"Then I'll answer it plainly," Avalene said. "The Duke asked me to marry him because he wished to. I accepted for the very same reason. I don't believe either of us owes the rest of the country a more elaborate explanation than that."
Rhys, who had been engaged in conversation a few feet away, arrived at her side in time to catch the tail end of the exchange, and something in his expression made Lord Harcourt's smile falter considerably.
"Edmund," he said, his tone pleasant, but edged with unmistakable warning. "I trust you're not troubling my fiancée with the sort of questions you'd never dare ask me directly."
"Merely making conversation," Harcourt said smoothly, rising from his chair. "Though I'll admit, Rhys, the whole county is rather eager to understand how a woman with no fortune and no name managed to succeed where a hundred eligible ladies failed."
"Because she never once tried to succeed at anything," Rhys said. "She simply was who she was, and I found that considerably more compelling than any calculated performance I've endured across a decade of ballrooms. I'd think carefully, old friend, before you suggest otherwise in my presence again."
Harcourt inclined his head, conceding the point with visible reluctance, and excused himself shortly after, though Avalene noticed him watching her from across the garden for the remainder of the afternoon with an expression she couldn't quite read.
"Don't mind him," Rhys said once they were alone again, his hand finding hers beneath the shade of a flowering tree. "Edmund has spent his whole life certain that nothing good happens without a hidden motive. I suspect it says more about the company he's kept than it does about you."
"He's not entirely wrong to wonder," Avalene admitted. "It is a rather unlikely story."
"The best ones usually are," Rhys said, and the warmth in his eyes eased whatever doubt Harcourt's words had briefly stirred in her.
The encounter, however, was not the last of its kind. As the weeks passed and the engagement became common knowledge throughout the county, Avalene found herself the subject of a particular scrutiny she'd never before experienced: invitations to teas and luncheons she would once have been entirely excluded from, extended now not out of genuine welcome, but out of a curiosity dressed up as courtesy—every hostess eager to examine firsthand the woman who had captured a duke's attention so thoroughly and so suddenly.
She bore it as best she could, drawing on the same quiet endurance that had carried her through three years in her stepmother's house, though she found to her surprise that it wore on her far less than she'd expected. There was a particular strength in facing scrutiny from a place of security rather than desperation, in knowing that whatever whispers followed her through a crowded room, she had somewhere solid to return to at the end of the evening: a man who had chosen her plainly and without condition, and who made certain at every gathering that she never once felt she was facing the room alone.