Alaric Vaughn, Duke of Thornhold, has rejected three perfect brides. Onoria Finch intends to become the fourth, until his two enormous wolfhounds block the drawing-room doorway and refuse to let her pass. That very night, his mother hires a woman so unremarkable she is nearly invisible. Yet when the two fearsome hounds lie obediently at her feet, the coldhearted duke is left utterly stunned.

 PART 2

That evening, the Dowager wrote a letter.

Not to a society matron in London. To her man of business in Newcastle.

The request was unusual, and she knew it as she wrote it. She was not seeking a governess. She was not seeking a maid. She was seeking a companion — for herself, she wrote, underlining the word twice — a woman of gentle birth and good sense.

Someone quiet. Unobtrusive. Someone with no ambition and no agenda.

Someone who would not try to fill the silence, but could simply exist within it.

She sealed the letter with wax and gave it to a groom before she could reconsider.

Weeks later, the reply arrived.

Mr. Henderson had a candidate. A Miss Clara Hailwood, daughter of a country vicar, recently deceased, who had left his child with a good education, impeccable manners, and precisely seven pounds to her name.

She was twenty-four. Plain in a pleasant sort of way. By all accounts, possessed of a temperament as calm and steady as a summer evening.

Mr. Henderson had added one line of his own at the close, and the Dowager read it three times.

A woman who knew how to be invisible.

Isabella looked at the grim tapestries. At the silent halls. At the long-case clock in the corner, whose ticking sounded like a slow, tired heartbeat.

A woman who knew how to be invisible.

It was perfect.

She was not hiring a future duchess.

She was hiring a ghost.

Clara Hailwood’s first impression of Thornhold was that it was a place that had forgotten how to breathe.

It rose out of the Northumberland landscape like a clenched fist of gray stone, defiant against the wind and the sky. The carriage journey from the village had been long and jostling, and as the castle swelled in the window, a knot of apprehension tightened in her stomach.

She clutched her small valise against her knees. It contained everything she owned in the world. Two spare gowns of gray and brown muslin. A book of poetry her father had given her. A small, worn Bible.

Her instructions had been clear. She was to be a companion. Her duties were to read aloud, to accompany the Dowager on walks, and to provide a restful presence.

The salary was more than generous. It was a lifeline.

For that, Clara was prepared to be as restful as a stone.

The great door creaked open, and a severe-looking butler led her into the hall.

She felt her own smallness in the face of its grandeur and its gloom. She was left to wait in a small antechamber, hands folded in her lap, listening to the clock.

She could have waited there for an hour. She would never be sure.

Then, from somewhere far off in the belly of the castle — deep, and low, and long — a sound came up through the stone.

Claws. On flagstones. Moving.

Then stopping.

Then nothing at all.

The house went completely, utterly silent, as if it had heard her arrive and had decided to hold its breath.