Chapter One

“You cannot have it.”

Raymond Jones, the sixth Duke of Shrewsbury, stopped at the base of the front steps and looked up at the woman blocking his path. She stood on the second step, which put her nearly at eye level with him, though he suspected that without the architectural assistance, she would barely reach the middle of his chest. Her arms were crossed in defiance, and her dark eyes were fixed on his face with an expression that led him to believe she intended to physically prevent him from entering her house.

Well, as of three weeks ago, it was his house.

“Miss Gerard, I presume,” he said.

“You presume correctly.” She did not move. The afternoon sun caught the loose strands of hair escaping her pins, turning the chocolate brown to rust and gold where the light touched it. Freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks, a scattering of tiny golden marks that continued down to the pale skin visible above her modest neckline.

She was soft everywhere the ton preferred women to be angular, curved where fashion demanded lines, and she took up more space than a woman her height had any right to occupy. Not physically, precisely. She simply seemed to fill the air around her. “And you are the Duke of Shrewsbury.”

“I am.”

“Then we have nothing further to discuss.” She settled more firmly onto her step, as though she intended to take root there. “Good afternoon, Your Grace.”

Raymond had spent the better part of his adult life cultivating a reputation for cold, controlled precision. He had rebuilt his family name from the ashes of his father’s spectacular disgrace through ten years of disciplined political maneuvering and careful social architecture. He did not lose his temper, and neither did he raise his voice. He did not allow himself to be thwarted by anyone, let alone a stubborn country spinster who apparently believed that standing on a step constituted a legitimate defence strategy.

He also did not allow himself to notice the way a woman’s crossed arms pushed her generous bosom higher against her bodice, creating a soft swell of pale, freckled skin that disappeared beneath cream-colored lace. He had more self-control than that.

“Miss Gerard.” He kept his voice level, a skill perfected over years of parliamentary sessions and hostile negotiations. “I am given to understand that you were offered alternative accommodations when it was announced that this estate would transfer to my possession. A furnished townhouse, I believe. You declined.”

“I did.”

“May I ask why?”

Her eyes flashed. They were extraordinary eyes, he noticed, against his better judgment. Dark brown, almost black at the center, but ringed with flecks of gold and green that caught the light like chips of amber and jade. An oval face, slightly rounded at the cheeks and a full mouth that looked as though it smiled often and easily. Everything about her was warm, open and entirely too much, and he found himself irritated by the mere fact of her existence.

“Because this is my home,” she said, and her voice had shifted from defiance to something rawer. “My mother planted every flower in that garden. My father’s handwriting is still on the study walls where he marked my height as a girl. My sister married and moved to Bath, and I am the only one left to care for this house. I will not abandon it.”

“I can appreciate sentiment, Miss Gerard.” He allowed a measured pause. “Your father, however, did not. He accrued considerable debts against the estate.”

The color rose in her cheeks, and the flush spread downward, disappearing beneath that cream-colored lace in a way he absolutely did not follow with his gaze. “My father was a good man who made poor financial decisions during a difficult time. That does not erase thirty years of love and memory.”

“It does, unfortunately, erase legal ownership.”

She flinched. It was a small movement, quickly suppressed, but he saw it. Something in his chest tightened in a way he did not care to examine.

“Your solicitors explained the situation quite thoroughly,” she said. Her voice had gone quieter, though no less stubborn. “I am aware that you now hold the deed and that I have no legal claim to remain here. I am also aware that I have nowhere else to go, and that this house has been my family’s home for three generations. If you force me to leave, I will have to impose upon my sister’s hospitality in Bath while I attempt to find some respectable employment that will accept a woman of eight-and-twenty with no useful skills beyond a thorough knowledge of household management and an unfortunate tendency to speak her mind.”

She was breathing harder now, her chest rising and falling with the force of her words. Those remarkable eyes were bright with unshed tears she was clearly too proud to let fall, and her hands had dropped to her sides.

“My grandmother planted that orchard,” she continued, and her voice cracked on the word. “My father built the library shelf by shelf, carrying the wood himself when we could not afford a carpenter. The cook taught me to make shortbread in that kitchen when I was nine years old, and I still use the same recipe, and every time I smell butter and sugar, I think of her hands over mine, showing me how to press the dough into the mould.”

She stopped and drew a breath that shuddered slightly. Then she shifted her chin again with what appeared to be the last reserves of her dignity.

“So no, Your Grace,” she said. “I did not accept your furnished townhouse. I refused it because it is not Warthfield. This is my home, and I would rather sleep in the cellar of this house than in the finest bedroom of anywhere else.”

