PROLOGUE

“I am sensible of the honour you do me, Sir Harold, but I must decline.”

The words fell into the overheated drawing room like stones into still water. Violet watched the ripples spread; Sir Harold’s face cycling through confusion, then offense, then the particular shade of wounded pride that men wore when denied something they believed themselves entitled to receive.

“I beg your pardon?” He dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief that had already seen considerable service this afternoon. The fire blazed unnecessarily high for March, and Sir Harold Upton had been perspiring since his arrival. “Miss Sinclair, I do not think you understood my meaning.”

“I understood it perfectly, sir.” Violet kept her hands folded in her lap, her spine straight against the settee. The posture cost her nothing; she had perfected years ago, this appearance of composure that concealed everything roiling beneath. “You have done me the honour of a proposal, and I have done you the courtesy of a direct answer. I should think that concludes the matter.”

Sir Harold’s mouth opened and closed. He was not an ugly man — merely an unremarkable one, with thinning grey hair and small eyes that calculated value in everything they touched.

“But surely… that is to say… your mother gave me every indication…”

“My mother,” Violet said quietly, “does not speak for me.”

The door burst open.

Lady Sinclair swept into the room in a cloud of lavender perfume so thick it preceded her by several feet. Her greying auburn hair, the same shade Violet’s would become in twenty years, was immaculately arranged, and her face wore the bright, brittle smile of a woman who sensed disaster and intended to prevent it through sheer force of will.

“Sir Harold! How delightful. I trust my daughter has given you happy news?”

“She has not, madam.” Sir Harold rose, his dignity visibly reassembling itself. “She has refused me. I confess myself astonished. I was led to believe…”

“Refused?” Lady Sinclair’s smile did not waver, but something behind her eyes went very still. “Nonsense. Violet, dear, you are overtired. You cannot have meant…”

“I meant precisely what I said, Mother.”

The smile cracked. Lady Sinclair turned to Sir Harold with a graceful flutter of her hands. “You must forgive us, Sir Harold. My daughter requires a moment to collect herself. If you would be so kind as to wait in the front parlour, I am certain we can resolve this misunderstanding.”

Sir Harold hesitated. His gaze moved between mother and daughter, calculating odds. Then he bowed, stiffly, his pride still smarting, and withdrew. The door closed behind him with a soft click that somehow managed to sound ominous.

The silence lasted three heartbeats.

“Have you gone insane?” Lady Sinclair’s voice dropped to a hiss. “Sir Harold Upton has three thousand a year; he has no debts, and his health is perfectly sound. What more do you want?”

“I want,” Violet said, “not to disappear.”

Her mother stared at her. “I do not know what you mean by that.”

But she did. Violet could see it in the way Lady Sinclair’s hands tightened on her fan, in the slight flinch around her eyes. She knew exactly what Violet meant, because she had done it herself. She had been witty and sharp and full of opinions once, before marriage had sanded her down to this: a woman whose only remaining passion was ensuring her daughters made the same surrender she had.

“Four proposals.” Lady Sinclair began to pace, her skirts sweeping the carpet. “Four eminently suitable gentlemen. And you have refused them all. Do you understand what people say? They call you difficult, particular and unmarriageable.” She spun to face Violet, and for a moment, something raw showed through the powder and propriety. “You are six-and-twenty years old, and you have no remarkable fortune of your own. What do you imagine will become of you?”

Violet thought of her sister Clara, whose hands shook when she poured tea and whose husband had methodically removed every friend, every book, every opinion that did not serve his comfort. Clara, who had married well and now existed as a ghost in her own home.

She thought of her mother, who had once debated politics at dinner gatherings and now could not form a sentence that did not reference marriage prospects.

“I would rather become nothing,” Violet said, “than become invisible.”

Lady Sinclair’s face went white, then red. Her mouth trembled. For a terrible moment, Violet thought her mother might actually speak honestly — might say something true about her own choices, her own regrets, the slow erasure of the woman she had been.

Instead, she said: “Your father will hear of this.”

She swept out. The lavender perfume lingered, cloying and inescapable.

