She read the deed slowly all the way to the seal and when she looked up there was for the first time since he had ridden down onto the shingle something unguarded in her face. And the asking. Marry me, he said, not because a duke ought to have a wife, and not because you nursed a nameless man back to a name he didn't deserve, but because I have spent 6 months in rooms full of solicitors, discovering that the only version of myself I actually liked was the one who split your father's wood, and did not know he was a duke at all. I should like to go on being that man in this cottage or in any other and I find I cannot do it without you in the room. She did not answer him at once.
She had had she told him later nine weeks of practice at not asking a man questions he could not answer and she discovered now that answering one herself was a great deal harder than it looked. That a whole winter of steeling herself against exactly this hope had left her badly out of practice at hoping. She looked past him once at the gray line where the sea met the sky, the same sea that had taken his name from him, and given it back changed, and then she looked at his hands, still marked faintly from an axe he had not swung in half a year, and something in her seemed to settle. You split wood, she said slowly, as though you meant it. I remember thinking that the first week before I knew what a duke was worth to anyone.
I find I still believe it more than anything London can have told you about yourself since. It is the truest thing anyone has said of me in 6 months. Then I shall hold you to being him, she said, duke or no duke. And if you are ever more the one than the other, I shall want to know which before the wedding and not after." But she was not truly bargaining, and he understood it. And she set the nets aside, and she took her time.
And when at last she answered him, the tide was coming in behind her, exactly on the hour she would have told him to expect.