Raymond looked at her. She looked back at him, defiant, desperate and utterly unwilling to yield. The sun had shifted, casting half her face in shadow, and he could see now that there were faint circles beneath her eyes. She had not been sleeping well. She was likely lying awake, wondering what would become of her, whether this cold duke from Hampshire would arrive with bailiffs and orders to vacate, whether she would have to pack her mother’s teacups and her father’s books and carry them to some rented room in a city she did not love.

He thought about the estate in front of him: Warthfield Lodge. He had thoroughly reviewed the accounts before claiming them. The roof leaked, and the cellar flooded every spring. The tenant cottages needed repair, the fencing was rotting, and the orchard had not been properly pruned in at least five years. It was a minor property, barely worth the administrative headache of managing it. He had five other estates, all of them larger, all of them more profitable. The only reason Warthfield held any value at all was its position: less than twenty minutes from the Chichester administrative center, where the ducal courts, the county assizes, and the regional parliamentary offices all converged. For a man with political ambitions, the strategic proximity was useful.

But he had no immediate need of the house itself, and he would likely never set foot here again after today.

“You may stay,” he said.

She stared at him. Her mouth had fallen open slightly, her lips parted in surprise, and he found himself noticing the precise shade of pink they had flushed in the heat of her speech. He should not be noticing that.

“I beg your pardon?” Her voice came out as barely more than a whisper.

“The estate is minor. I have no plans to reside here myself. You may remain as a tenant, but I shall send one of my housekeepers to stay here as well. My solicitor will draw up the terms.”

Her eyes went wide, enormous pools of brown, gold and green, luminous with shock and what might have been the beginning of hope. Her whole face transformed, the tension dissolving, the stubborn set of her jaw softening into something almost unbearably open.

And then, before he could step back or prepare himself in any way, she seized his hand.

He flinched because he was surprised. Her fingers were warm around his, surprisingly strong, and the contact sent an entirely unwelcome jolt of sensation up his arm. She was looking at him, her eyes bright with earnest feeling, her breath catching as her bosom rose and fell beneath the lace, the depth of her emotion impossible to conceal.

“Oh, thank you,” she breathed. “Thank you, Your Grace, truly. I do not know how to express my gratitude. I will do anything to repay your kindness. Anything at all. You only have to name it.”

She meant it innocently, but his mind did not receive it innocently.

The image arrived unbidden, vivid and immediate. Those same eyes looking up at him from a much lower position, that full pink mouth shaped around something far more intimate than gratitude. The sounds she might make when he told her exactly how she could repay his kindness, when she opened those lips and…

He extracted his hand.

“That will be unnecessary.” His voice came out rougher than intended, and he saw her blink in confusion at the sudden shift in his tone. He did not care. He needed to leave this doorstep before his self-control cracked any further. “My solicitor will be in contact regarding the tenancy agreement. Good day, Miss Gerard.”

He turned before she could respond. His legs carried him back toward the carriage with strides that were slightly too long and slightly too fast, but he did not look back. He did not need to see her standing there on that step with her wide dark eyes and her full, grateful mouth. He had made a simple business decision, nothing more. The estate was worthless, and allowing her to stay cost him nothing. This was not sentiment, of course; in fact, it was efficiency.

He had almost reached the carriage when he heard her voice behind him, soft but clear in the afternoon air.

“Do you see? I told you it would be fine.”

He stopped and turned his head just enough to see her out of the corner of his eye. She was no longer looking at him. She was looking at the front door of the house, one hand resting on the weathered wood of the frame, speaking to it as though it could hear her. As though she expected it to respond.

She was talking to the house.

Raymond climbed into his carriage, rapped sharply on the roof to signal the coachman, and stared straight ahead as the vehicle lurched into motion. The image of her lingered behind his eyes: the freckles, the curves, the earnestness in those dark eyes, the way she had said ‘anything at all’ while looking up at him like he was the answer to a prayer she had not known she was saying.

He was not his father. He did not lose control over a woman’s body and a carelessly offered sentence. He had discipline and restraint. He had spent a decade building walls around every impulse his father had indulged, and he was not about to let those walls crumble because a soft, stubborn spinster had touched his hand and offered him gratitude in a breathy voice.

He would return to Hampshire, resume his correspondence, prepare for the Assize Commission and focus on the political matters that actually required his attention. Warthfield Lodge and its chattering occupant would fade into irrelevance, a minor footnote in the ledger of his holdings, forgotten by the end of the week.

There were men who remembered the wreckage. Men who had profited from it, who had stood close enough to the old Duke’s fire to warm their hands without singeing their own reputations. One man in particular. Raymond did not allow himself to think the name often, for it served no purpose, and he had long since learned that dwelling on threats he could not yet neutralise was a waste of discipline better spent elsewhere.

