Page 59 of How Not to Marry a Duke

Free.

The word detonated inside him like a shell burst.

* * *

He did not walk to the stables.

He ran.

Through the corridors of Carthedge Hall, past startled servants and his mother's outraged exclamation from the morning room, down the stone steps and across the courtyard where the November wind cut through his coat like a blade. He had not stopped to don a hat. He had not stopped to think. He had simply moved, his body acting on the imperative that his mind had not yet fully processed.

Free. He was free.

The stable held the warm animal perfume of hay and horses and leather oil. His Arabian—the grey he had ridden to Spain and back, the one Florinda had admired in that long-ago summer before everything went wrong—lifted its head at his approach, ears pricking forward.

"Your Grace?" The head groom scrambled up from his stool, bewildered by the sight of the Duke of Carthedge appearing unannounced, coatless, breathing hard. "Is all well?"

"Saddle him." Frederick was already reaching for the tack, his hands moving without conscious direction. "Now."

"Your Grace, the weather—it is threatening rain⁠—"

"I do not care about the rain." Frederick pulled the saddle from its rack, the weight of it familiar in his arms. He had done this a thousand times in the army—saddled his own mount whilst shells burst overhead and men screamed and the world ended around him. He could do it now. He could do anything now.

Free. The word sang through him like a bell.

"Where are you going, Your Grace?" The groom was helping now, cinching the girth, adjusting the stirrups. "Shall I send word ahead?"

"Ashbourne House." The name tasted like a prayer on his tongue. "There is a woman in a tower who believes I am going to marry someone else. I intend to correct that misapprehension."

* * *

He was mounted and ready to ride when Thorne appeared in the stable doorway, breathing hard from his own dash across the courtyard.

"Your Grace." The solicitor's spectacles were askew. His cravat had come undone. Frederick had never seen him look anything less than immaculate, and the sight was almost more shocking than the contents of the report. "There are legal proceedings to discuss. Lord Ashworth must be confronted. The evidence must be presented properly⁠—"

"Write them down." Frederick gathered the reins, his horse shifting beneath him, sensing his urgency. "I shall read them when I return."

"When will that be?"

Frederick looked down at the man who had just handed him his freedom. Thorne's face was flushed from exertion, his eyes bright with the particular satisfaction of a man who had won an impossible case.

"When I have proposed to the right woman."

He did not wait for a response. He dug his heels into the Arabian's flanks and burst from the stable into the grey November afternoon, the wind tearing at his hair, the rain beginning to fall, and none of it—none of it—signifying in the slightest.

Five miles to Ashbourne House.

He intended to be there before nightfall.

* * *

The miles fell away beneath the Arabian's hooves—five becoming four, four becoming three. The rain soaked through his coat, plastered his hair to his forehead, turned the road to mud that his horse navigated with the sure-footed grace of an animal bred for worse terrain than this. Frederick barely noticed. His mind was a litany, a prayer, a desperate catalogue of hope.

Free, he thought, and the word was a drumbeat keeping time with the horse's stride. Free. Free. Free.

Three miles. Two. The rain intensified, blurring the landscape into grey smears of hedgerow and field. His shoulder ached—the old wound from Spain, aggravated by the cold—but he did not slow. Could not slow. There was a woman waiting who did not know she was being waited for.

One mile. And then—fourteen, he thought. Fourteen gold threads in her hair. Fourteen stairs he had carried her up and down, morning and evening, whilst his arms memorised the weight of her. Fourteen days until the ball that no longer signified, because there would be no announcement, no marriage to the wrong woman, no lifetime of honouring a contract built upon fraud.