After Watching the Man Who Promised Her Forever Place a Sapphire on Another Woman’s Finger, Diana Asked the Lonely Duke for One Dance to Make Her Ex Jealous—But Before the Music Ended, He Whispered, “Marry Me.”

PART 1

The Langdon ballroom held two hundred bodies and enough heat to strip the wax off the sconces.

Diana Waverly counted them without meaning to. Two hundred breaths, two hundred voices, all of it pressing down on her like a hand between the shoulder blades. Melting beeswax. Damp wool. Lilies going brown at the edges in a tower of white roses four feet from her elbow.

Her corset had been laced that evening by a maid who had clearly taken the afternoon’s gossip into her hands and pulled hard.

Across the room, a man laughed.

She knew the laugh before she knew anything else about it. Low, rumbling, the sound of a shared secret. Simon had laughed exactly like that in her father’s garden last August, in the damp shadow of the hedge, with his mouth against her hair.

Just until the estate is settled, Diana. Just until my father’s debts are cleared. You belong to me.

Now that laugh belonged to Miss Lydia Montrose, who stood under the great chandelier in pale peach silk with her father’s shipping fortune spread invisibly around her like a moat.

And on her left hand, a sapphire the size of a thrush’s egg.

Diana tightened her grip on her fan.

The wooden staves cracked. A small, sharp, private sound, swallowed whole by the orchestra tuning its strings in the gallery above. She did not look down. She did not need to. She had felt the ivory splinter under her thumb, and she understood — with the strange, cold clarity that arrives at the exact moment a life ends — that she would keep that fan forever.

“You have heard the joyous news, Miss Waverly.”

The dowager had cornered her in the powder room ten minutes earlier. Lady Ashby, in lavender silk, eyes bright as a bird’s over a worm.

“We are so delighted for the Viscount.”

Diana had said something. She could not remember what. Her mouth had produced polite syllables while the floor of her stomach dropped out and kept dropping.

Nobody had told her. Not Simon. Not her mother. Not Penelope, who told her everything, which meant Penelope had not known either.

The whole room had known before she did. That was the mortar in the wall of it.

And now Simon — Viscount Rexford, twenty-nine, three seasons of patient promises, the man she had refused four respectable suitors to wait for — turned his head and found her across the sea of feathers and cravats.

He looked at her with pity.

Not guilt. She had braced for guilt. She had built a small armour out of it on the walk in: she would see the shame on his face and feel something clean, something like winning.

Instead he gave her a slow, patient nod. The nod a man gives a dog that has been told to lie down.

Be a good girl. Take this quietly.

Her fingers closed. Another stave went.

“I am going to be sick,” Penelope whispered.

“Then aim away from my gown.”

“Diana. Please. Let us go to the carriage. I will claim a migraine, no one will question it—”

“If I leave now, Penn, I may as well wear a sign declaring myself ruined.”

Her own voice came out thin and metallic, like a cheap coin dropped on pavement.

She was three-and-twenty. She knew precisely what that number meant in a room like this one — she had heard her mother’s friends say it kindly, which was worse. Miss Waverly has such a pleasant manner. Such a shame.

Three seasons. She had turned away a baronet with good lungs and a solicitor with good hands because Simon had whispered in a garden that she belonged to him, and she had believed it.

That was the part she could not survive thinking about.

Not that he had married for money. Half the men in this room had married for money, including several of the ones currently enjoying her ruin. The humiliation was that she had trusted him. She had saved her dances. She had guarded her reputation like a woman carrying a full cup through a crowd. She had been so perfectly, patiently, thoroughly good.

And a man in a tight waistcoat had simply decided she was worth less than a shipping line.

The whispers were already moving. They moved through a ballroom faster than plague — dowagers leaning behind their painted fans, eyes flicking to Diana, then to the happy couple, then back. Debutantes giving her wide, frightened looks, the way young soldiers look at a man missing a leg.

She knew exactly what she had become in this room.

The cautionary tale. Standing at the wall in last season’s silk while every mother in London pointed her out to her daughter.

She could stay here and be pitied. Or she could leave and be finished.

Diana’s gaze swept the perimeter of the room — past the giggling cornet players, the drunk baronets, the married lords hunting mistresses with the patient eyes of men at market. She was looking for something and did not have a name for it yet.

A shield.

No. Something better than a shield.

A weapon.

Someone whose presence would crush Simon’s little announcement flat.

Then she found him.

He stood in the darkest corner of the room, beside the open doors to the terrace, and he did not belong here. Benedict, Duke of Rothwell, despised London — the Season, the gossip, the people, thoroughly and without apology. Two-and-thirty, notorious in Parliament, carrying a reputation built out of ruined rivals and cold efficiency.

He was not handsome in the polite sense. His jaw was too sharp. His nose carried the slight bump of an old break. His eyes were a flat, unreadable grey, and he regarded the ballroom the way a man regards a slaughterhouse — as though the smell had grown tedious.

Nobody stood within three feet of him. The distance had a quality to it. Not respect. Fear, wearing respect’s coat.

Diana looked back at Simon. He was kissing Lydia’s knuckles. His eyes came up to check that Diana was still watching.

Watch this, Simon.

“Hold my drink, Penn.”

“Diana — what are you doing?”

“Surviving.”

She put the crystal glass into her friend’s hands and walked.