But the name surfaced now, unbidden, as it always did when Raymond found himself doing something that could be perceived as generous, sentimental or weak.

There was a man who would perceive it as weak. The Earl of Dunmore perceived everything as either a weapon or a vulnerability, and he had spent ten years watching Raymond with the patient attention of a man who understood that the best time to strike was the moment your opponent believed himself safe.

Raymond was not safe, but he had become very good at appearing so.

He climbed into his carriage and told himself that letting a stubborn spinster remain in a minor property was not the sort of decision that could be used against him. It was a practical matter. An administrative convenience. Nothing that would attract notice from anyone, least of all a man whose estate sat twenty miles to the east and whose interest in Raymond’s affairs was as constant and unwelcome as the English rain.

The carriage rattled down the drive, past the overgrown orchard, the sagging fence line, and past the spot where her mother’s flowers still bloomed despite years of neglect. Raymond watched the house grow smaller through the rear window, a warm stone building with ivy climbing its eastern wall and smoke curling from the kitchen chimney.

He could still feel the warmth of her fingers around his hand.

He closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the seat, and told himself it meant nothing.

***

Evelyn Gerard stood on the front steps of Warthfield Lodge and watched the Duke of Shrewsbury’s carriage disappear down the drive until it was nothing but a dark shape against the late afternoon sky. Only when it had vanished entirely around the bend in the road did she allow her knees to give way, sinking to sit on the stone step with a graceless thump that would have horrified her mother.

“Well,” she said to the door behind her. “That was unexpected.”

The door, naturally, did not respond. But Evelyn had been talking to Warthfield for as long as she could remember, and she was not about to stop simply because the house had been temporarily owned by an intimidating duke with cold grey eyes and shoulders broad enough to block out the sun.

She pressed her hands to her face and discovered that her cheeks were burning. Her heart was still pounding against her ribs with a force that seemed entirely disproportionate to the conversation she had just survived. She had expected shouting, threats, ultimatums and perhaps even the arrival of stern-faced men carrying her father’s books out to a waiting cart. She had steeled herself for the worst and armed herself with indignation, prepared to go down fighting for every inch of ground.

She had not believed that he would permit her to remain, least of all with such ease.

Nor had she expected him to look at her like that.

Evelyn was not naive. She had survived the two London Seasons that circumstances allowed her, during which she had learned a great deal about how men looked at women and what those looks meant. She knew the difference between genuine admiration and the sort of pitying assessment that calculated her dress size and found it wanting. She knew the way men’s eyes slid past her toward slimmer, more fashionable figures, and she knew the particular expression of a man who was interested enough to flirt but not enough to court.

The Duke of Shrewsbury had looked at her like none of those things.

He had looked at her, for one brief, charged moment, like he wanted to devour her whole.

She shivered despite the warmth of the afternoon. It was absurd, of course. The man was a duke. One of the most powerful peers in the south of England, from what she had gathered through village gossip and her own hasty research after learning he would be claiming her home. Cold, they said. Controlled. He rebuilt his family name after some scandal involving his father, the details of which remained frustratingly vague. He had political ambitions, and he was unmarried, despite being well past thirty, which suggested either impossibly high standards or a fundamental disinterest in the institution.

He was also, she admitted to herself in the privacy of her own doorstep, unreasonably attractive in a way that felt almost aggressive. Tall, broad and dark-haired, with a jaw that could have been carved from the same stone as Warthfield’s foundation and eyes the color of winter clouds. He had towered over her even when she stood on the second step, radiating a sort of controlled power that made her want to both retreat and draw nearer at once.

And he had flinched when she touched his hand.

Evelyn replayed the moment in her mind. The way his whole body had tensed at the contact. The way his eyes had darkened, his pupils expanding, and his breath catching almost imperceptibly. The way he had pulled his hand away as though she had burned him and excused himself with a roughness that bordered on rudeness.

“He was horrified,” she said to the climbing rose beside the steps. “Obviously horrified. A man like that, being handled so forwardly by a woman like me. No wonder he fled.”

But that did not quite match the memory. He had not looked horrified. He had looked… hungry. For just a moment, before the mask of cold composure slammed back into place, he had looked at her mouth with an intensity that made her stomach do something complicated and her face flush hot.

“You are imagining things,” she informed the rose bush firmly. “It is the stress. The relief. Your mind is deceiving you because you have not had proper rest in weeks.”

The rose bush remained skeptical.

Evelyn pushed herself to her feet, brushing the dust from her skirts. She had a great deal to do now that her immediate future did not involve finding a room to rent in Chichester. The house needed attention, and the tenant cottages needed repair. She had been too consumed with worry to focus on anything practical, but now she could begin again. She could throw herself into the work of maintaining this place she loved.

