"Ashwick," he said. "Julian Ashwick, Duke of Ashwick. And I am aware that I have made a considerable nuisance of myself, tracking you down on nothing more than a first name and a bakery, and I am prepared for you to tell me I've overstepped."
"You're the Duke," she said. And it wasn't quite a question, more the dawning horror of a woman realizing exactly how thoroughly she had spoken her mind to a man of significant consequence. "The one who was getting married in eleven days."
"I was. I'm not any longer."
Her eyes widened. "What happened?"
"You happened, if I'm honest." He said it plainly, the way she had spoken plainly to him in the carriage, because he had decided somewhere in the three weeks since that rainstorm that plainness suited him better than the careful diplomacy his position usually demanded. "You asked me what I wanted, and no one had asked me that in longer than I care to admit. And once you'd asked, I found I couldn't stop thinking about the answer. So, I asked Cordelia the same question, and it turned out neither of us wanted what our families had arranged for us. She's happily settled elsewhere now, and I am here, standing on your doorstep with flour dust on my boots, apparently, hoping you might let me buy you a coffee somewhere that isn't a moving carriage in a rainstorm."
Marianne stared at him for a long moment, and he watched her working through the sheer improbability of it: a duke on her doorstep, having dissolved his own engagement over a conversation she'd nearly forgotten she'd had, if not for how often it had crept back into her thoughts at inconvenient hours.
"I don't know what to say to that," she admitted.
"You could say yes to the coffee. Everything else we can work out afterward."
She laughed then—the same laugh he'd heard in the carriage: startled, bright, and entirely unguarded. And something in his chest loosened at the sound of it in a way it hadn't loosened in months.
"All right," she said. "Yes to the coffee. But you're paying, Your Grace, given the trouble you've apparently gone to just to find me."
"I would have gone to considerably more trouble than a bakery's worth of gossip," he said, and meant it entirely, the words coming out steadier and more certain than nearly anything else he'd said in the days since the wedding that never happened.