A Lady for a Duke

by Alexis Hall

“You do know,” remarked Lady Marleigh dryly, “that contrary to popular belief needlepoint is not mandatory for our sex.” Viola shot her an amused look from beneath brows whose tilt, she knew, inclined to the devilish. “Well, forgive me for attempting to acquire some accomplishments.” “My dear, an accomplishment is inventing the hydraulic press or investigating the properties of nitrous oxide. It is not making a picture of a willow tree on cloth.”

She’d never allowed herself to question whether the choices she’d made had been right. They’d simply been necessary, whatever their price. It was different, though, now that she understood that the cost was not just hers to bear. Not enough to make her doubt, but enough to make her hurt.

Gracewood was right to mourn her. She had died two years ago on a battlefield in France. She was Viola Carroll. She had always been Viola Carroll. And some part of her had always known it. There was only one thing she hadn’t known. One truth that, locked in pursuit of her own, she hadn’t grasped. It was simply this: That love—that her love for Gracewood and his love for his friend—had not died with her.

“Leave? We can’t leave. Mira is already hovering perilously close to the line between charmingly unique and frankly peculiar.”

“I can’t keep offering some semblance of friendship to a man I—a man I must have always loved, in ways I had no hope of comprehending, and know that I am holding half of myself from him, and that I must for fear of breaking his heart for the second time.”

😭😭

“Is it so wrong, that I would prefer to think of you happy beyond the gates of Morgencald?” “I want you to be happy also.” Her voice was wavering. She took a second to steady it. “Perhaps we could promise each other?” He lifted his brows. “Promise each other to be happy?” “Promise each other to try,” she finished desperately.

Oh God. He was… was he flirting?

“I could never marry you, Gracewood. The world—” “Forgive my language, but”—his eyes were as steady on hers as the clasp upon her wrist, his mouth suddenly full of smiles—“fuck the world. I will change it for you if I have to.”

Two years of grief suddenly seemed the most irrelevant price to pay for Viola’s return. For her chance to be who she was meant to be. And his, at last, to know her as she was meant to be known. If only he had trusted her. And listened to his heart, instead of to his hurt.

“That I did not know how to see you,” he told her, “is not your lie.”

just keep falling more and more in love with these 2 💕

“I would say”—he shaped the words close to her mouth, as if each of them was its own kiss, a private prayer—“I love you as a man loves a woman, but we both know that love is not bound by such narrow terms. So instead let me simply tell you that I love you. I love you with the unfading flame of my friendship. With every drop of ardour in my blood. I love you with my soul, as some reserve their faith for absent gods. I love you as I believe in what is right and hope for what is good. I love you with everything I am and ever was—and if you will only let me, with every day that comes, and every self that I could ever be.”

Holy pronouncement of love 🥰