She Grabbed a Stranger to Escape Her Ex — Not knowing He’s a Duke!

Chapter 1

The wool of his coat was rough against her cheek. Rain clung to it, and beneath the damp, something warmer — cedar and tobacco and the faint starch of a valet’s care. Beneath her palms, she felt the man go rigid, a full-body flinch that traveled through his shoulders and down his spine like a tremor. Behind her, six feet away and closing fast, she heard that laugh. The one she had woken to in the dark for two years. The laugh that meant he had seen her. That he knew exactly where she was. That the game was beginning again. She pressed deeper into the stranger’s shoulder, held her breath, and prayed to a God she had long since stopped believing in.

Clara Ashworth had not planned to attend the Blackwood ball. She had come because her Aunt Helena had accepted for her, because Lady Blackwood was one of the eleven people in London who still sent her a Christmas card, and because refusing would have been noticed. That was the arithmetic of her life now. Every decision was weighed against what might be observed, repeated, carried home in a carriage and delivered to the wrong ears.

She had stood for the first hour in her usual position: where she could see both doors.

Dominic was not supposed to be in England. He had gone to Paris in June and was not expected back before spring. She had checked. She had asked her aunt to inquire casually of two separate acquaintances. She had been told, with certainty, Paris until March.

He came in at ten o’clock with the Croft party. Of course he did. He was to marry Miss Isabelle Croft in April, and there was forty thousand pounds in it, and everybody said what a charming match it was. He entered through the far door of the long gallery, laughing at something with his head turned away. In about six seconds, he would turn it back, and he would be looking directly at her.

Clara’s body decided before her mind could catch up.

She had a wall behind her, a pillar to her left, the open door in front. There was nowhere to go. The only object between her and Dominic Hawthorne’s eyes was the back of a man in a dark blue coat, standing four feet away.

She took two steps and put her arms around him.

She buried her face in his shoulder, pressed her hands into the heavy wool of his coat, and held on the way a drowning person holds to wreckage in a black sea. She felt him go absolutely rigid under her hands. Stone-still. But he did not push her away.

Four seconds. Maybe five. She heard Dominic’s laugh move past her, heard it continue down the gallery without stopping. That laugh—the one she had once found delightful, the one she now heard in her sleep—faded into the noise of the party.

Then she became aware that the room had changed. Not gone silent. Worse than silent. It had gone quiet. The particular, dangerous quiet of forty people all deciding at once to watch and wait.

Clara lifted her head.

The man she was holding was perhaps thirty. Dark hair, sharp jaw, a face she did not know at all—and she was quite certain she would have remembered. He was looking down at her with an expression she could not read. Not outrage, which she had braced for. Not amusement, either. Something more careful than either. Something that looked like a man taking rapid inventory of a room he had not expected to be in.

“Madam,” he said quietly. “You are going to want to let go of my coat.”

She let go. “I am so sorry. I am—”

She stopped. There was no end to that sentence. She had no explanation that would make it better.

“No,” he agreed. “I don’t suppose there is.”

Behind him, forty feet away, somebody laughed. Then several people did. The sound was light, social, terrible.

“I’ll go,” Clara said. “I’ll go now.”

“You will not,” said the man, “because you will not reach the door. And if you run out of this room, the story that goes home in every carriage tonight is that you ran.”

He put one hand very lightly under her elbow and turned so that they were both facing outward into the gallery. His grip was firm but not unkind.

“Stand there. Look bored. Say something to me and laugh at it. And for God’s sake, make it look easy.”

Clara, who had spent two years being told she could not do easy, said, “I don’t think I can.”

“Then say something true. And let me laugh at it.”

“You are the only man in London who has not heard about me,” Clara said. “And that will last about eleven more minutes.”

He laughed. It sounded entirely genuine. She suspected it was not.

“Good. Now walk with me to the window. Slowly. Take my arm as though you have done it a hundred times before.”

They stood at the window for four minutes and made conversation that neither of them afterwards remembered a word of. The room gradually returned to its noise. The danger passed, folded into the evening as a curiosity rather than a scandal.

“There is a card room through that door,” he said. “It is empty because the tables have not been set. Go into it. I will follow in three minutes.”

“Sir, please—”

“I am not going to do anything to you. I am going to tell you something. And you would much rather hear it from me tonight than from somebody else on Thursday.”

The card room was dark and smelled of wax and old felt. A single candle burned on the mantel. He came in exactly three minutes later and left the door standing open a foot, which she noticed and was obscurely grateful for.

“I ought to begin,” he said, “by telling you my name. Because you plainly do not know it, and everyone else in that gallery does. I am Blackwood.”

Clara’s stomach dropped out of her body.

The Duke of Blackwood.

“I hugged the Duke of Blackwood,” she said.

“You did,” he agreed. “In front of the Blackwoods, the Crofts, Lady Basingstoke—who writes eleven letters a day—and my great-aunt Margaret, who is deaf and consequently very loud.”

