Page 81 of The Courtship Dance

“Yes,” he agreed. “I think perhaps we are.” He pulled her into his arms. “I love you, Francesca, more than anything or anyone in the world. I want to marry you.”

“But your heir…” She resisted, not leaning into him.

“Blast the heir. My cousin Bertram can inherit, or his sons. And if he manages to produce none, then it will pass to some other distant relative. I will be dead then, anyway, and I do not think I will care. What matters to me are all the years remaining to me…and spending them with you.”

He reached down and tilted up her chin. “Francesca…beloved…you are the only woman I want for my duchess. Will you marry me?”

Francesca looked up at him, and it was a moment before she could speak past the lump in her throat. “Yes, Sinclair. I will marry you.”

THEY WERE MARRIED two days later in Lilles House in London. The ceremony was simple, with no family or friends except Irene and Gideon to witness as the duke slipped the Lilles wedding ring upon her finger.

Rochford had obtained a special license before he had asked her to marry him that day in her garden, and he called in his favor to Lady Mary’s fiancé, Christopher Browning, asking him to marry them posthaste. He had no intention, Rochford told Francesca firmly, of allowing her to slip away again. And Francesca, smiling, had agreed. In truth, she wanted to waste no more time being anything other than his wife.

Afterwards, when their friends had left, Rochford took her hand in his and said, “Come. I have a present for you.”

She laughed as she followed him upstairs. “Another gift? But you have positively showered me with gifts. All the jewels…the dresses I ordered yesterday from Mlle. du Plessis.”

“Those are but a drop in the bucket,” he assured her with a grin. “It is my intention to buy you so many clothes that even you will not be able to wear them all. And slippers. And jewels. We will buy every gown and bauble in Paris on our honeymoon. I have years to make up for, years when I could do nothing, had no right to do anything for you, and I had to stand by and watch as you struggled.”

He led her into his bedroom and across to the small dressing room beyond. Unlocking a door in the wall, he revealed a closet of shelves behind it, many of them filled with jewelry cases. He removed a mahogany jewelry box and carried it out to the bedroom, setting it on a table.

“More jewels?” Francesca laughed. “How many jewels can the Lilleses have?”

“A positively vulgar amount, I assure you,” her husband replied. “However, these are different. They do not belong to the Lilles family. They are yours.”

Intrigued by his words and expression, Francesca pulled open the bottom drawer of the small chest. In it lay a sparkling tiara. Her eyes widened. It was a tiara that had belonged to her grandmother. She had given it to Francesca when she married Lord Haughston. Francesca looked over at Sinclair, her eyes wide.

“I don’t understand.”

He nodded toward the box, and she continued opening the drawers, taking out necklaces and bracelets, earrings and rings…all sorts of jewelry that had once belonged to her. The Haughston parure of emeralds Andrew had presented her with on their wedding day…a brooch of pearls and sapphires that Dom had given her…the pearl necklace from her parents.

“These are the things I sold!” Francesca stared at him. “You—you bought them?”

He nodded. “I saw a necklace once at the jeweler’s and recognized it as one you had worn. I was certain, and I managed to worm the information out of the man. He admitted that your maid had been selling things for you. So I bought it, and I told him to bring everything else you sold him to me.”

“So that is why I was able to get such good prices for them! I thought it was Maisie’s amazing bargaining skills.” Francesca laughed, tears filling her eyes. “I never dreamed that it was you….”

“The gold and silver pieces are downstairs in the butler’s pantry.”

“No! You bought all those, too? You did not need to take those, as well.”

“I doubted that most of them meant much to you, but I wanted to make sure—” He broke off and shrugged.

“That I got the best price for them,” Francesca finished.

“I am sorry. I could not buy your wedding ring back. He told me he had already sold it.”

“It doesn’t matter. None of them matter.” She smiled at him, her face glowing, struggling to hold back the tears in her eyes.

She understood now the depth of his caring. What he had done for her all these years, silently, expecting nothing in return, thinking that she loved him not, knowing that she had believed lies about him—yet despite all that, he had secretly purchased the things she had sold only because he wanted to help her. Because he could not bear to see her struggling with her poverty. She saw now, too, how often he had manipulated things so that she could make money—the bet he had made with her last year about finding a husband for Constance, the way he had led his great-aunt to her to arrange a wife for Gideon, the allowance for food he had arranged with her butler when Callie stayed with her, which she was sure had been far in excess of what was needed.

She swallowed hard and took his hands in hers. “All that matters is that you wanted to buy them. I love you more than I can ever tell you.”

“That is good. Because I love you even more.”

He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. His hand curled around the sapphire bracelet he had given her after their bet. She had worn it and the sapphire earrings today; her dress had not mattered, but those gifts from him had.

He rubbed the sapphires thoughtfully with his thumb. “I thought that I would have to pay a great price for these. I feared you might have sold it somewhere else. The other day, when I saw you wearing it and my earrings…why did you not sell them?”