The Duke Rode Two Days Through Rain to Reach His Dying Aunt—Only to Find Her Well and Her Companion Defying His Every Command, Until One Look Across a Chessboard Made Her Fall for the Man She Could Never Have

PART 1 

“You will hand me that book at once.”

The Duke of Danahern did not raise his voice, for he had never in his life needed to. A lowered tone from him had emptied ballrooms and silenced tenants and sent stewards scurrying. It was a voice built for obedience, and he had come to expect obedience the way other men expected the sun.

So when the young woman seated beside his aunt’s fire simply looked up at him, marked a place with one finger, and said, “No, I don’t think I will,” Oldwin felt something he had not felt in a very long time. He felt the floor of the world shift half an inch beneath his boots.

“I beg your pardon,” he said.

“You needn’t. It was only a small refusal.” She had a low, clear voice, and she did not so much as rise. “Your aunt asked me to read to her, and I have not yet finished the chapter. When I have, you are very welcome to the book.”

He had ridden hard from London through two days of rain to reach Danahern Hall, and he had come directly to the west drawing room because the housekeeper told him his great-aunt was poorly. And instead of a sick room, he had found firelight and lamplight. And this — this slip of a creature in a gray wool gown, plainly dressed, entirely unremarkable, reading aloud to Lady Honoria as though the master of the house were a draft from an ill-fitted door.

He was accustomed to being looked at. He was not accustomed to being weighed and found unnecessary.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked.

“I have a fair idea.” She turned a page unhurried. “You are tall. You are wet through. You are scowling at a very old lady’s companion instead of greeting the old lady. And you have your grandfather’s portrait’s exact expression — a man who has bitten a lemon and blames the tree. You are the Duke.”

From the depths of her chair, Lady Honoria made a sound that in a younger woman would have been a giggle.

Oldwin stood very still. The fire cracked. Somewhere far off in the great sprawling house, a clock counted the hour with the patience of stone. And he was aware — with an irritation that surprised him — that he had spent the whole of his journey composing cold sentences for stewards, and none at all for whatever this was.

“Aunt,” he said without taking his eyes from the girl. “Who is this?”

“That,” said Lady Honoria, folding her spotted hands with obvious relish, “is Miss Ward. Miss Fay Ward. She is my companion. She is the cleverest person in this house by a distance I should call embarrassing, and she has kept me alive through a winter that three physicians promised would finish me. Fay, dearest, this is my great-nephew Oldwin, whom you will find is a great deal more bark than he supposes, and a great deal less bite than he hopes. Do go on with the chapter. He can wait. He has kept the whole of Wiltshire waiting for years. It will do him good to learn how.”

He had come home meaning to be obeyed, and instead he was being managed by two women — one of whom was eighty-one, and one of whom he had never in his life seen before. And Oldwin did not know whether he was more offended or intrigued, or the reverse.

And that uncertainty was itself so novel that he found he had walked to the fire and taken the opposite chair before he had decided to.

“Finish the chapter, Miss Ward,” he said. “I find I am curious what could hold my aunt’s attention so entirely that a duke might be furniture.”

Fay Ward looked at him then — properly, for the first time. She had a plain face made unplain by a pair of very direct hazel eyes, and a mouth that seemed always on the edge of some private amusement the world had not earned. She was not a beauty. Nothing about her would have caused a single head to turn at any assembly in London. And he had spent the whole of the season among women engineered to turn heads.

And yet, when she looked at him, measured him plainly, without fear and without flattery, as though he were a passage in a book she did not expect to admire, he felt the strangest urge to sit up straighter — and despised himself for it.

“You may find,” she said, “that it is not the book that holds her. It is only that someone troubled to read it.”

And she returned to the page and read on in her low, clear voice, and did not look at him again.