A Perfectly Rational Proposal

“What?”

At my words, Ian froze all over again, sharp as cracking ice. He rubbed at his ear with his palm, as if he doubted the thing still worked.

Do not worry. Your ears are in perfect working order.

“I have weighed this with the utmost rationality, and I am proposing to you now. It is not a joke, and it is not a prank. Marry me.”

“……”

Ian closed his mouth. It had not been long, but I already knew when this man went silent. It was when he needed to think—when anger was likely to spoil the matter, and so he gave himself a brief pause.

But when you are seated at a negotiation table, giving your counterpart time to think is something only fools do!

I shot to my feet. Then, like some tragic actress, I clenched both fists, twisted my face with all the strength I had, and fixed my eyes on Ian. And I shouted.

“Or were you truly toying with me?!”

“Gah!”

Crash!

Somewhere, a plate hit the floor. My voice was loud enough to ring through the whole of the hall.

The color drained from Ian’s face.

I was just about to hurl something even louder, and far easier to misunderstand, for all the room to hear.

“Mmph!”

A large hand sealed my mouth. The palm was far softer than James’s. I blinked.

Well, James spent ten years on the battlefield. Of course his hands were rough.

And the only thought I could muster, even in the middle of this, was a comparison with my husband.

The weight of those twenty years sat heavier on me than I had realized. Half-risen from his chair on account of my shouting, Ian let out a hollow laugh.

“I am a man who has never once been left speechless in conversation with another, and yet in this brief moment you have managed to rattle me several times over.”

Was that a compliment? I answered with the only means of expression left to me—blinking. The man holding my gaze finally sighed.

“Very well. Let us talk in a private room.”

In practical terms, it was a declaration of defeat.

The private rooms at Aramir were furnished much like the main hall. The only difference was that the space had been divided by great crystal partitions.

I had been here more than once already, and I was not about to gawk around the place like some wide-eyed rustic.

“Then, a pleasant afternoon…”

“One moment.”

I called after the manager who had shown us in and was on the point of vanishing. He lifted his head and looked at me. I settled back against the sofa.

“I’ve had my fill of sweet and savory things, so a smoky Earl Grey would do nicely.”

“…You like tea.”

He seemed to know I had enjoyed a lavish tea course out in the hall. I shrugged.

“Yes. My one luxury. Whereas Your Grace possesses wealth enough that a luxury of this degree would hardly feel like a luxury at all.”

The jab was plain enough: are you really going to begrudge a pittance like this? Ian, who caught it, stared straight through me.

“Bring it.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

The manager withdrew with a polite bow. There would be a little time before the tea arrived, and I had nothing in particular to say to the man across from me, so I repeated myself like a parrot.

“Marry me.”

“…Must you keep saying that?”

He looked genuinely at a loss.

Even in the days when I had set high society spinning as the Duchess of Parnel, I had never once seen his composure come undone. The man I knew was more taciturn, and a little more rigid.

Is it because he’s young, too?

Perhaps. I tried to recall what I knew of the Duke of Tyrone at this point in time, and nothing came to mind but the National Impotent.

His faintly furrowed eyes were pressing me for an answer. I smiled, the corners of my eyes curving prettily.

“If Your Grace accepts readily, I’ll stop of my own accord.”

Meaning: if you don’t want to hear it, take the proposal. At that, Ian’s face twisted further still. He worried his lower lip between his teeth, then spoke in a tone edged with irritation.

“Is there no choice in the matter? Even a slave is permitted to choose where he will labor.”

A slave? He disliked it that much?

Then I ought to be considerate.

I held up two fingers.

“I’ll give you two choices. Marry me gladly, or marry me while blushing. Which will it be?”

“……”

Ian pressed his lips shut and stared at me without so much as a blink. More than I had expected, the man of this moment seemed a shy, unworldly youth.

How amusing.

A mischievous smile rose to my mouth of its own accord. To think the miracle of turning back time had handed me the chance to tease that iron fortress of a Duke of Tyrone.

I pressed both fists to my cheeks in a show of cuteness and blinked up at him like a kitten. So what if I was forty on the inside? The body was twenty.

“For the record, you’re choosing my reaction. As you’ve already seen, I’m quite the actress. If shy is to your taste, I’ll be shy starting now.”

“Let us not.”

