THE DUKE CHOSE THE PLAIN GIRL AT A MAYFAIR AUCTION — THEN THE VEIL CAME OFF

Chapter 4

Evelyn stood very still and let the sentence settle over her like cold water.

“You bought them,” she repeated.

“Sixteen thousand four hundred pounds, at eleven shillings to the pound, from four separate men, three of whom were glad to be rid of the paper.” The Duke returned to the mantel and picked up a glass he did not drink from. “They imagined they were selling me a bargain. They were selling me a leash.”

“For my father.”

“For your father.” He looked at her. “You are shocked. You imagined I acquired them out of gallantry.”

“I imagined nothing at all, Your Grace. I have known you for three hours.”

“Sebastian.”

“Three hours,” she repeated, “and in that time you have told me you watched me undetected for three years, purchased my father’s ruin before you ever spoke to me, and now hold the power of life and death over my family.” She pulled the veil from her shoulders and folded it, once, twice, with great precision. “I am not shocked. I am taking inventory.”

Something crossed his face that she would spend weeks trying to name. It was not amusement. It was closer to respect, and it arrived with the force of a blow.

“You mean to marry me,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Into scandal. Into the ridicule of tonight. Into my father’s debts and my mother’s grave and whatever it is that lies under the railway paper.” She watched him. “You are tying your name to a woman the whole of Mayfair has just watched being sold.”

“I am tying my name to a woman who stood through it without weeping.” He set the glass down untouched. “Let them talk.”

“That is easy to say with a duchy behind you.”

“It is not easy, and you know it.” He said it flatly. “I have spent fourteen years making this name into a weapon, precisely so that when I chose to spend it, no one could stop me. I am spending it now.”

“If you marry me,” she pressed, and something trembled under the composure she had spent twenty-three years building, “you will be asked to justify it at every table in England. They will say the Duke of Halstead lost his wits over a charity lot. They will say you took second-best because the best ran off with a lieutenant.”

“Second-best,” he repeated slowly, and there was danger in it.

“I am not a rescued maiden, Your Grace. I do not require saving.”

His mouth curved, faintly, for the first time that evening.

“I would never insult you by attempting it.”

The words should have comforted her. Instead they unsettled her more deeply than pity ever could — because pity she had learned to carry, and this she had no place to put.

“Then marry a woman who will be grateful. There are a hundred of them within a mile of this house.”

“I do not want gratitude. Gratitude grows bitter in the end.” He crossed the room and stopped before her, close but not touching. “I want a partner who will argue with me at breakfast.”

“On that,” she said, “I can promise nothing less.”

“Then it is settled.”

“It is not.” She raised her chin. “Four days.”

He blinked. In a man so controlled, it was enormous.

“Four days,” she repeated. “You will give me four days to consider whether I am walking toward freedom or merely into a larger cage. A gilded one, I grant you. But a cage all the same, and in law, Your Grace, you know as well as I do that a wife ceases to exist separately from her husband. My property, my name, my future — all of it absorbed.”

In eighteen forty-seven, the law of coverture made that fear painfully real.

He studied her for a long moment. Then he inclined his head.

“As you wish.”

She gathered her gloves. At the door she paused, one hand on the frame, and did not turn around.

“If I refuse,” she said, “what happens to him? My father.”

“He is destroyed within the month. I am not a charitable institution, Miss Ashby, and I did not buy those debts as a favour to anyone.”

“Then you have answered everything I needed to know.” She turned. “You are exactly as dangerous as I feared.”

“I told you I was watching you.” He was still standing where she had left him. “I never told you I was a good man.”

She reached the threshold.

“Miss Ashby.”

She stopped.

“There is one more thing,” he said, “and you should know it before you decide.”

She waited.

“Your mother’s grave at Ashby Grange,” he said. “There is no date of death on the stone. Only a year.”

The corridor seemed to lengthen.

“Ask your father why.”