***

Baron Sinclair did hear of it. He stood in the doorway of Violet’s room that evening, grey-haired and tired, and said: “You might have simply accepted him, Violet. It would have been easier for everyone.”

Then he retreated to his study, as he always did, leaving the women to sort out the wreckage of their own lives.

That night, Violet sat at her writing desk and composed a letter to her Aunt Philippa in Bath — the aunt who had never married, who lived independently on a small inheritance, who was spoken of in hushed tones as a warning to young ladies.

Dear Aunt, she wrote, the ink sharp and fresh on the page, I find myself at an impasse. I cannot continue as I am. I am looking for another way.

She did not send it. She was not yet desperate enough to admit she needed rescue. But she kept it, folded small, tucked into the corner of her desk where no one would find it.

A declaration of intent, waiting for its moment.

***

The next morning, an invitation arrived. Thick cream paper, elegant script. The Worthington Ball, one month hence; the event of the Season, the place where matches were made and futures decided.

Violet turned it over in her hands. Another ballroom. Another evening of fortune hunters and simpering and her mother’s desperate matchmaking.

She almost threw it away, but she did not.

CHAPTER ONE

The balcony doors gave way beneath her hands, and the night air hit her like absolution.

Violet did not stop moving until she reached the stone balustrade, her gloved fingers gripping the cold stone as she drew breath after breath of air that did not smell of pomade and desperation. Behind her, the doors had swung shut, leaving her chaperone a few steps back, and muffling the violins, the chatter and Mr. Crawley’s nasal voice explaining why a woman of her advanced years ought to consider herself fortunate to receive his attentions.

Twenty minutes. She had endured twenty minutes of his company before her composure cracked.

The Worthington Ball blazed behind her, three hundred candles turning the windows to sheets of gold, but here on the balcony, the darkness was almost complete. April had not yet surrendered its chill, and the cold seeped through her silk gown, deep green, no pastels, never pastels, raising gooseflesh along her bare arms. She did not care. She would take frostbite over another moment of Mr. Crawley’s damp hand attempting to find her waist.

“You are in my spot.”

Violet’s heart seized. She spun toward the voice — low, flat, emerging from the shadows at the far end of the balcony where the light from the windows did not reach.

A man stood there. She could make out only the shape of him at first: tall, broad-shouldered, a darker darkness against the night. Then he shifted, and the distant candlelight caught the angles of his face.

He was not handsome in any way the ballroom would recognize. His features were too strong, too angular; a jaw that looked carved from something unforgiving, heavy brows drawn low over eyes she could not quite see. His dark hair was longer than fashion dictated and looked as though he had run his hands through it several times in frustration. He wore black, unrelieved by any ornament, and he looked at her the way one might look at an unwelcome tradesman who had wandered into the wrong room.

“I beg your pardon?” Violet said.

“The balcony.” He did not move. “I was here first. Find another.”

She stared at him. In six Seasons, through countless balls and assemblies and interminable dinner gatherings, no man had ever spoken to her with such complete absence of courtesy. It was, she realized with something like shock, almost refreshing.

“There is no other balcony,” she said. “I checked.”

“Then return to the ballroom.”

“I would rather freeze to death, thank you.”

Something shifted in his posture, surprise perhaps, or reassessment, but the silence stretched between them, filled only by the distant strains of a waltz.

“You are not going to leave,” he said. It was not a question.

“I am not.”

“Even though I have asked you to.”

“You did not ask. You commanded. There is a difference, and I do not respond well to either.”

He made a sound that might have been a laugh, had it contained any warmth. “Then we appear to be at an impasse, madam. I came here to avoid people, and now there is a person.”

“I came here for precisely the same reason.” Violet released the balustrade and turned to face him fully, her chin lifting. “Which gives us equal claim. Unless you mean to suggest that your desire for solitude outweighs mine simply because you arrived first?”

“I mean to suggest nothing of the kind.” He stepped forward, out of the deepest shadow, and the light finally found his eyes. They were grey;  not the soft grey of morning mist but the dark grey of storm clouds, of charcoal, of something that had seen too much and refused to look away. “I mean to state it plainly. I was here first. Therefore, you should leave.”

