Page 47 of Duke of Eccess (Seven Dukes of Sin #4)

“Are you…considering something towards her?” asked Lucien carefully. “I have to warn you to remember the fourth credo?—”

“I remember the fourth credo,” Octavius snapped. “I—Christ…”

He licked his lips nervously. She was somewhere upstairs, two floors up, when he wanted her right here by his side. Not as a servant to watch the children, but as his missing half, his equal in every sense.

“I have this feeling… She’s become a blessing in my life, Lucien. I’m afraid something’s going to happen, that she’ll be torn away from me and the children forever.”

“Well, isn’t it because it’s Christmas? You go into these moods every year.”

“Perhaps.”

His friend examined him closely. “Is there something you can do?”

One thing came to mind. One thing he’d been telling himself he could never do.

Propose. Perhaps he would change her mind after all.

The thought was both exhilarating and terrifying. Both right and dangerous.

“There is,” Octavius replied through a dry, scratchy throat, staring at Lucien’s glass with a desperate thirst. “But it’s very risky.”

Lucien laid his hand on his shoulder and squeezed it. “After the mistakes I’ve made with Chastity, I’ve learned that sometimes the highest risk comes from not taking risks at all.”

All the air was forced from his lungs.

“As for the credo,” Lucien added, “I suppose I shouldn’t lecture you on following it, given I was the first of our brotherhood to break it.”

Protect each other’s family as your own… The second credo of the Seven Dukes of Sin, and Lucien had broken it by seducing Dorian’s forbidden little sister…whom he’d secretly loved his whole life. Octavius found the dark-haired woman talking to her brother and his wife, her face alit with happiness.

“So don’t tell anyone I said this,” Lucien continued, his violet gaze on his wife, “but some things are worth breaking the rules for. As long as you’re ready to face the consequences.”

Lucien left his side, and Octavius watched the ball alone for a few moments more, not really seeing it.

Then a decision crystallized in his mind.

He approached Jacobs, who had just sent a footman with an empty tray back down into the kitchen, and asked him to send Temperance to him.

Octavius stepped out of the ballroom, and in the wide hallway, the music flowing out under the door, she came down to him in her governess’s gown with her hair pinned severely back and her eyes glittering with some unknown anxiety.

Her gaze darted with fear to the closed doors behind him.

“Do not fret,” Octavius said. “You are not going inside.”

“Is everything all right? Are the children all right?” she asked hastily.

“They are fine,” he reassured her as she stood a painful step away from him. “I missed you. I want you to be by my side, but I respect your decision and your wish not to be included in the ball. But if you feel comfortable, I would like to dance with you.”

Temperance raised her eyebrows. “Dance with me?”

Octavius nodded. “You can hear the music. We are alone here. Please grant me this little present for Christmas.”

She cleared her throat and opened her mouth to say something but then closed it and straightened her back and eventually said, “Very well. I shall dance with you.”

The musicians began playing a somewhat slower waltz, a scandalous new dance among the nobility but much loved by young people—a style of dancing Octavius had requested as the Regent enjoyed it so much.

As the music swelled, he took her in his arms and they danced.

Her body, so small, felt so right against his own.

Her gray eyes were warm, and he didn’t want to do anything else in this world but hold her.

He wanted to be hers, completely and utterly hers.

And finally make that official claim he’d been holding in for so long.

And so he began. “Temperance, you…you’ve become as essential to me as the air I breathe.”

She inhaled sharply and blinked in surprise.

Octavius did not wait for her to say anything but continued, “I know you said you don’t wish to marry.

I understand your objection is to protect your independence and freedom.

But that is exactly what I wish to offer you.

I want you to be mine, in every sense of the word.

In front of the ton, the world, and God for the rest of my life—and I would give you as much independence and freedom as you wish… as my wife.”

Temperance’s smile fell off her face, her eyes widening with fear. She frowned, shook her head slightly, and opened her mouth to speak.

This was not the face of a happy bride about to accept a proposal. The panic in her eyes told him everything.

It was going to be a no.

He hadn’t told her he loved her. He hadn’t become the man worthy of her yes.

Now he was going to lose her as his lover, and as his governess.

This was the disaster he’d been fearing. He needed to fix this—and now.

Damnation. What else could he do?

But before she could answer, a footman opened the ballroom doors carrying a tray of empty champagne glasses. In that brief moment when the doors stood open, revealing the glittering ballroom within, a loud female voice shrieked.

“That’s her! Lady Agatha Hale, the Mad Heiress! There is nowhere to hide now, Lady Agatha!”