She Was Offered to the Highest Bidder to Settle Her Father’s Debt — Then the Ruthless Duke Laid Ten Thousand Pounds on the Table and Did the One Thing No One in That Room Had Imagined

PART 1

The July heat lay over Car Court like a hand pressed flat.

Every window in the long drawing room stood open to the garden, and still the air did not move. It only carried in the smell of stocks and warm box hedge and the dust of a road that had not seen rain in a fortnight. Beeswax candles had been lit, though it was scarcely dark, and they wept down their sticks in the heat until the whole room swam faintly with the scent of honey and hot linen.

Sabine Carr stood on the turkey carpet where her uncle had placed her, her gloved hands folded, and counted the men.

Seven. She had known most of them since she was a child in short skirts, and she catalogued them now the way her father had once taught her to read a column of figures — without haste, letting each entry settle before she moved to the next.

“Come, sir.” Sir Cassius Vain turned a letter seal over in his fingers, tapping it against the marble mantel as though it were a magistrate’s gavel. “He was a handsome man, she would grant him that.” Cruelty rarely announced itself in a plain face, and her uncle’s was all clean lines and silvering temples — the sort of face that made strangers trust him inside a quarter hour.

“You have each seen the accounts. My brother, God keep him, left more owing than the estate can answer. A gentleman here might discharge the debt and gain a wife of eight and twenty, who runs a household like a regiment. I call that a bargain in a lean season.”

“A wife with a temper, by all report,” said Lord Merik from the best chair. He was near sixty, gouty, with damp pale eyes that had been trawling over her since she came in. “I don’t mind a temper. It wears down.”

“It does not,” Sabine said.

The room stilled. Her uncle’s seal paused against the marble.

“It does not wear down, my lord,” she went on, in the same even voice she might have used to correct a footman on the placing of a fork. “I only mention it so that you bid with full knowledge. My uncle would not wish any gentleman to feel he had been sold damaged goods.”

Somebody coughed to cover a laugh. Lord Merik’s mouth worked.

Sir Cassius crossed the carpet in three unhurried steps and took her elbow. And though his grip through the muslin was gentle, his thumb found the soft inner bend of her arm and pressed until the bone ached.

“My niece jests,” he said pleasantly. “Grief makes her wild. She will be biddable enough under a firm hand.”

“I have never in my life been biddable,” Sabine said, still smiling. “And my uncle has known me eight and twenty years, so you may take that as tested.”

The pressure on her arm increased. She did not let it reach her face.

Across the room, a tall figure detached itself at last from the shadow of the doorway and came forward into the candlelight — and the murmur that ran round the gentlemen was not the murmur of welcome.

The Duke of Ravensmore was younger than his reputation. That was the first thing she registered, and it annoyed her, because a man ought to earn his notoriety over a lifetime and this one could not have seen thirty. He was built like a man who did his own riding and his own lifting, broad through the shoulder, the dark blue coat straining where lesser men’s hung loose. His hands were ungloved, and large, and still. His hair was black and untidy from the road. He had a hard, well-made face that gave nothing, and gray-dark eyes that went once round the room, taking its measure, before settling on her with a directness no one had used on her all evening.

“Ravensmore.” Sir Cassius recovered first, releasing her arm to spread his hands. “You honour us. I had not thought a matter so small would draw you from town.”

“You wrote to me,” the Duke said. His voice was low and unhurried, roughened at the edges — a voice built for saying difficult things quietly. “You wrote to a dozen men. I had the letter Tuesday.”

A flush climbed Sir Cassius’s neck. “A general canvass. Merely—”

“You offered a woman’s hand at auction and franked the invitation at your own expense.” The Duke’s gaze had not left Sabine. “I confess I came to see whether a man would truly do such a thing, or whether I had misread the hand. I see I had not.”

“Your grace mistakes a private family arrangement.”

“There is nothing private,” the Duke said, “about seven witnesses.”

Sabine watched him and understood, with the cold clarity that came to her in bad moments, that she had misjudged the shape of the evening. She had prepared herself for the gentlemen she knew. She had not prepared for this one, and she disliked being unprepared more than she disliked being sold.

“Since you are here, Ravensmore,” said Sir Cassius, rallying with a smoothness she had to admire even as it turned her stomach, “you may as well hear the terms. The debt against the estate stands at four thousand pounds. Whoever answers it takes the lady and the land both. Do you bid?”

“Four thousand,” repeated Lord Merik, and wheezed, “for a spinster with a sharp tongue.”

“Two thousand, then,” offered a thin young man by the pianoforte — Sir Rodrik Ames, whom Sabine had once refused to dance, and who had not forgotten it. He said it looking at her, wanting her to see him say it. “Two thousand, and she may keep her tongue for all I care. I’ll find a use for the rest of her.”

Heat went up the back of Sabine’s neck that had nothing to do with the July night. She held Sir Rodrik’s eyes until he looked away, which took longer than it should have, and then she turned her attention deliberately to the open window and the blue dusk beyond it — as if the transaction concerned some other woman entirely, and she were merely a guest gone bored.

Inside, her heart went like a hare’s. She knew precisely what waited past this room for a woman with no money and no protector. She had spent three months since her father’s affairs collapsed learning exactly how narrow her choices were, and she had come down tonight in her one good gown — a deep amber silk that had been her mother’s, cut down and turned — because if she was to be haggled over, she would at least be haggled over looking like her father’s daughter and not a beggar at the kitchen door.

Pride was a poor blanket. It was the only one she had left.

“Two thousand five hundred,” said a thin gentleman she did not know.

“Three,” said Lord Merik, and leered.

Sir Cassius’s seal tapped the marble, keeping time, delighted. “Three thousand from Lord Merik. Do I hear more? The lady is worth it, gentlemen. Look at her. There is not a hostess in three counties who would not envy the man who—”

“Ten thousand.”

The Duke set it into the noise the way a man sets a heavy stone down onto a table — flatly, and with a small sound of finality — and everything else in the room stopped.

Sabine turned from the window before she could school herself not to. He was looking at her still. He had not raised his voice for the sum any more than he had for anything else, and that was somehow worse — that a number so vast, more than twice the debt, more than the whole estate had been worth in her grandfather’s best years, should be laid down as though he were declining a second cup of wine.

“Ten thousand,” breathed Sir Cassius. The seal had gone quite still in his hand. “Ten thousand. Your grace. That is — the most generous—”

“I have not finished,” the Duke said.

Sabine felt the words land in her chest like a key turning. Every eye in the room had swung to Ravensmore, and every eye wore the same avid, ugly hope — that they were about to watch the county’s most notorious man take his purchase, and do with her precisely as Sir Rodrik had promised he would. She saw them lean toward it. She saw her uncle already reckoning the sum against his own creditors, his mouth soft with relief.

“Name your condition, your grace,” Sir Cassius said. “Whatever it is.”

The Duke walked forward. He came without hurry across the carpet until he stood before Sabine, close enough that she could smell the road on him — horse and dust, and beneath it something clean, cedar and cold water — and he looked down at her from his considerable height.

And for one breath, the hard face did something she could not name.

Then he turned his back on her and faced the room.