“That is not how logic works.”

“It is how I work.”

Violet felt her mouth twitch, but she suppressed it ruthlessly. “Then you work badly, sir.”

He went still. For a moment, she thought she had miscalculated — that he would turn cold, or angry, or dismissive in the way of men who did not appreciate being challenged. Instead, he studied her with an intensity that made her want to step backwards. She did not.

“You are not afraid of me,” he said.

“Should I be?”

“Most people are.”

“Most people are afraid of a great many things that do not warrant the effort.” She clasped her hands before her, the picture of composure despite the chill seeping into her bones. “I reserve my fear for genuine threats. You are merely rude.”

The silence that followed was different from the one before; charged, somehow, as though the air between them had thickened. He tilted his head, and for the first time, his expression shifted into something other than irritation.

“Rude,” he repeated. “Yes. I have been told.”

“Recently, I imagine.”

“Constantly.” He moved to the balustrade, maintaining a careful distance between them, and looked out over the darkened garden. His profile was sharp against the faint glow from the windows. “It does not seem to improve matters. I say what I think, and people take offence. I am told this is a personal failing.”

“It is certainly not a social asset.”

“I have no interest in social assets.”

“Then what are you doing at the Worthington Ball?” Violet asked. “It is rather the definition of a social occasion.”

He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice had lost some of its edge. “I was dragged here by a friend who believes I have spent too long avoiding society. He is under the impression that exposure will cure me of my distaste.” His mouth curved, but it was not quite a smile. “He is wrong.”

“And yet you came.”

“Julian can be persistent. And I owed him a debt.” He turned his head, those storm-grey eyes finding hers. “What is your excuse? You fled the ballroom as though pursued by creditors.”

“Worse.” Violet moved to the balustrade as well, though she kept the distance he had established between them. The cold stone bit through her gloves. “Fortune hunters.”

“Ah.”

“You sound unsurprised.”

“I am familiar with the species.” His gaze moved over her face — assessing, cataloguing, but not in the way Mr. Crawley’s gaze had. There was no avarice in it, no calculation of her worth. He looked at her as though she were a problem to be solved, or perhaps a book in a language he did not quite speak. “They must be desperate indeed to pursue a woman who has made her disinterest so thoroughly clear.”

Violet blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“Your expression when you came through those doors. You looked as though you wanted to murder someone. I assumed it was not the general company but a specific target.” He paused. “Was I wrong?”

“No.” She let out a breath that misted in the cold air. “Mr. Crawley. He has convinced himself that my refusals are a form of flirtation.”

“Are they?”

“They are a form of refusal. I do not know how to make them clearer without resorting to physical violence.”

His mouth twitched. It was not quite a smile; his face seemed unpracticed in the expression, but it transformed his features nonetheless. For a moment, he looked almost human.

“I find that physical violence is generally effective,” he said. “Though it does complicate one’s social calendar.”

Violet laughed before she could stop herself. The sound surprised her because she could not remember the last time she had laughed at a ball. He looked surprised too, as though he had not expected to provoke that particular response.

“You are not what I expected,” she said.

“What did you expect?”

“I did not expect anything. I thought you were part of the architecture until you spoke.”

“I aspire to be mistaken for architecture. It means people do not attempt conversation.” He turned to face her fully, leaning one hip against the balustrade. “And yet here we are. Conversing.”

“Against both our wishes, apparently.”

“No.” The word was quiet, almost reluctant. “Not against mine. Not anymore.”

The violins inside swelled into something sweet and aching. Violet became suddenly aware of how close they stood; not close enough to touch, but close enough that she could see the faint lines at the corners of his eyes, the slight tension in his jaw. He held himself like a man who expected to be found wanting and had decided not to care.

She knew that posture because she wore it herself.

“You have not asked my name,” she said.

“I did not wish to presume an introduction.”

“We have been arguing for ten minutes. I think the time for formality has passed.”

His eyes met hers. “Then you tell me yours, and I shall tell you mine.”

“Miss Violet Sinclair.” She did not curtsey. It seemed absurd, somehow, after everything they had already said. “Spinster, according to society. Difficult, according to my mother. Entirely unmarriageable, according to general consensus.”