She could stop lying awake at night, wondering where she would go when they came to turn her out.

She paused at the threshold, one hand on the door frame, and looked back down the empty drive where the duke’s carriage had vanished. She could not quite shake the image of him standing at the base of her steps, all dark elegance and barely contained power, looking up at her with those storm-cloud eyes as though she were a puzzle he could not quite solve.

“He will not come back,” she told the door. “He said as much. He has other estates. This one is nothing to him.”

And she was nothing to him either, which was as it should be. She was the inconvenient occupant of a minor property, a problem solved with a few words and a tenancy agreement. He had done her an enormous kindness, and she was grateful, and that would be the end of it.

Evelyn stepped inside and closed the door behind her, and if her hand trembled slightly as she pressed her palm flat against the worn wood, she did not let herself dwell on the reason.

“Thank you,” she whispered to the house. “Whatever happens next, thank you for keeping me here.”

The house creaked softly in response, settling around her like an embrace.

Chapter Two

“Will that be all for the evening, Your Grace?”

Raymond did not look up from his correspondence. The letter before him required his full attention, a preliminary report on the upcoming Assize Commission, detailing the proposed reforms to the magistrates’ courts and the various factions likely to oppose them. Important work. Critical, even. The sort of matter that demanded every ounce of his considerable focus.

“That will be all, Hendricks.”

His valet retreated with the practised silence of a man who had spent fifteen years learning exactly how much space his employer required. Raymond dipped his quill pen and continued reading, his eyes tracking the careful script while his mind insisted on wandering to places it had no business going.

It had been three days since Warthfield.

Three days since he had returned to Shrewsbury Hall, his principal seat in Hampshire, and buried himself in the mountain of work that always accumulated during his absences. Three days of correspondence, account ledgers and meetings with his steward about drainage issues in the east fields. Three days of rigid, disciplined productivity, every hour accounted for, every moment directed toward something useful.

Three days of failing to forget her.

Raymond set down his pen and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. This was absurd. She was a minor inconvenience, a tenant on a property he would likely never visit again. He had spent perhaps thirty minutes in her company, most of which she had spent arguing with him on a doorstep. There was no reason for her to occupy even a corner of his thoughts, let alone the sprawling territory she seemed to have claimed without his permission.

And yet.

The freckles. The way they dusted the pale skin of her chest and disappeared beneath her bodice, a trail he had not followed with his eyes but could not stop imagining. The soft curves of her body, generous and warm, so different from the angular elegance the ton prized. The way she had looked up at him with those wide, gold-flecked eyes, her lips parted, her voice breathy with gratitude, saying ‘anything at all’ as though she had no idea what those words might conjure in the mind of a man who had not touched a woman in longer than he cared to admit.

She had not known. That was the worst of it. She had meant it innocently, a simple expression of gratitude, and his mind had twisted it into something filthy and urgent before he could stop himself. He had stood there on her doorstep, imagining her on her knees, and she had been thinking about shortbread and her father’s library.

He was disgusted with himself.

Raymond pushed back from the desk and crossed to the window, staring out at the darkened grounds of Shrewsbury Hall. The moon was half-full, casting silver light across the manicured gardens and the ornamental lake that had cost his grandfather a small fortune to construct. Everything here was controlled, ordered, precisely as it should be. He had spent ten years making it so, rebuilding the estate and the family name from the wreckage his father had left behind.

His father, who had destroyed himself over a woman.

Several women, in point of fact. The old Duke of Shrewsbury had been legendary for his appetites, his gambling, his utter inability to deny himself anything he wanted. He had kept mistresses openly, spent fortunes on jewels, horses and estates he could not afford, and ultimately died in disgrace, leaving his only son to inherit a title that felt more like a punishment than a privilege.

The disgrace had not been solitary. There had been others in the old Duke’s orbit, men who had enabled his worst impulses or been dragged into them. Most had scattered when the scandal broke, retreating to their own estates to wait out the storm, emerging only when it became clear that the new Duke intended to bury the past so thoroughly that even proximity to it would be forgotten.

One had not scattered. One had stayed close, circling the edges of Raymond’s reconstruction like a creditor waiting to present a bill. Lord Welling had been young then, barely thirty, an earl with a new title, old ambitions and the particular hunger of a man who believed the world owed him a debt it refused to acknowledge. He had been involved in the schemes that destroyed the Shrewsbury name, but how deeply, Raymond had never been able to determine with certainty. Deeply enough to know things. Deeply enough to have kept records, copies, or the kind of quiet leverage that did not need to be displayed to be felt.

