The Duke of Ravenscroft was not, Miss Cecily Ashworth had been told, a man who received visitors on a Tuesday morning.
She presented herself at his townhouse in Grosvenor Square regardless. She was twenty-one years old, recently orphaned, and possessed of exactly seventeen pounds and four shillings standing between herself and a very particular variety of disaster. The morning calls of dukes could accommodate themselves.
The butler conveyed no visible alarm at a young woman in a sensible wool pelisse announcing she had private business with His Grace. He showed her to a small waiting room and returned in twelve minutes to escort her to the study.
Edmund Hartwell was standing at the window when she entered—tall, dark-coated, his attention apparently occupied by the square below. He did not turn immediately. Cecily recognised it as the specific theatrical technique of men who wished to establish command before a conversation began.
“You have business with me,” he said to the glass. “My man tells me you would not name it to him.”
“I would not name it to a footman. It is not a footman’s sort of business.”
That turned him. He was perhaps five-and-thirty, with a hard clever face that surrendered nothing and a pair of grey eyes that surrendered only that they were counting—her gown, her boots, the portfolio under her arm, the precise distance between her and the door. Cecily had spent her childhood watching her father reckon other men’s ledgers. She knew the look of a mind doing sums, and she let him do them.
“My father was Joseph Ashworth,” she said. “He kept the Ravenscroft accounts for nineteen years. He died in March.”
“I know who your father was.” A pause, weighted. “I did not know he had a daughter who called in person.”
“He had one who did rather more than that.” She set the portfolio on the desk between them and did not open it. “He kept two sets of books, Your Grace. The ones the family saw, and the ones he kept for himself, because a careful man keeps a record of the things that frighten him. I found the second set when I was clearing his rooms.”
She watched the stillness come over him—not the absence of feeling but the careful management of it, a man closing every shutter in a house at once.
“Go on,” he said.
“Your father married twice. Everyone knows that. What everyone does not know is that his first wife, the Frenchwoman he put aside in ’eighty-nine, did not die before he married your mother. She died after. By four years.” Cecily kept her voice level, because the levelness was the whole of her power and she would not spend it on drama. “There is a parish record. A letter in your father’s own hand instructing mine to make the matter disappear. And my father’s memorandum of having been paid to do it. Which makes your parents’ marriage bigamous, and you, Your Grace, not the Duke of Ravenscroft at all, but a gentleman named Mr. Hartwell with a cousin in Shropshire who would be very glad of the correction.”
The clock on the mantel marked several seconds.
“You have come to sell it to me,” he said.
“No.” That surprised him; she saw it. “If I wished to sell it I would have gone to your cousin, who could pay in titles, or to the scandal-sheets, who could pay in coin and would not have made me ride on the outside of the coach. I came to you because I do not want to ruin a man for the crime of his father’s convenience. I want a settlement. A small independence—enough to live quietly, somewhere that is not a relative’s charity. In exchange, the portfolio is yours to burn, and I forget I ever read Latin well enough to understand a parish register.”
He came away from the window then and stood across the desk from her, close enough that she had to tip her chin to hold his eyes and refused to step back to spare her neck the trouble.
“You are asking me,” he said slowly, “to trust the discretion of a woman who has just demonstrated she can dismantle my entire life from a leather case.”
“I am offering you the only sort of discretion worth having—the kind that has been tested and chosen anyway. You cannot buy silence and be sure of it. You can only buy it and wait to be betrayed.” She drew a breath. “I am proposing the alternative.”
“Marry me,” he said.
It was Cecily’s turn to be surprised, and she disliked how thoroughly he saw it.
“A wife cannot be compelled to testify against her husband,” he went on, watching her with new and unsettling attention. “A wife shares the ruin she might otherwise sell. It is the most binding silence the law allows, and it answers your difficulty as neatly as it answers mine—you would have not a small independence but a large one, and no relative’s charity in it anywhere. It is, I admit, a colder proposal than the situation is said to require.”
“It is a cage with a settlement attached,” Cecily said. “You would have me where you can see me.”