Something flickered in his expression; interest, perhaps, or recognition. “The Miss Sinclair who has refused four proposals?”

“You have heard of me.”

“I have heard of your refusals. They are spoken of with something approaching awe in certain circles.” He inclined his head. “I confess, I expected someone more…”

“More what?”

“More apologetic about it.”

“Should I apologise for knowing my own mind?”

“No.” The word was immediate, emphatic. “You should not.”

They looked at each other in the darkness, and Violet felt something shift — a realignment, as though they had been strangers a moment ago and were now something else. Something that did not yet have a name.

“Your turn,” she said.

He hesitated. She saw it; the brief calculation, the weighing of whether to give her his name and everything that came with it. Then his jaw tightened, and he spoke.

“Langdon. The Duke of Langdon.”

Violet’s breath caught. Not because of the title; she had danced with dukes before, had made polite conversation with earls and marquesses and every rank the peerage had to offer. But she knew this name. Everyone knew this name.

The Dark Recluse. The duke, who had vanished from society three years ago, never returned. The man her mother whispered about as proof that even the highest ranks were not immune to madness.

“Your Grace,” she said, and was proud that her voice did not waver.

“Miss Sinclair.” He watched her face, clearly waiting for the reaction he was accustomed to:  the fear, the fascination, the morbid curiosity. “I see you have heard of me as well.”

“I have heard rumours.”

“And what do the rumours say?”

“That you are mad. That you are dangerous. That you keep to your house and see no one, and that your servants are afraid to speak your name.”

His expression did not change. “All true, I expect. Except perhaps the last. My servants are more annoyed than afraid.”

“You do not seem mad to me.”

“Give me time.”

He said it lightly, but she heard the edge beneath — the weariness of a man who had grown tired of defending himself against whispers he could not silence. She knew that weariness, too.

“I do not perform, Miss Sinclair,” he said quietly. “It is my only consistent quality. I cannot make small talk, I cannot pretend interest I do not feel, and I cannot smile at fools and call it courtesy. Society finds this unforgivable, and so I have removed myself from society.” He paused. “Tonight was meant to be an exception, but I see now that it was a mistake.”

“Because of me?”

“Because of…” He stopped. His jaw worked. “No. Not because of you. You are the only bearable thing about this entire evening.”

The words hung between them, stark and unvarnished. He looked almost surprised to have said them, as though they had escaped without his permission.

Violet thought of all the balls she had attended, all the conversations she had endured, all the men who had wondered if her dowry, her age and her reputation were adequate and had seen nothing else. She thought of Mr. Crawley and Sir Harold and every simpering fortune hunter who had ever tried to convince her that her opinions were charming obstacles to be overcome.

This man had not tried to charm her. He had not tried to convince her of anything. He had simply stood in the darkness and said what he thought, and he had listened when she did the same.

“I should return,” she said. “My mother will be looking for me.”

“Of course.” He stepped back, creating distance. His face had closed again, that brief vulnerability shuttered behind something harder. “I apologise for keeping you.”

“You did not keep me. I stayed of my own volition.” She moved toward the doors, then paused. “Your Grace?”

“Miss Sinclair?”

“I hope your friend’s theory proves correct. About society.”

“It will not.”

“Perhaps not.” She looked back at him; at his sharp features, his storm-grey eyes and his complete, devastating lack of pretense. “But I hope it does anyway.”

She did not wait for his response. She pushed through the doors and let the warmth and noise of the ballroom envelop her while the light blinded her after so long in the darkness.

But at the threshold, she glanced back.

He had moved to the balustrade, his tall frame silhouetted against the night sky. He was watching her. She could feel the weight of his gaze even across the distance, even through the glare of three hundred candles.

She turned away and walked into the light.

But she did not throw away the memory of his voice in the darkness, or the way he had looked at her as though she were something unexpected, something worth the breach in his solitude.

She kept it, tucked into the corner of her mind where no one would find it.

A declaration of something, waiting for its moment.

CHAPTER TWO

The house was too quiet. It had been too quiet for three years.