Raymond had spent years trying to understand what Welling wanted. It was not money; the man had sufficient wealth. It was not political power in the conventional sense; he held his seats and his committees and wielded them competently. It was something less tangible and therefore more dangerous. Raymond had watched him at dinners, debates and the endless social machinery of the peerage, and what he saw was a man who moved through rooms full of people who had been born to their positions and never let him forget that he had not been born to his. The old families smiled at Welling, drank his wine and voted alongside him when it suited them, but not one of them regarded him as an equal.

Raymond’s father had been the worst offender. The old Duke had treated Welling with the casual warmth of a man petting a useful dog, and Welling had accepted it because the alternative was exclusion. But acceptance was not forgiveness. Raymond understood that now, in a way that he had not understood at twenty-two. A man could swallow humiliation for years and appear unchanged by it, and the only evidence of the poison accumulating inside him would be the patience with which he waited for the right moment to spit it back.

Welling was patient, and that was what frightened Raymond most.

Raymond had sworn, at the age of two-and-twenty, that he would be nothing like his father. He had built walls around every impulse, every desire, every weakness that might lead him down the same path. Control was not merely a preference; it was survival. The moment he allowed himself to want something badly enough to lose his grip, he became his father’s son in truth.

He would not let that happen.

He returned to his desk and forced himself to read another three pages of the Commission report. The words blurred together, something about land disputes, tenant rights and the proper jurisdiction of county magistrates. He made notes in the margins. He drafted a response to the Lord Chancellor’s office. He did everything a disciplined, controlled man ought to do.

When he finally retired to his chambers, the clock had struck midnight, and his eyes burned with exhaustion. He dismissed his valet’s offer of assistance, undressed himself, and climbed into the massive four-poster bed that had belonged to four generations of Shrewsbury dukes. The sheets were cool and crisp, freshly pressed. The room was dark and silent. He closed his eyes and willed himself toward the oblivion of sleep.

It did not come.

Instead, she came.

The dream began in the library at Warthfield.

He knew it was Warthfield, though he had never set foot inside the house, because the room felt like her. Warm and slightly cluttered, books piled on every surface, a fire crackling in the grate despite the mildness of the season. The light was amber and gold, casting long shadows across the worn carpet and the comfortable furniture that had clearly been chosen for use rather than appearance.

She was standing by the fire.

Her hair was down, tumbling over her shoulders in dark waves that caught the firelight, the brown warming to auburn at the ends. She wore something white and flowing, a nightgown or a chemise, the fabric thin enough to reveal the shadow of her body beneath. The freckles he had glimpsed on her chest continued downward, he could see now, trailing down the upper curves of her breasts like a path he wanted to follow.

She looked up at him with those ridiculous doe eyes, dark and warm and flecked with gold and green.

“Your Grace,” she said, and her voice was soft, almost a whisper. “You came back.”

“I should not have.” The words came out rough, scraped raw. “I should not be here.”

“But you are.” She took a step toward him, and the movement made the thin fabric of her gown shift against her body, outlining every curve. “You are here, and I promised you anything at all.”

“You did not mean it like this.”

“Did I not?” She was close now, close enough to touch, and she was looking up at him with an expression that made his blood run hot. Her lips were parted, pink and full, slightly wet where she had just touched them with her tongue. “I meant every word, Your Grace. I will do anything to repay your kindness. Anything you ask.”

He reached for her before he could stop himself. His hand tangled in her hair, those thick soft waves, and he tilted her face up toward his. Her eyes went wide, her breath catching, but she did not pull away.

“Anything,” he repeated, and his voice had dropped to something dark and dangerous.

“Anything.”

She sank to her knees.

The movement was slow, deliberate, her eyes never leaving his as she lowered herself to the carpet before him. Her hands came to rest on his thighs, palms warm through the fabric of his trousers, and she looked up at him with those enormous eyes, her lips parted, waiting.

“Say my name,” he commanded.

“Raymond.” It came out breathless, reverent, a prayer shaped around two syllables. “Raymond, please.”

He tightened his grip in her hair and guided her forward. Her fingers worked at the fastenings of his trousers with clumsy eagerness, and then her hand was on him, warm and soft, and he groaned as she stroked the length of him.

“You have no idea what you do to me,” he said through gritted teeth. “You stand there with your freckles, your curves and your ridiculous cheerful face, and you offer me anything, as though you do not understand what that word means coming from that mouth.”

“Show me.” She leaned closer, her breath hot against his skin. “Show me what it means.”

Her lips parted, and her tongue darted out to wet them. And then that impossibly full mouth was opening for him, taking him in, and the sight of her on her knees looking up at him while she…

Raymond woke with a violent jolt, his body jerking upright in the darkness. His heart was slamming against his ribs. His skin was slicked with sweat, and the sheets were tangled around his legs. And beneath the bedclothes, his body was hard and aching with a ferocity that bordered on painful.

