Chapter Two: The Reason

Her father’s study smelled like leather and old cigars, the same as it always had. Arabella sat in the chair across from his desk, spine straight, hands folded in her lap, while Edward Hart paced behind her like a man deciding how to discipline a business partner who’d breached a contract.

“Do you have any idea,” he said, “what you’ve done?”

“I haven’t done anything.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “I didn’t ask him to say that.”

“Then why would he—” Her father stopped himself, pressing his fingers to his temple. Through the study door, she could still hear the muffled hum of the gala continuing without them, the quartet picking back up as though nothing had happened. “He’s thirty-nine years old, Arabella. He needs a wife who can stand beside him at a board meeting, not one who’s barely finished growing up.”

“I’m twenty-four. Not a child.”

“You know what I mean.”

She did. She’d heard the shape of it her whole life, dressed in different words. Not polished enough. Not poised enough. Sometimes, quieter, meaner: not built for the kind of attention a man like that draws. Her mother had a particular way of looking at Arabella’s plate at dinner that said more than any sentence could.

The door opened without a knock.

Adrian entered the way he did everything—unhurried, unbothered by the tension thick enough to cut. Arthur followed a step behind him, his expression carefully unreadable in the way of men who had spent decades in boardrooms.

“There’s nothing to correct,” Adrian said, before Edward could finish his thought.

“You can’t be serious. You stood up in front of the entire business community and—”

“I was serious.” Adrian’s tone didn’t rise. It never seemed to need to. “The terms of our fathers’ agreement specified a union between the Hart and Blackwood families. They didn’t specify which daughter. Or which age was acceptable to you.”

Edward’s jaw tightened. “She has no experience with the kind of life this marriage requires. Vivian was raised for it.”

“I don’t need a wife raised for cameras,” Adrian said. “I need a wife I can trust.” His gaze moved, briefly, to Arabella. “And I don’t require her to be anyone other than who she already is.”

The words landed strangely in the room—not romantic, not even particularly warm, but final in a way that made further argument feel pointless. Arabella found herself watching him, trying to read the calculation behind the statement and finding, instead, something closer to conviction.

“Why me?” she asked, before she could stop herself.

It was the question everyone in that ballroom had wanted to ask and none of them had dared. Adrian turned toward her fully now, and for a moment the room seemed to fall away.

“Because you’ve spent your whole life in rooms full of people who didn’t see you,” Adrian said. “And you never once demanded that they should. Not by shrinking, and not by performing for them either. You simply stayed yourself.”

It wasn’t an answer to why me so much as an answer to something she hadn’t asked—something closer to who are you to me. She felt it land somewhere beneath her ribs, quiet and unexpected, like a key turning in a lock she hadn’t known was there.

“That’s not a reason to marry someone,” her father snapped. “That’s an observation.”

“It’s the only reason that’s ever mattered to me,” Adrian said, turning back to Edward as though the matter were settled, because to him, it was. “The engagement will be announced formally within the week. I’d like the wedding within three months.”

“Three months—”

“My schedule doesn’t allow for a longer engagement.” He said it the way he might mention a shareholder meeting, but his eyes cut briefly back to Arabella, and something in his expression eased, just barely, just for her. “Unless you object.”

Every adult in the room turned to look at her.

Arabella thought of every gala she’d stood at the edge of. Every family dinner where her name came second, third, sometimes not at all. She thought of Vivian’s face collapsing in the ballroom, and the strange, dangerous flicker of possibility unfurling in her own chest—the first time in years someone had asked what she wanted instead of telling her what she should feel grateful for.

“No,” she said. “I don’t object.”

Her father’s expression turned to something like disbelief. Arthur exhaled, the tension in his shoulders easing by degrees. And Adrian—calm, unreadable Adrian Blackwood, nearly forty and never once in his adult life explaining himself to anyone—held her gaze a beat longer than necessary, as though searching for confirmation that she meant it.

He didn’t get the chance to find it.

The study door burst open, and Vivian stood in the frame, mascara streaked down her face, eyes blazing with a fury that promised this was very far from over.