Marcus stood at the window of his study, watching the grey morning light creep across the square below. Mayfair was waking: servants scrubbing steps, delivery carts rattling over cobblestones, a nursemaid hurrying past with two small children in tow. Life, happening just beyond the glass. He watched it the way one might watch a play in a language one did not speak.

Behind him, his breakfast sat untouched on the desk. The eggs had gone cold an hour ago, and the toast had never been warm to begin with. Mrs. Cole had learned years ago that he rarely ate before noon, and the kitchen had adjusted accordingly. They prepared the tray out of duty, he ignored it out of habit, and the footman cleared it away without comment.

It was a routine. One of dozens that had calcified around him since his mother’s death, small rituals of avoidance that allowed him to move through his days without having to feel them.

The clock on the mantel chimed nine. Marcus did not turn to look at it. He knew what the day held: correspondence with his steward about drainage issues on the northern estate, a stack of invitations he would refuse and an afternoon of pretending to read in a library that still smelled faintly of his mother’s perfume. Evening would bring dinner alone at a table meant for twenty, followed by brandy in the same library, followed by a sleep that never quite came.

Three years. Three years since the fever had taken her in nine days. Three years since he had held her hand at the end and listened to her final words, spoken with the terrible clarity of the dying.

Find someone who sees you, darling. They exist, I promise.

He had not believed her then, and he did not believe it now.

And yet.

Marcus turned from the window, his jaw tight. The sharp-tongued woman from the balcony had lodged in his mind like a splinter, and no amount of rational thought seemed capable of removing her. He had lain awake half the night replaying their conversation: her refusal to leave, her complete lack of fear, the way she had laughed at his poor attempt at humour as though he had said something genuinely amusing rather than merely tolerable.

You are merely rude.

She had said it without malice, without the wounded offense he usually provoked. She had said it the way one might observe that the sky was grey or the tea was cold; a simple statement of fact, requiring no apology and expecting no change.

When was the last time someone had spoken to him like that? When was the last time someone had looked at him and seen something other than a title to be courted, a fortune to be calculated, or a scandal to be whispered about?

He crossed to his desk and picked up the calling card that had been waiting when he returned from the ball. Julian’s card, left with a note scrawled on the back: You survived. I am astonished. Come to White’s tomorrow and tell me everything.

Marcus set the card down and reached for the small brass bell that would summon Simmons. His valet appeared within moments — neat, unflappable, with the particular expression of long-suffering patience he had perfected over a decade of service.

“Your Grace?”

“I require information.” Marcus kept his voice flat, as though the request were routine. “There is a Miss Sinclair. The daughter of Baron Sinclair. I wish to know her circumstances.”

Simmons’s eyebrows rose by perhaps a quarter of an inch, the most dramatic expression of surprise Marcus had ever seen from him. “Miss Violet Sinclair, Your Grace?”

“You know of her?”

“I know that she is considered something of an original, Your Grace. She has refused several proposals and is spoken of in certain circles as unmarriageable.” Simmons paused delicately. “There are also rumours that she is difficult.”

“Difficult how?”

“She has opinions, Your Grace. And she expresses them.”

Marcus felt his mouth twitch. “How shocking.”

“Indeed, Your Grace. Shall I make inquiries?”

“Discreet ones. I wish to know her family situation, her circumstances, and why precisely she has refused four proposals when most women in her position would have accepted the first.”

Simmons inclined his head, his face revealing nothing. “Very good, Your Grace. Will there be anything else?”

“No. That will be all.”

The valet withdrew, and Marcus was left alone with the silence pressing in from every corner of the room. He looked at the cold breakfast, at the stack of correspondence he had no intention of answering, at the fire dying in the grate because he had not bothered to ring for more coal.

This was his life. This careful, colourless existence he had constructed to keep the grief at bay. He had removed himself from society because society required performance, and he had nothing left to perform. He had stopped accepting invitations because every ballroom reminded him of his mother’s laugh, every dinner gathering of her wit, every musicale of the way she had played Mozart badly but with such enthusiasm that no one had minded.