He fell back against the pillows and stared at the canopy above him, jaw clenched so tight his teeth ached.

A dream. It had been a dream. She was forty miles away in a crumbling house in Sussex, probably sleeping peacefully, probably dreaming of shortbread and rose gardens and whatever else occupied the minds of relentlessly cheerful spinsters. She had no idea that the Duke of Shrewsbury was lying in his ancestral bed in Hampshire, hard as iron and furious about it, because his subconscious had decided to conjure her image in the most debauched possible scenario.

He was not his father.

He would not lose control over a woman’s skin and a carelessly offered sentence. He had discipline and restraint. He had spent a decade building himself into a man who did not surrender to base urges, who did not let his body dictate his actions, who did not become a slave to his own desires.

He closed his eyes and willed the arousal to fade, but it did not.

Instead, the images from the dream returned with punishing clarity. Her hair in his fist, her eyes looking up at him, her soft pink mouth opening, her tongue darting out, her breath hot against his skin. And then the sound of his name in that breathy voice. Raymond. Raymond, please.

He lasted approximately four minutes.

Then, with a curse that would have shocked his valet, his hand moved beneath the sheets.

He tried not to think of her. He tried to summon any other image, any other woman, any of the discreet companions he had taken over the years who had understood that his needs were physical and nothing more. But his mind would not cooperate. Every time he closed his eyes, she was there. On her knees, looking up at him. Those dark eyes, wide and willing, her chest heaving, her full lips wrapped around…

His hand moved faster, rough and graceless, nothing like the controlled precision he applied to every other aspect of his life. He was panting now, his free hand fisted in the sheets, his hips lifting off the mattress as he chased the release his body demanded.

She would be warm, he thought. She radiated warmth, like a hearth fire in human form. Every inch of her would be soft, yielding and impossibly sweet. If he buried himself inside her, she would make sounds, he was certain of it, breathless little gasps and moans that would drive him mad. She would say his name. She would wrap those soft thighs around him and pull him deeper. She would look up at him with those enormous eyes and tell him she would do anything, and this time he would not walk away, this time he would show her exactly what that word meant…

The climax hit him like a blow, wrenching a groan from somewhere deep in his chest. He bit down on the sound, muffling it against his clenched teeth, but her name slipped out anyway, a hoarse whisper in the darkness.

Evelyn.

He lay in the aftermath, chest heaving, staring at the shadows on the ceiling. His body felt wrung out, emptied, and for a moment, there was nothing but the quiet satisfaction of release.

Then the disgust flooded in.

He had touched himself like a green boy, like a man with no self-control, like his father, and he had done it while thinking of a woman he barely knew. A woman who had shown him nothing but polite gratitude and passionate defence of her home. A woman who deserved better than to be the unwitting subject of his sordid imaginings.

Raymond cleaned himself with mechanical efficiency, changed into fresh nightclothes, and stripped the soiled sheets from the bed. He would ring for the servants to replace them in the morning and offer no explanation, because he was the Duke of Shrewsbury, and he did not explain himself to anyone.

He climbed back into bed and stared at the ceiling until dawn began to grey the windows.

He would not think of her again. He would put Evelyn Gerard, her warmth and her earnest gaze out of his mind entirely. She was a tenant on a minor property, nothing more. He had done her a kindness and received nothing in return, because he had wanted nothing in return, because she was nothing to him.

The sun rose. He dressed, went to his study and read more reports about the Assize Commission. He answered correspondence, he met with his steward, and he did everything a disciplined man should do.

That night, he dreamed of her again.

And the night after that.

And the night after that.

By the end of the week, Raymond had accepted several unfortunate truths. He could not stop thinking about her. He could not stop dreaming about her. And no cold baths, long rides, or brutal self-recrimination was going to change that. He had not been with a woman in a long time, and she undid him so thoroughly, yet he could not understand why. He tried to stop thinking about her, but it did not work.

None of it worked.

Chapter Three

“The Crown’s summons, Your Grace.”

Raymond took the sealed letter from his secretary’s hand and examined the wax impression pressed into the crimson seal. The royal cypher. He had been expecting this, had been preparing for it, and yet the sight of it still sent a cold thread of anticipation down his spine. The Assize Commission. A month-long gathering of every landed peer in the southern counties, convened to consider reforms to the magistracy and to settle land disputes that had festered since the tenant unrest of the previous year.

He broke the seal and read.

