered her gaze to her folded hands. Her father’s words returned to her.

Think what is being spent and who must pay it.

Lady Daventry rose, signalling that the interview was over.

“I will receive you tonight if you come, and I will stand by that choice afterwards. What you do beyond it is between you and my son.”

Elise waited until they were in the carriage before giving voice to her anger. “She had no right.”

“She told me the truth,” Ophelia said wearily.

“She told you her fears and dressed them as facts.”

“Some of them are facts.”

“Some,” Elise conceded. “Not all.”

Ophelia turned towards the window and watched London pass. Adrian had spent his life beneath the weight of his name. He had only just begun to believe himself capable of carrying it. Loving Ophelia would add her scandal to that burden, along with every insult England could devise for Shirin’s daughter and her children.

He believed he could bear it.

Ophelia loved him too well not to wonder whether he should have to.

She sat in her room and stared at the ball gown spread out on the bed, waiting for her to call Bronwen and begin to get ready. And in her head, the old voice was whispering.

Make yourself small. Give in. It is what you are for.

If she resisted, Markham might proceed. Her father’s credit might fail before Adrian and Soane secured enough advantage over him. Elise would stand beside her and be mocked for it. Lady Daventry would divide her family and her world to receive her. Adrian would tie the Calder name to a scandal already staining him in print.

If Ophelia married Markham, he had promised the proceedings would stop. She knew what his promises were worth, but in the darkness she began treating this one as truth because surrender required it.

Her father would be safe. Elise could return to Wales. Adrian would be spared the necessity of choosing between Ophelia and his family. He would hate her decision, but hatred would pass. In time, he might marry a woman the world welcomed and remember Wales as a winter madness.

The thought hurt so badly that she mistook the pain for proof that it was noble. She called it sacrifice because cowardice was an uglier word.

Yet in the one honest corner of herself, Ophelia knew what she was considering. Markham had not left her without another path. He had only made that path public, difficult, and bright.

The evidence against him existed. She understood it as well as any man among them, yet if private pressure failed, she would have to stand openly behind the accusation. She would have to let London see what Olivia Jones had hidden: Shirin Sethna’s daughter, Josiah James’s pupil, the woman who could read a settlement and follow money through a lie.

She had spent years pretending that woman did not exist.

Marriage asked her only to disappear again. The other path asked her to be seen.

Ophelia opened her strongbox and took out her mother’s bangles. The gold lay heavy and warm in her hands, chased with the pattern Shirin had worn every day of her adult life, in Bombay and then in England.

Ophelia had hidden them because they revealed too much. They named the mother she had been taught to soften into silence and the inheritance society preferred her to apologise for.

She could sell them. Markham would give her no money of her own once they were married, but the bangles might purchase some small liberty within the cage.

Or she could wear them that night.

That frightened her more.

Bronwen found her sitting on the edge of the bed with the gold in her lap. The maid stopped in the doorway and studied her face.

“Don’t, miss.”

“Do not what?”