She untied her apron and set it aside. And as she reached for her cloak by the door, she glanced back at him with an expression somewhere between amusement and disbelief, as though she still expected him to reveal this was all some elaborate misunderstanding.
"I have to ask," she said, tying the ribbons of her cloak with hands that were not quite steady, though she told herself it was only the autumn chill. "Why me? You could have simply let the engagement dissolve and moved on to whatever match your mother deemed suitable next. There must be a dozen well-connected women in your circle who would have been considerably easier to court than a stranger from a rainstorm whose surname you didn't even know."
Julian considered the question seriously, the way he'd come to understand she preferred her questions answered—without the polish he'd been trained since boyhood to apply to every public utterance.
"Because in eleven minutes in a rainstorm, you asked me what I wanted, and meant it, and waited for a real answer instead of the one that would have been easiest to hear," he said. "I have spent my entire life surrounded by people who wanted something from me: my title, my name, my family's influence. And none of them, not once, wanted to know what I actually felt about any of it. You didn't want anything from me at all. You were only trying to get home in the rain. I think that's precisely why I couldn't stop thinking about you."
Marianne was quiet a moment, turning that over. "That's rather a lot of weight to put on eleven minutes."
"It is. I've had rather a lot of time to think about it since." He offered his arm, somewhat formally, somewhat self-consciously, as though unsure whether the gesture would be welcome. "Shall we discover whether the conversation holds up outside a moving carriage?"
She took his arm, and it did hold up—better, if anything, without the rain and the urgency of a stranger's presence to heighten every word.
They found a small coffeehouse two streets over, tucked between a milliner's and a bookshop, and settled into a corner table, where the proprietor, recognizing neither of them for who they were, simply set down two cups and left them to their conversation, which turned out to need no encouragement at all.
What followed was not the swift, cinematic romance of a single grand gesture, but the slower, steadier accumulation of ordinary hours. That first coffee stretched into three, the small shop's proprietor eventually clearing his throat pointedly as he began stacking chairs around them, and neither Julian nor Marianne quite noticed until they were the last two people left in the room.
"I believe," Marianne said, glancing around at the emptied shop, "we may have overstayed our welcome."
"I believe you may be right." Julian did not look especially troubled by the prospect. "Would you object to a walk? It's a fine enough evening, and I find I'm not ready to end this yet."