The language was formal, as Crown correspondence always was, but the substance was simple enough. His presence was required in Chichester for the duration of the Commission, beginning in a fortnight. Attendance was compulsory for all peers holding Sussex properties. Failure to appear would result in forfeiture of his vote on the proposed reforms, including the Tenant Rights Act, that would directly affect his holdings.

Raymond set the letter down and stared at the map of southern England spread across his desk. His secretary had marked each of his properties with small pins: the Hampshire estate where he currently sat, the Kent holdings he rarely visited, the London townhouse, and three smaller properties scattered across Surrey, Sussex, and the edge of Dorset.

One of those pins sat squarely in Sussex, less than twenty minutes from Chichester.

Warthfield Lodge.

He had not thought of the property in strategic terms when he claimed it. That was a lie. He had thought of nothing but strategy when he claimed it, had calculated the value of its proximity to the administrative center with the same cold precision he applied to every acquisition. Warthfield was worthless as an income-generating estate, but its position made it invaluable for exactly this purpose: a base of operations for any political business conducted in the southern Sussex governance hub.

He had simply failed to account for one variable.

The variable currently residing in his base of operations, talking to the walls and filling every room with her presence and haunting his dreams with her freckled shoulders and her soft pink mouth.

Raymond pushed back from the desk and crossed to the window, staring out at the Hampshire countryside without seeing it. He had options. He could take lodgings in Chichester itself, rent rooms at one of the respectable inns that catered to visiting peers. The expense would be trivial, and the inconvenience would be minimal. It was the obvious solution, the sensible solution, the solution that did not involve spending a month under the same roof as Evelyn Gerard.

But the lodgings in Chichester would mean an hour’s ride to the Commission chambers each morning, then an hour’s ride back each evening. Two hours a day, every day, for a month. Time he could not afford to waste, not when the political stakes were this high. The Tenant Reform Act would reshape the relationship between landholders and their tenants for a generation. His vote and his presence mattered. Every hour spent travelling was an hour not spent building alliances, gathering intelligence, positioning himself for the outcomes he needed.

Warthfield was twenty minutes away, a forty-minute round trip. An hour and twenty minutes saved every single day.

It was the practical choice. The efficient choice. The choice any rational man would make when weighing the costs and benefits of his options.

Raymond returned to his desk, drew a fresh sheet of paper toward him, and began to write.

Mrs. Blackwood,

I write to inform you that I will be taking residence at Warthfield Lodge for the duration of the Assize Commission, approximately one month beginning the fifteenth of this month. Please prepare the master chambers accordingly. I will require…

He paused. The master chambers, the best rooms in the house, were traditionally reserved for the owner. The rooms that had belonged to Evelyn’s father before his death, and which she herself might now be occupying.

He crumpled the letter and began again.

Mrs. Blackwood,

I write to inform you that I will be taking residence at Warthfield Lodge for the duration of the Assize Commission. Please prepare suitable chambers for my use. Miss Gerard is not to be displaced from her current accommodations. I will require basic provisions appropriate for a gentleman’s needs, though I expect to take most meals at the Commission or in Chichester proper. My arrival will be on the fourteenth, in the early evening.

Shrewsbury.

He read the letter twice, checking for any phrase that might be misconstrued, any word that might suggest more than simple practicality. There was nothing. It was a perfectly businesslike communication from a landlord to his housekeeper, informing her of his plans and outlining his requirements. Nothing more.

He sat alone in his study, watching the afternoon light shift across the map of Sussex, and told himself that he was making the right decision.

There was also the matter of proximity.

Not to Chichester, that calculation had already been made and settled, but proximity to Welling. The Earl’s Sussex estate, Dunmore Park, sat less than twenty miles from Warthfield, and the Commission would place them in the same chamber for a month of daily sessions. Raymond had shared political space with Welling before, at Parliamentary sittings, county assemblies and the annual round of obligations that the peerage imposed on its members. But those encounters had been brief and structured, bounded by agendas and protocols that left little room for the kind of unscripted confrontation Welling seemed perpetually on the verge of engineering.

A month was different. A month meant sustained contact, daily observation, the slow accumulation of small interactions that could reveal patterns and weaknesses to a man trained to look for them. Raymond would be watching Welling, and Welling would certainly be watching him.

The thought should have made Warthfield less appealing, not more. If Welling was surveilling his movements, and Raymond was sure that he was, and would continue until one of them was dead or ruined, then taking residence at a property twenty miles from the man’s own estate was an invitation to closer scrutiny. Every visitor, every errand, every arrival and departure would be duly noted by those in Welling’s employ.

Every interaction with the woman currently living under his roof…

Raymond set down his pen and stared at the letter he had written to Mrs. Blackwood. He thought about Evelyn Gerard on her front steps, chin lifted, daring him to remove her. He thought about the warmth of her fingers around his hand and the breathless gratitude in her voice. He thought about how that scene might look through the eyes of a man who saw the world as a series of transactions and vulnerabilities.

