He hadno idea.
They were not strangers, the two of them. Imogen had encountered him more than once in London drawing rooms and crowded ballrooms, had stood not five feet from him at Lady Carrington’s spring rout last April, when he had been holding forth on something tedious about Parliament to a gentleman whose name she could not now recall. He had always been polite to her on the rare occasions when politeness had been required. Distant. Amused, perhaps, in the way one might be amused by a sparrow that had wandered too close to a picnic—mild, fleeting, ultimately inconsequential.
He had never once looked at her as if she were a woman of consequence. He had never, she suspected, looked at her long enough to be certain of the color of her eyes.
Well.
Thatwas about to change.
She reached the altar at last, and the rustle of her train settling against the stone was the loudest sound in the church. The vicar—a round, kind-faced man with spectacles that kept slipping down his nose—gave her a small, encouraging smile that she could not return, then prompted her gently to place her hand into the waiting grasp before her.
Tristan’s hand.
She had not expected it to be warm. Foolish, she knew—he was a man, not a marble effigy, however much he resembled one—but something in his stillness, his composure, had made her brace for cold. Instead, his fingers closed around hers with a steady, sure pressure, and even through both their gloves, she could feel the heat of him, the contained strength, the way he held her hand as though it were a thing already belonging to him.
Her father’s absence did not go unnoticed—another irregularity among many—but no one spoke. No one dared interrupt the ceremony now that it had begun. There had been a story prepared, of course; an attack of gout, a carriage gone lame on the road from Hampshire. Eliza had drilled it into her last night between sobs and frantic, whispered apologies.If anyone asks. Only if anyone asks.
The vicar cleared his throat and began.
The words flowed over her, familiar and solemn. Sacred vows spoken in measured cadence, the same vows she had heard at half a dozen weddings in her four-and-twenty years, the same vows she had once, in girlhood, imagined speaking herself to some shadowy, kind-eyed gentleman of her own choosing. Imogen forced herself to listen, to respond when required. Her voice did not falter. It did not betray her—though she had taken some small precaution there, pitching it just slightly lower than her usual register, softening the consonants in the way Eliza always did when she was nervous.
“Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love him, comfort him, honour and keep him, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?”
“I will.”
The words left her lips steady and sure, and a small, terrible part of her marveled at how easily she had said them. As if they had been waiting on her tongue all along.
Across from her, Tristan did not hesitate.
“I will.”
There was no flicker of doubt in his tone. No pause. No suspicion. His voice was deeper than she remembered—or perhaps she had simply never stood close enough to hear it properly before, never been close enough to feel the low resonance of it travel through the slim bones of her wrist where his hand still cradled hers.
Imogen’s pulse quickened until she could feel it in her throat, in her temples, in the tender place behind her ear where the veil’s pins pressed against her scalp.
He did not know.
A strange, almost disorienting calm settled over her as the ceremony continued. It was happening.Truly happening.Each word spoken bound them further, sealed a fate that neither of them had anticipated and only one of them yet understood. She felt curiously detached from her own body, as though she were watching herself from the back of the church—a slim, veiled figure in ivory silk, her hand laid trustingly in the hand of a duke who believed her to be his bride.
“…to love, cherish, and to obey…”
She nearly choked on that last word but forced it out all the same, and felt his fingers tighten almost imperceptibly aroundhers when she did. Whether in approval or in some unconscious reflex, she could not say.
To obey.
The irony of it nearly undid her. She had defied her family, her conscience, the laws of both Church and State, and the simple practical wisdom of every novel she had ever read—all to stand here and promiseobedienceto a man she had just deceived more thoroughly than any wife in the history of England.
“…till death do you part.”
The vicar smiled, lifting his hands in a small, beneficent gesture, his spectacles catching the light from the high windows.
“I now pronounce you husband and wife.”
The church seemed to exhale as one—a soft, collective sound, half sigh, half murmur, the rustle of silk and the faint creak of pews as the guests permitted themselves to settle into the satisfaction of a thing well done.
Imogen did not breathe at all.
“Your Grace,” the vicar said warmly, “you may kiss your bride.”