The past three days had revealed that Robert’s patience, a skill he’d honed with bitter intensity over years of confinement, was out of practice. He’d told himself to set aside the issue of his marital prospects. He’d made his offer, and the lady would agree or not. He’d tried to focus on plans for repairing the drive.

On his mother’s plans for refurbishing the dower house, though those plans would doubtless change when Her Grace returned from Paris.

On reviewing the settlements negotiated for Nathaniel and Althea.

On the growing stream of correspondence offering him awkward congratulations for not being dead—without putting it quite like that.

He might as well have been in a protracted staring spell for all he’d accomplished since bidding Constance farewell.

She brushed a glance over him, a fulminating look that presaged loaded verbal cannon and fixed bayonets. The cat mrrrralphed outside the door, batting a paw at the glass.

“I have considered your offer,” Constance said. “I am inclined to give you leave to pay me your addresses.”

“I am pleased.” Also relieved as hell, though Robert also knew a conditional acceptance when he heard one. “Do go on.”

Yooooowl. Bat…bat…bat.

“Perhaps we should join him in the garden.” Her ladyship picked up her reticule and made for the door. “The light is better out there anyway.”

Robert retrieved her gloves from the sideboard and met her at the door. “Whatever else you have to say, Constance, just tell me. A long engagement, a special license, that year in Paris…Tell me, and if it’s within my power to accommodate you, I will.”

“You’d come to Paris with me? Travel by coach and ship and so forth?”

“Yes.” Robert had given this some thought, when he was supposed to have been laying out annual beds for the drive. He and his duchess could sail from Hull to Le Havre and cut out some of the overland travel.

“You will be my wife, the woman who has forsaken all others to stand by my side. I traveled thirty-two miles by coach with Nathaniel when I was in worse health than I am now, albeit I was drugged at the time. I would need to keep the shades pulled in the carriage, and I’d rather travel at night under a waning quarter moon, but yes. I would come to Paris with you.”

“London?”

Robert considered the question as the cat batted away at the glass. They could sail almost all of that distance, and for some reason, the prospect of a coastal seascape was less intimidating than the prospect of parallel ruts undulating endlessly over the English countryside. Perhaps the sound of coach wheels was to blame.