“Yes.” He did not insult her by denying it. “And you would have me where you can see me, Miss Ashworth, which is not nothing, when you hold my whole existence in a portfolio and I have just learned you are cleverer than every man I employ.” Something flickered at the corner of his hard mouth. “I find I am not entirely sorry to have met you. That was not in my morning’s calculations.”
She had come prepared to be refused, threatened, or bought. She had not come prepared for this—for the unfamiliar warmth of being recognised, by a man with everything to lose, as a person to be reckoned with rather than managed. It moved through her like the first heat of a fire in a cold room, and she distrusted it precisely because it was so pleasant.
“Then understand my one condition,” she said, and was glad her voice held. “If I marry you it will be because I choose it in this room, freely, and not because you have made the alternatives unliveable. I have spent my life being the careful daughter who solved other people’s frightening things. I will not become the careful wife who does the same. Whatever this is between us—and there is something, I am not a fool—I will be the one to reach for it, or it does not happen.”
“Then reach,” said the duke, “or do not. I will stand exactly here.”
And he did. He put his hands behind his back, the picture of a man surrendering the field, and waited—and the waiting was the most provoking thing he could possibly have done, because it left the whole distance between them hers to close.
So she closed it.
She came round the desk and kissed him, and felt the instant his composure cost him something to keep—the sharp indrawn breath, the hands coming unclasped to settle at her waist as though he had been holding them back by force. He let her set the pace because she had told him to, and there was a heady power in that, in feeling a duke answer only the pressure she gave and never more, so that every step deeper was hers to take.
She took them. She pushed the dark coat back off his shoulders and he shrugged it to the floor; she found the buttons of his waistcoat and he stood and let her, his breath roughening at her ear, murmuring her name once as if testing whether he was allowed it. When his mouth came to her throat she tilted her head to give it to him and felt his restraint fray, his hands tightening, gathering the careful daughter into someone who wanted and said so. The wool pelisse went the way of the coat. His palm spread warm and certain over the thin muslin at the small of her back and pressed her against him, and she made a sound she had never made for anyone and felt him go still, listening, learning, and then do exactly the thing that had drawn it again.
“Tell me,” he said against her skin. His voice had lost all its drawing-room command and she liked it infinitely better undone. “You set the terms. I’ll hold to them.”
“This,” she said, and drew his hand from her waist to where she wanted it, and gasped at the heat of his touch through the muslin. “And do not be careful with me. I have had a lifetime of careful. I should like, for once, to be wanted without strategy.”
So he wanted her without it. He lifted her to the edge of the great desk among the scattered papers of his ruin and stepped between her knees, and she pulled him in by the loosened linen of his shirt and met him, and the careful sums went out of his eyes entirely. He learned her by the catch of her breath the way he must once have learned to read a room, all that formidable attention bent now on the single question of what undid her—returning to it, refining it, until she had a fist in his dark hair and her brow against his and the bright tightening heat broke over her in the quiet study with the clock still marking the hour. He followed her over with her name in his mouth, holding her hard against him, neither of them, for that long moment, anything resembling careful.
Afterward he reached past her, took the portfolio from the desk, and held it out to her without opening it.
“Burn it yourself,” he said. “Or keep it. I find I would rather you held my life knowingly than that I spent our marriage wondering when you might.”
Cecily looked at the leather case—the thing that had been her whole power walking into this room—and understood that he had just handed it back to her unread, which was a far more reckless thing than any sum she had come prepared to do.
“You should not trust me this much,” she said. “You have known me an hour.”
“I have known you an hour,” he agreed, “and in it you declined to ruin me, refused to be bought, and would not let me make the choice for you. I have trusted men with my fortune for less.” He brushed a loosened curl from her cheek, and for once there were no sums in his eyes at all. “Marry me, Cecily. Not for the silence. I withdraw the silence as a reason. Marry me because you reached, and I should very much like you to keep doing it.”
She kept the portfolio. She thought she might burn it after the wedding, or she might not—might leave it in a drawer between them, unopened, a thing chosen daily rather than bought once. The duke watched her decide not to decide, and smiled as though it were the answer he had wanted all along, which, she was beginning to understand, it was.
“Tuesday,” she said. “You may receive me on Tuesdays from now on.”
“Madam,” said the Duke of Ravenscroft, “I shall receive you whenever you reach.”
