“I was opposed to marrying anyone foolishly,” he said.
“You were opposed to marrying me,” she returned, plain. “Then you weren’t. Something happened between those two sentences. Tell me what it was.”
He watched the fire as if it could buy him time.
“You’ll tell me anyway,” she went on. “In some form. I would rather hear it now, while I am warm and cross than later, when I am calm and the words will do more damage.”
“You think very highly of the timing of words,” he murmured.
“I think it matters,” she said.
He rubbed a thumb along the edge of the desk, not quite a fidget. Then he let out the breath he’d been holding and turned to face her fully.
“You spoke to Rondell,” he said. “I rode with him. He was pleased to be riding beside a duke who allegedly shares his tastes. He mistook me for a confessional, though.”
“And he confessed,” she said, “to what exactly?”
“He bragged,” Stephen corrected. “He told me his method. He promises marriage to a girl. He meets her at midnight. They drive north. They stop at the last sensible inn before the border, and he sleeps with her. Then he disappears before dawn.”
Maria’s throat closed on the last sentence.
“He said this to you,” she managed, “as if it were… clever.”
“He explained that no decent girl would confess the truth when she returned home. That she would say they had married and found some unbridgeable difference, because her father’s pride would put a hand over her mouth before she could tell him where she’d been left and how.”
Maria sat very still. Her body remembered cold; it had just begun to forget.
“He picked the girls?” she asked, after a breath.
“He picked girls who did not know enough to be afraid,” Stephen said. “Or girls who were so tired of fear they mistook him for a way out.”
“And you decided… what? That I would have been one of them?”
“I decided you were exactly the kind of woman he would find,” Stephen said, not softening it. “Someone who doesn’t like to bother anyone with what she wants. He would have said the right words and made you feel wise for agreeing to them.”
“I’m not a fool,” she said, because she had to say it at least once for her own sake.
“I know,” he said. “But you hadn’t had time to practice being not a fool in this world yet.”
She almost laughed, because it was such an exact sentence. “And so you…?”
“I told him to be quiet,” Stephen said. “I told him that if he spoke to you again without three people present, I would move the earth under his feet and make it seem like the weather did it.”
“That would be theatrical,” she said.
“I can be,” he said. “Then I rode home, and I went to your brother and I told him we were going to marry.”
“You could have toldmefirst,” she said, the old anger flickering back.
“You had told me you had found your future husband,” he said. “I was not going to argue with you about a man I intended to throw out of the county before supper.”
“I would have liked to be given the courtesy of a conversation.”
“You would have insisted on seeing the best in him,” Stephen said. “And I would have said something unforgivable about your judgment. And then I would have married you anyway. I chose the shorter road with fewer bruises.”
“For whom?” she asked.
“For you,” he said.