“Give Me an Heir and You’ll Be Free,” the Ruthless Duke Told the Stranger He Married — He Never Guessed She Had Loved Him for Seven Years, or That Her Ruined Physician Father’s Forbidden Knowledge Could Save His Life

PART 1

“Give me an heir and you’ll be free.”

The Duke of Edshot said it the way another man might read out a bill of sale—without heat, without apology. His back half turned to the woman who stood on the far side of the great drawing room. The fire had burned low, and no one had come to mend it, because he had ordered the servants gone an hour since.

“You will have a name, a settlement, and after the child is born and weaned, your freedom and a house of your own in whatever county you please. That is the whole of it. I want no more from you than that, and I will pretend to offer no more.”

He turned then, because a gentleman turned, even a gentleman who had ceased to believe in the word. He expected to see the thing he had seen in the eyes of every woman his aunt had paraded before him these last months—the flinch, the calculation, the swift, greedy arithmetic dressed up as maidenly hesitation. He expected to despise her a little, as he despised them all, and to be glad of it, because contempt was easier to carry to an altar than hope.

He saw none of it.

Glenna Viner stood very straight beside the cold marble of the chimney piece, her gloved hands folded before her, and looked at him as though she were the one weighing the bargain and finding it not quite to her liking. She was not beautiful in the way the county reckoned beauty. She was too pale, too plainly dressed—her gown a gray that had been black once and would be nothing at all before another winter was out. But her eyes were steady and gray as slate under rain, and they did not drop from his.

“You are very frank, Your Grace,” she said.

“I am dying.” The Duke watched to see what the word would do to her. Most women wept, or pretended to, dabbing at dry eyes while their minds ran ahead to widowhood and jointure. This one did not weep. She looked at him for a long moment—not at his fine coat, nor at the ring on his hand, nor at the length and breadth of the room. She looked at his face. At his mouth. At the corners of it, and at the hollows beneath his eyes, with an attention so particular and so unashamed that he felt it almost as a touch.

“Are you dying?” she asked.

No one had asked him that. Not his aunt, who spoke of his health in hushed euphemisms. Not the physicians who told him rather than asked. Not the tenants who crossed themselves when his carriage passed.

He found the directness of it disarming. And disarmed, he answered plainly.

“The same thing that carried off my father at eight-and-thirty, and his father before him. A wasting of the heart. It comes on with a blueness of the lips, breathlessness, a tiredness that no rest will mend. I am six-and-thirty. I have watched the same shadow come up in myself this twelvemonth. I intend to leave a son and a house in order, and then I intend to be done.”

She was quiet a moment. The fire ticked and settled. Beyond the tall windows, the January dark pressed against the glass.

“I see a man in a great cold room who has sent all his people away so that no one will see how tired he is,” she said. “That is what I see.”

The Duke said nothing. He had meant to conclude the interview in ten minutes and had already given her thirty. He had meant to feel nothing and had felt unaccountably seen. And being seen was the one thing he had spent a decade making impossible.

“Why are you here, Miss Viner?” he asked, crossing to the window. “My man tells me you are gently born, a physician’s daughter. That your father is dead and left you nothing but debts and a bad name. That you have kept yourself these three years by sewing and by reading aloud to old women who are cruel to you. A woman such as you does not answer an advertisement of this kind for the sport of it. What do you want?”

He saw her breathe. When she answered, her voice had changed—only a little, only enough that a man who had spent his life listening for the false note might catch it.

“I want a roof that is my own and no one’s charity. I want to sleep a single night without reckoning what I shall do when this position ends, as they all end. I want at the last to be somebody’s business that they cannot put out of doors on a whim.”

It was the most honest thing anyone had said to him in that room in twenty years. And because it was honest, and because honesty from a stranger frightened him more than any flattery, he retreated at once behind the cold thing he did best.

“Good. Then we understand each other. This is a transaction. You will find me a fair man in transactions. I do not want a companion. I do not want conversation over breakfast. I do not want to be nursed or coaxed or improved. I want an heir, got in the ordinary way, quietly and without sentiment. When it is done, you go free and rich, and you may forget you ever heard the name of Edshot. Can you do that?”

He turned to see how the coldness landed. He expected her to bridle, or to weep at last.

Glenna Viner looked at him. And something crossed her face that he could not name—something that was not fear, and was not greed, and was, if he had been able to read it, very like grief.

“Yes, Your Grace,” she said quietly. “I can do that.”

She signed her name to his cold bargain in a firm, clear hand. And let him believe he had bought a plain poor woman’s compliance for a settlement and a house.

He never guessed her secret.