The joke had evidently gone too far. Ian shook his head and let my words slip in one ear and out the other. Then he set one arm lightly on the table, propped his chin upon his hand, and regarded me with languid eyes.

“Why?”

“Pardon?”

“One indecent song makes the rounds, and you leap to marrying me. Why such an extreme conclusion?”

“I already explained it clearly enough.”

A sigh escaped me at his suddenly serious manner. I straightened my back and met his gaze.

It was not the whole truth, but neither was it a complete lie, and so the words came easily.

“That song has put me in a considerable bind. My mothers-in-law are making my life utterly miserable. So, since things have come to this, I would rather turn the song into an established fact.”

“For a reason as slight as that?”

At those words, the corner of my mouth twisted of its own accord.

In this life I had so far slipped past the mothers-in-law’s explosions by a hair’s breadth and no small amount of cunning, but in the last one I had suffered every kind of torment at their hands—from crude, stupid beatings to the cleverer cruelties of false rumors and quiet ostracism.

Twenty years had passed, and still the old wounds stabbed at me like glass. I mocked him in a voice as cold as ice.

“Slight, is it? I take it you’ve been beaten black and blue by the mothers-in-law in my place.”

Ian’s broad shoulders flinched. Even so, he was no blockhead like James; he lowered his head without protest.

“That was discourteous of me.”

“You’re forgiven.”

I had no wish to pick a fight with him over right and wrong, so I took the apology at once. Then I laid out what I had truly wanted to say, and more plaintively.

“And in the same vein, I like very much that you have no parents I would be obliged to wait upon. That you are a man of few words, that you are someone who would take no interest in a wife, and that you can’t get it up—all of that is perfectly fine with me. So please, marry me.”

I had been honest from the very start.

Holding one’s cards close is a luxury reserved for those with a strong hand. How far can a person bluff with nothing but a single cracked tile?

I’ve shown you everything I have.

So now only his decision remained.

I thought it was not a bad offer for Ian, either. I had served as a duchess for twenty years; I knew the work. He was a man who, even twenty years from now, would be dogged by gossip for having no wife at all. Surely it would be better to have a wife like me—one who kept her head down, did her duties, and was as good as not there.

“……”

But Ian, whom I had expected to answer at once, only kept his lips pressed shut. At last I could not hold my temper, and I was halfway to shoving myself up from the seat.

“Look here, answer me, and quickly—”

“Pardon me.”

An unfamiliar voice wedged itself between us. None other than the manager.

Did he overhear?

I stole a glance at his face. That utterly unperturbed expression suggested he had not caught a word of my outrageous remarks. I smoothed a hand over my pounding heart.

As if to bid me be calm, a sharp, biting fragrance tickled my nose.

“Your smoky Earl Grey.”

It was the scent of the tea.

Smoky Earl Grey was, quite literally, Earl Grey dressed in a smoked aroma, and it carried a harsh scent not unlike a cigarette. Most noblewomen tended to dislike it; the taste of the leaf clung thickly to the tongue.

Ian, as if he knew as much, looked at me in surprise.

“You like this tea?”

Most of them. Not all. I answered while filling my cup to the brim.

“If you are asking because it isn’t the very finest, then yes, I like it. It ranks in my personal top five.”

“Hm.”

In a spirit of here, have a taste of this yourself, I filled Ian’s cup as well. His sapphire-blue eyes watched the tea ripple. I did not bother waiting for him to drink; I lifted my own cup.

Sip by sip—I had just swallowed my third mouthful when Ian took up his cup. Perhaps because of the size of his hand, the porcelain looked small, and yet the way he brought it to his lips was as fluid as running water.

Is he going to drink now? I glanced over, and his lips parted.

“Very well.”

“What?”

Before I could even round my eyes, he drained the cup in a single gulp. I never got the chance to scold him that tea was not meant to be drunk that way, because he set the empty cup down with a neat click and said,

“Let us do it. Marriage.”

Whether the leaves had turned astringent on his tongue as he looked at me, or he was simply and truly annoyed, Ian’s brow was knotted tight. He was so handsome that even a scowl was not the least bit ugly.

And so, somehow, I felt as if I had lost.

He crooked the corner of his mouth into a cold smile.

“As it happens, I was growing thoroughly sick of you as well.”

And even then, the voice was unbearably sexy.