She Fled Her Faithless Suitor Into a Dark Room, Unaware England’s Most Feared Duke Was Hiding There — Before She Even Learned His Name, He Did Something That Left Everyone Speechless.

PART 1

“If you weep on my waistcoat,” said a voice out of the dark, “I shall be obliged to charge you for the laundering. And I warn you, it is very fine, and the laundering will ruin you.”

Pride Ambrose, who had shut the door behind her and pressed her back against it in the absolute certainty that she was alone, gave a small strangled shriek and spun about — and could see nothing at all, for the room was unlit, save the last red glow of a dying fire. The voice had come from the great wing chair before it. Low. Dry. Amused. A man’s voice, entirely at his ease.

“I am not weeping,” she said, with as much dignity as a person can summon while flattened against a door in the dark. “I am collecting myself. And I did not know anyone was here. This room was dark. I supposed it empty.”

“It was dark,” the voice agreed. “And I supposed it empty too, which is precisely why I chose it. I came in here to escape three hundred people, a string quartet, and a woman named Lady Bracewell, who has spent the entire evening attempting to introduce me to her niece. I put out the candles myself and sat down in this excellent chair with the express intention of being alone until midnight.”

She heard the smile in it now, dry as autumn leaves. “And here is a young woman who has burst through the door and pressed herself against it as though pursued by wolves, and who is not weeping, and who supposed the room empty. We appear to have had the same idea, madam, and to have chosen the same refuge — which is unfortunate, because a refuge with two people in it is merely a room.”

Pride’s eyes were adjusting now. She could make out the shape of him — a large man unfolding himself from the chair, rising, a tall dark silhouette against the last red coals. Something in the size of him, the ease, the dry voice, made her heart, already racing from her flight, race for an entirely different reason.

“I am sorry to have disturbed your solitude,” she said. “If you will forgive me, I will find another—”

She stopped. From beyond the door, in the corridor, came the sound she had fled. A man’s voice, calling, hunting. “Pridey. Pridey, don’t be foolish. Come out. You’ve quite misunderstood, Pridey.”

She went rigid against the door.

“Ah,” said the stranger, and there was a new note in the dry voice now — a sharpening. “Not wolves. A suitor. And a faithless one, if I am any judge of the particular oiliness of don’t be foolish, you’ve quite misunderstood. I have heard that exact tone before, from men caught doing exactly the thing they are insisting you misunderstood. What did you catch him at?”

“That is hardly your affair,” Pride whispered furiously.

“It is entirely my affair,” the stranger whispered back, “since he is about to open that door and find you in a dark room and me in it with you, and whatever he catches us at will be a great deal more compromising than whatever you caught him at. And I have spent forty years avoiding precisely this sort of scene. So if we are to be ruined together in the next thirty seconds, I should at least like to know the name of the young woman I am to be ruined with, and the nature of the crime that has ruined me.”

A pause. Footsteps, closer.

“Quickly, madam. He is coming.”

Pride, cornered, heart pounding, made a decision of the kind she would spend the rest of her life either regretting or blessing, and was never afterward entirely sure which.

“Pride Ambrose,” she breathed. “And I caught him in the conservatory with my own cousin, on his knees, saying to her the very same words he said to me a fortnight ago when he asked for my hand. Word for word the identical speech — as though we were interchangeable. As though a proposal were a thing a man might deliver twice in a month to two different women and mean neither time. That is what I caught him at, and now he is pretending I misunderstood, and hunting me through the house to explain it away, and I would sooner be ruined in a dark room with a complete stranger than let that man near me again to tell me that what I saw with my own two eyes was something else.”

Silence from the dark shape by the fire. Then the stranger spoke again, in a voice that had lost every trace of dryness and held something else now — quieter. Warmer.

“Then you had better come and stand by the fire, Miss Ambrose, where the light is. Let us be found together, in perfect innocence, rather than caught together in the dark — for the dark is where the scandal lives. If we are standing calmly by the coals when he opens that door, two strangers who happened into the same room, it will look a great deal less like ruin and a great deal more like nothing at all. Come. Stand here. And when he opens the door — say nothing. Leave him to me. I find I am suddenly very much in the humor to deal with a man who proposes twice in a fortnight, and I have not been in the humor to deal with anyone in a very long time.”

She crossed to the fire. She stood where he bid her, in the faint red light, and she looked up at him for the first time, and saw a face she knew, or half knew — a strong, dark, forbidding face she had glimpsed across the ballroom earlier, and been told in an odd whisper to avoid. The Duke of Jarnis. The great recluse. The coldest and most feared man in the three northern counties, who never hosted such gatherings, and had opened his own house for this one, it was said, only under some family obligation.

“You are the Duke of Jarnis,” she said faintly.

“I am,” said the Duke. “And you are the young woman who is going to help me have the most entertaining evening I have had in a decade. Steady, Miss Ambrose. Here he comes. Do not be afraid. Whatever else happens tonight, I promise you this — you will not have to explain yourself to that man ever again. Leave him entirely to me.”

And the door opened.