Clara put both hands over her face.

“I want to be clear that I am not angry,” he said. “I want to establish that first, because what I am about to say will sound as though I am.”

“Say it.”

“There is a hearing on the eleventh of February,” said the Duke of Blackwood, “in which I am attempting to keep guardianship of my brother’s daughter. She is nine. My sister-in-law’s family have applied to have her removed from my care. Their entire case—the whole of it, there is nothing else in it—is that a bachelor of thirty-one is an unsuitable person to raise a girl, and that my household is not a proper one.”

Clara took her hands away from her face very slowly.

“Oh, God,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Oh, God. I’m sorry. I didn’t—I had no idea—”

“I know you didn’t.” He was leaning against the card table with his arms folded, quite calm. “Nobody in that gallery is going to say the Duke was ambushed by a stranger. They are going to say that an unmarried woman put her arms around me in public, and that I did not remove her. Which is what happened. And by Thursday, Colonel Croft’s solicitor will have it. Because the Crofts are my sister-in-law’s cousins. And they were standing eleven feet away.”

The room was very cold. The candle flame trembled in a draft from the open door.

“What can I do?” Clara said. “Tell me, and I’ll do it. I’ll write to the court. I’ll swear whatever you like. I’ll say I was taken ill—I’ll say anything—”

“An affidavit from the woman herself is worth precisely nothing. And it makes it a matter of record besides.” He shook his head. “No, there are two ways out of a thing like this. And I have been standing in that gallery for four minutes, going through both of them.”

“What is the first?”

“I disown it entirely. I say you are a stranger to me. That your conduct was extraordinary, and that I was as astonished as anybody.” He said it flatly, like a man reading a line from a play he despised. “That answers the guardianship. It is very likely enough on its own to end their case.”

“And what happens to me?”

“You are finished,” said the Duke of Blackwood. “Completely and immediately. A woman who does that to a stranger, and is publicly repudiated by him, does not recover. And I would guess, from the way you were standing when I found you at my shoulder, that you have already got very little left to lose. Which means it would not cost you a great deal to lose the rest.”

He paused. The silence stretched.

“And that is the most contemptible sentence I have ever spoken aloud. And I would like you to know—I heard myself say it.”

Clara found that she was gripping the back of a chair so hard her knuckles had gone white.

“What is the second way?”

He did not answer at once. He looked at the wall, at the candle, at the door standing open a foot. Then he looked at her.

“The second way,” he said, “is that it was not extraordinary at all. That it was a private thing, done carelessly in public, by a woman who had every right to do it. Because we are engaged. And have been these six weeks. And have been waiting on her family’s leave to say so.”

The clock in the corner went on with what it was doing.

“You don’t know my name,” Clara said.

“No.”

“You don’t know one single thing about me. You don’t know what is already said about me—and there is a great deal. And every word of it will come out inside a fortnight. And it is not the kind of thing that helps a man keep a nine-year-old girl.”

“I know,” said the Duke of Blackwood.

“Then why in God’s name would you—”

“Because I have just stood in a card room,” he said, “and heard myself work out, quite coolly and in about ninety seconds, that the cheapest way to keep my niece is to destroy a woman I have never met.” He straightened up off the table. “And I found that I could do it. That is the part I am having difficulty with. I found I could do it. And I would have done it. And I would have been perfectly reasonable about it for the rest of my life.”

He looked at her.

“Whose was the laugh?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You did not grab me because you were frightened of a room. You grabbed me at the exact moment a party came through that door. And you have not once looked at that door since.” His voice was not unkind. “Whose was the laugh?”

Clara Ashworth stood in the dark card room in her eighteen-month-old gown, and for a moment she considered lying. She was so tired of telling the truth and having it used against her.

“His name is Dominic Hawthorne,” she said. “And I was engaged to him for two years. And he is marrying Miss Croft in April.”

Something happened in the Duke of Blackwood’s face. A shutter came down, then lifted. “Hawthorne,” he said slowly. “Is he indeed?”

“You know him?”

“I know of him.” He was looking at the wall, and Clara had the distinct impression that he had stopped talking to her entirely. That he was somewhere else, running calculations she could not see. “Miss Ashworth.”

“Clara.”

“Miss Ashworth.” He came back from wherever he had gone. “I am going to make you an offer, and I want you to think about it overnight. Do not answer me now. You have had a very bad hour, and people make poor decisions in a bad hour.”

“Say it anyway.”

“Six months,” said the Duke of Blackwood. “An engagement, publicly announced on Monday. It carries me past the eleventh of February, and it puts you back in every drawing room in London on my arm. At the end of six months, you break it off. Publicly. On grounds of your own choosing. And a woman who has jilted a duke is a woman nobody in England will ever pity again.”

Clara stared at him.

“And what do you get?”

“A household that is a proper one in the eyes of a court for eleven weeks.” He picked up his hat. “And I do not have to spend the rest of my life being the man who did the other thing.”