He picked up the letter, folded it, and sealed it anyway.

The Commission required his presence, and Warthfield was the practical choice. Miss Gerard was a tenant, nothing more, and he would conduct himself accordingly. If Welling was watching, and Welling was always watching, he would see nothing worth reporting.

Raymond told himself this with the conviction of a man who had built an entire life on the principle that what he told himself became true through sheer force of will.

It had always worked before.

***

The fortnight passed with agonizing slowness.

Raymond threw himself into preparation with a fervor that even his secretary found excessive. He read every report on the Commission’s proposed agenda. He corresponded with allies and identified potential opponents. He reviewed the histories of each Sussex peer who would be in attendance, noting their voting patterns, their political leanings, their vulnerabilities and ambitions. By the time his departure date arrived, he knew more about the Assize Commission than half the men who had convened it.

He also dreamed of her every single night, but he had stopped allowing himself to acknowledge that fact.

The ride to Sussex took most of a day, and he set out before dawn to ensure his arrival before nightfall. The weather was fair, the roads dry, and his horse made good time through the Hampshire countryside and across the border into Sussex. He passed through Chichester in the late afternoon, noting the bustle of preparation as the town readied itself for the influx of visiting peers, and continued east toward Warthfield without stopping.

The sun was beginning to set when the house came into view.

Raymond reined his horse to a halt at the crest of the hill overlooking the property. From there, he could see the whole of it: the warm stone building with ivy climbing its eastern wall, the overgrown orchard behind it, the tenant cottages scattered across the near fields, the kitchen garden that someone had recently weeded. Smoke curled from the chimney, and candles flickered in several windows. The house looked lived in, cared for, loved in a way that his own grand estate in Hampshire never quite managed.

And through the lit kitchen window, he could see her.

Just a silhouette at this distance, a shape moving behind the glass, but he knew it was her. No one else moved like that, with that particular energy, that sense of constant motion and warmth. She was occupied at the table, her hands busy with something, and as he watched, her silhouette threw its head back in what could only be laughter.

He could almost hear it from across the grounds. She was laughing in her kitchen, in the home he had let her keep, and she had no idea that he was sitting on a horse in the gathering dusk, watching her shadow move behind the window like a moth drawn to a flame it knew would burn it.

One month.

He could survive one month.

Raymond urged his horse forward, down the hill and along the drive toward the house. The gravel crunched beneath hooves, and a dog barked somewhere in the distance. The front door opened, spilling warm light across the steps, and Mrs. Blackwood emerged to greet him with the efficient courtesy of a housekeeper who had received two weeks’ notice and made thorough use of them.

“Your Grace. Welcome to Warthfield. Your chambers are prepared, and there is dinner waiting if you are hungry.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Blackwood.” He dismounted and handed the reins to a groom who had materialized from the direction of the stables. “Has Miss Gerard been informed of my arrival?”

“She has, Your Grace. She expressed her intention to give you privacy during your stay and assured me she would not intrude upon your time.”

Something that might have been disappointment flickered through his chest, but he crushed it immediately.

“That is considerate of her. Please convey my appreciation.”

He followed the housekeeper inside, his boots echoing on the worn flagstones of the entrance hall. The house was smaller than he had imagined, the ceilings lower, the rooms more intimate. It smelled of beeswax and lavender and something baking in the kitchen, warm and sweet and utterly unlike the formal grandeur of Shrewsbury Hall.

It smelled like her. He knew because he could not get over her scent from the first meeting.

Mrs. Blackwood led him up a narrow staircase to the chambers that had been prepared for his use. They were not the master chambers, he noted. The housekeeper had followed his instructions, giving him chambers which were comfortable but clearly not the primary suite. Through a connecting door, he could see a small sitting room, and beyond that, another door that presumably led to the rest of the private quarters.

Her quarters.

They would be sharing a wall.

“Will there be anything else, Your Grace?”

Raymond realized he had been staring at the connecting door for too long. He turned away with more abruptness than necessary.

“No, thank you. That will be all.”

The housekeeper withdrew, the door closed, and Raymond stood in the center of his temporary chambers and listened to the silence of the house settling around him.

It was not silent for long.

From somewhere below, he heard the faint sound of singing. A woman’s voice, clear and unself-conscious, carrying some tune he did not recognize. She was singing while she moved through the house, probably finishing whatever task had occupied her in the kitchen, probably entirely unaware that her voice was floating up through the floorboards and wrapping around him like a physical thing.

One month.

He sank into the chair by the fireplace and dropped his head into his hands.