She had been his translator. His buffer against a world that found him too blunt, too intense, too incapable of the small lies that smoothed social interaction. Without her, he was merely what he had always been: a man who said what he thought and could not understand why this was considered a flaw rather than a virtue.

Find someone who sees you.

He had not looked. He had not wanted to look. The very idea of allowing another person close enough to see him, truly see him, as his mother had, felt like a betrayal of her memory.

And yet the sharp-tongued woman had seen something. He did not know what, precisely. But she had looked at him in the darkness of that balcony and had not flinched. She had argued with him, matched his bluntness with her own, and when he had told her he did not perform, she had not tried to convince him that he should.

She had simply accepted it. As though it were not a failing but a fact.

The clock chimed the half hour. Marcus stared at the fire but did not move.

***

Julian arrived at two o’clock, announced by Barrett with the particular tone of resigned disapproval the butler reserved for visitors who arrived without invitation and expected to be welcomed regardless.

“Langdon.” Julian swept into the study without waiting for permission, bringing with him a cloud of cologne that made Marcus’s eyes water. “You look dreadful. Did you sleep at all?”

“No.” Marcus did not rise from his chair by the dying fire. “Your cologne is excessive.”

“My cologne is perfect. Your house smells of dust and melancholy. I am providing contrast.” Julian threw himself into the opposite chair with the careless grace that had made him the darling of every ballroom in London. His golden-brown hair was artfully disheveled, his hazel eyes bright with amusement, his entire person radiating the easy charm that Marcus had never possessed and had long ago stopped envying. “You left the ball without saying goodbye. I had to hear from Lady Worthington that you had departed, and she made it sound as though you had fled the scene of a crime.”

“I had been there for two hours. That was the agreed-upon duration.”

“The agreed-upon duration was until you had a conversation with someone who was not me.” Julian leaned forward, his expression sharpening with interest. “And I am told you did. On the balcony. For quite some time.”

Marcus felt his jaw tighten. “Who told you that?”

“Everyone. You were seen returning to the ballroom separately from a young woman with auburn hair and a reputation for being difficult.” Julian’s smile widened. “Miss Violet Sinclair, unless I am very much mistaken. The unmarriageable Miss Sinclair, who has refused four proposals and made strong men weep with her sharp tongue.”

“We spoke briefly. It was nothing of consequence.”

“Nothing of consequence,” Julian repeated the words slowly, as though tasting them. “And yet you have not asked me to leave, which means you wish to talk about it. And you have dark circles under your eyes, which means you did not sleep. And there is a calling card on your desk that appears to have been handled several times.” He paused. “My calling card, I might add. Which suggests you were looking at it while thinking about something else entirely.”

Marcus said nothing. It was, he had learned, the most effective response to Julian’s observations. His friend had an unfortunate talent for reading people, and silence was the only defence against it.

Julian was not deterred. “She told you to find another balcony, I presume?”

“She told me nothing of the kind. I told her to find another balcony.”

“And she refused?”

“She refused.”

“And then what? You argued?”

“We discussed the inadequacies of fortune hunters and the exhaustion of social performance.” Marcus kept his voice flat. “She was hiding from a Mr. Crawley. I was hiding from everyone. We found ourselves in agreement on several points.”

Julian stared at him. Then he began to laugh; a genuine, delighted sound that filled the silent study like something foreign and almost painful.

“My goodness, Marcus.” He shook his head, still laughing. “She refused to find another balcony, and you stayed? You, who cannot tolerate anyone’s company for more than ten minutes? You, who once left a dinner gathering through the kitchen to avoid small talk?”

“I left through the kitchen because Lady Alverton would not stop discussing her daughter’s watercolours. It was self-preservation.”

“And yet Miss Sinclair held your attention for… How long was it?”

Marcus did not answer. The fire had died to embers, and he should ring for more coal, but the action felt like too much effort.

Julian leaned back in his chair, his laughter fading into something more thoughtful. “You are intrigued.”

“I am nothing of the kind.”

“You are. I can see it. Something has shifted.” He studied Marcus with the same intensity Marcus usually reserved for estate accounts. “When was the last time you thought about a woman for more than five minutes? When was the last time you thought about anyone other than yourself and your ghosts?”

