Every Lady Tried to Impress the Duke—Only One Asked, “Are You Tired?”

Chapter 1

The beeswax candles had burned down an inch and a half when the Duke of Marnfeld understood, with a clarity that tasted like cold coffee, that he had become a side of beef being examined at a market. Eight pairs of eyes. Eight practiced smiles. Eight women who had each been dressed, drilled, and delivered by a mother with a plan, and the roast venison had barely been carved before the first question arrived.

“Your Grace, tell me — do you find London tolerable in February?”

The question came from Lady Amara Colthurst, whose eyebrows had been plucked into perfect arcs of concern. Marcus Ashford, sixth Duke of Marnfeld, raised his glass so that he had somewhere to hide his expression. Thirty-six years old. Twenty-two thousand acres. Unmarried. He had known, when his mother’s letter arrived in September, that “a small gathering of suitable families” was her way of writing “an auction of brides,” and he had known he would attend, because he had learned long ago that opposing Helena Ashford was like opposing the tide. Loud. Persistent. Inevitable.

“It is nothing a man cannot survive,” he said, which was the same answer he had given three times already in different disguises.

The dinner table curved away from him in a horseshoe of damask and crystal, and every head turned his way like flowers toward a window. He had been placed in the center, of course. His mother had seen to that — “so that you may see all the girls, darling, and they may see you” — which meant he could not escape, could not lean back and disappear into the crowd, could not do anything except sit in the middle of the table like a salt cellar that everyone wanted to own.

Lady Gwendolyn Hetherington asked whether he intended to reopen the West Ballroom. A young woman with ringlets counted his estates aloud, as though demonstrating arithmetic. Someone praised the architecture of Marnfeld Hall with such feverish precision that Marcus began to suspect she had memorized the description from some architectural guidebook or, worse, from her mother’s letter.

He smiled whenever politeness required it. He answered when answering was cheaper than silence.

Across the yawning expanse of the table sat a young woman in pale blue. Marcus had noticed her for one reason only: she appeared to be the single person in the room making no effort whatsoever to be noticed. Her dress was handsome but modest, the sort of thing a provincial gentlewoman wore to a dinner when she wished to be appropriate rather than remarkable. She spoke when spoken to. She listened. And she had, through two courses, not once steered the conversation toward him.

That alone made her extraordinary.

Lady Amara leaned closer, and the scent of orange flower water arrived before her words. “The country must be sweeter for you than London, surely. Marnfeld is far too beautiful to abandon for half the year.”

“I prefer whichever place requires the least conversation about where I prefer to be,” Marcus said.

Lady Amara laughed with careful brightness, and Marcus suspected she believed he was joking. She was not the first. Across the table, the girl in blue lowered her eyes to hide a smile. He saw it. The sight of it—quiet, unperformed, real—had more heat in it than any of the candlelight.

She asked for the salt. She passed the butter. She ate her fish.

More questions rolled in on the tide. Should he hold a winter ball? Did he ride before breakfast? Lady Gwendolyn described, with tenderness, a charity project she wished to establish after marriage, as though the marriage itself were an accepted fact of the universe. No one seemed to care about his answers. They were not dishonest, these women. They were simply performing the version of themselves they believed a duke would prefer, and he could hardly blame them—could not blame them at all, actually, because he knew by heart the mathematics of their lives: the season is short, the opportunities few, and the doorways of the great houses swing shut without warning.

He blamed no one. He was only tired.

By the dessert course, he had barely eaten. He rubbed his left temple once, and caught his mother’s eye, and saw the small satisfied arranging of her face, and stopped rubbing.

Then Lady Amara began a story about an orchestra in Vienna—something to do with a conductor and a burst string, and a marriage she had watched fall apart in three movements—and the conversation paused for a breath, because her story was reaching its pounce, and the whole table had turned to listen.

And into that pause, the girl in blue said: “Your Grace?”

Eight heads swiveled.

Marcus looked down the length of the table and met her eyes for the first time that evening. They were steady eyes. Unhurried. She was slightly flushed from the attention, but her voice did not tremble.

“Yes, Miss Linden?”

“I wonder,” she said, and hesitated, as though she might still withdraw the question. Then: “Are you tired?”

The table went quiet in a way nothing had made it quiet all night.

Marcus stared at her. Of all the things he had braced himself to hear that evening—compliments, invitations, survey questions about his acres—those three words had not been among them. Lady Amara’s smile had frozen into a polite mask. Lady Gwendolyn’s fork had stopped halfway to her mouth. He watched the girl in blue swallow, saw her decide not to take it back, and something behind his ribs loosened.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because everyone keeps asking what you think about things,” she said simply. “No one has asked whether you still have the energy left to think about them.”

For one dangerous moment, he forgot the table existed. And then he laughed—not the polite laugh he had been distributing all evening like small coins, but a real one, rough at the edges, unexpected. He laughed until his mother dropped her spoon, loudly, and only then did he stop, and the girl in blue had the grace to look almost mortified.

“I am, in fact, extremely tired,” he admitted.

“Then I apologize for adding another question.”

“It is the first one I have enjoyed answering.”

The conversation resumed, eventually, because society abhors a silence. But something had shifted in the room, the way the air shifts before rain, and Marcus ceased to hear any of it. He watched Miss Linden return to her dessert as though she had not just made every other woman at the table look slightly less observant by comparison.

She did not look up at him again. She did not try to convert her advantage into an audience.

And that, he thought, was far more interesting than the question itself.

Two hours later, pleading correspondence, Marcus excused himself and walked the long carpeted corridor toward the library, not because he had letters to write, but because he had noticed her slip out ten minutes earlier, and because he wanted—badly, suddenly, irrationally—to know where a woman who did not want his attention was going when she left his table.

The library door stood ajar, leaking lamplight and the smell of old leather.

He stopped on the threshold and looked in.

She was standing alone beside the farthest shelf, an open book in her hands, and she was not reading it. Her head was tilted, and she was looking at the window, at the black glass where her own reflection floated, and her lips were moving as though she were counting something. Silent syllables. Unseen witnesses.

She had come here to be alone, the same way he had come here hoping she was here.

I cannot let her see me watching, he told himself, and stepped forward anyway.