The words landed harder than Julian probably intended, and Marcus felt them settle into his chest like stones.

“My mother has been dead for three years,” he said quietly. “I am aware that I have not moved forward. I am not certain I know how.”

Julian’s expression softened. For all his lightness, he had been there in those terrible days after Helena’s death. He had sat with Marcus through the worst of it, had dragged him out of bed when the grief threatened to close around him, and he had been the only person in the world who did not expect Marcus to perform a recovery he did not feel.

“She would not want this for you,” Julian said. “This house, this silence, this careful, grey existence you have built around yourself like a tomb.”

“I know what she would want. She told me.”

“And have you done it?”

Marcus thought of his mother’s final words. Find someone who sees you. He thought of the woman on the balcony, her green eyes sharp with intelligence, her chin lifted in defiance, and her complete refusal to be intimidated by his title or his reputation.

“No,” he said. “I have not.”

“Then perhaps it is time you started.”

The silence stretched between them. Julian did not push further; he knew better, but his point had been made. It sat in the room with them, unavoidable.

“I have made inquiries,” Marcus said finally. “About Miss Sinclair.”

Julian’s eyebrows rose. “Have you indeed?”

“Her family situation is complicated. Her mother is determined to see her married. She has refused four proposals from men who wanted whatever dowry came with her and not her mind.” He paused. “She is six-and-twenty, and society considers her a spinster.”

“Society considers many things. Most of them are wrong.” Julian leaned forward again. “What are you thinking, Marcus? And do not tell me you are thinking of nothing. I have known you since Eton. You are planning something.”

Marcus was quiet for a long moment. The fire had gone out entirely now, and the study was growing cold, but he did not move to address it.

“I need a wife,” he said. “Everyone has made that abundantly clear. My uncle, my solicitor, and half of the Parliament. A duke without a duchess is a liability, apparently.”

“And you have resisted for three years.”

“I have. Because every woman I meet expects me to be something I am not. They expect charm and courtesy and the performance of affection. I cannot give them that. I cannot pretend.” He looked at Julian. “But Miss Sinclair does not pretend either. She refused four proposals because she did not want to disappear into marriage. She values honesty over comfort.”

Julian was very still. “Marcus, what are you suggesting?”

“I am suggesting a practical arrangement. A marriage of convenience. She needs a husband who will not expect her to change. I need a wife who will not expect me to perform.” He paused. “We could be useful to each other.”

“You have spoken to her once. On a balcony. In the dark.”

“Yes.”

“And you wish to propose marriage.”

“I wish to propose an arrangement.” Marcus stood, moving to the window where the afternoon light was beginning to fade. “I am not offering love because I am not capable of it. But I can offer her freedom, independence, and a husband who will not attempt to control her. That may be worth more to her than affection.”

Julian was silent for a long moment. Then he rose as well, crossing to stand beside Marcus at the window.

“You know this is insane,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You know she may refuse you.”

“I expect she will.”

“And yet you intend to try.”

Marcus thought of the woman on the balcony — her sharp tongue, her sharper mind, the way she had looked at him without fear or calculation. He thought of his mother’s words, spoken with her dying breath.

Find someone who sees you.

“Yes,” he said. “I intend to try.”

Julian shook his head slowly, but he was smiling. “Then I wish you luck, my friend. You are going to need it.”

He departed shortly after, leaving Marcus alone with the silence and the strange, unfamiliar sensation of wanting something he could not quite name.

***

That evening, Simmons returned with the information Marcus had requested. Miss Violet Sinclair: eldest unmarried daughter of Baron Sinclair, dowry modest but respectable, reputation for intelligence and sharp opinions that had discouraged most suitors. Her mother was desperate to see her married. Her father was indifferent. Her elder sister was unhappily wed to a viscount; her younger sister remained unmarried at nineteen.

She was, by all accounts, exactly what society said she was: difficult, particular, and unmarriageable.

Marcus read the report twice. Then he set it aside and stared into the fire that Simmons had rebuilt without being asked.

He would call on her tomorrow. Not to court her because he was not capable of that. But perhaps to make a proposal of a different kind.