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 7

He did not go after her immediately.

He knew she was a woman of pride and principle. To chase her carriage down the drive would be to make a scene — to compound her humiliation rather than mend it.

He had to give her room to breathe.

But he could not bear the thought of her out in the world, alone, with nothing but a handful of money and a broken heart.

The house felt hollow.

He walked the halls, the hounds pacing restlessly at his side. They whined low, mournful sounds, nudging his hand with their wet noses, reading his distress before he had named it himself.

He went to the library. The book Clara had been reading was still on the table, a ribbon marking her place.

He picked it up. A single wildflower, pressed between the pages, fell into his hand.

A ghost of the garden. A ghost of her.

He went to his study and poured a brandy. His hand shook.

Then, without quite deciding to, he walked the corridor he had not walked in a year.

The West Wing.

The door was locked. He had the key. He had always had the key.

He stood outside it for a long time, the brandy going warm in his hand.

Then he turned the lock.

The room smelled of dust and cedar and cold ash. A riding coat still hung on the back of the chair. A pair of boots stood by the bed, waiting, as though their owner had only stepped out for a moment. A book lay face-down on the nightstand, the page still held open.

Alaric stood in the middle of his brother’s room and did not move.

Edmund had been the sunny one. The one who laughed too loudly at dinner and rode too fast on the moors and planted white roses because he said stone should never get the last word.

The horse had come back without him. It had come back alone, sweating, saddle empty, reins dragging in the heather. They had found him three fields away.

Nobody had ever explained it. There had been nothing to explain. A man falls; a man dies; the world closes over him like water.

Alaric set the book on the nightstand, right side up. He straightened the boots.

Then he closed the door, and locked it, and put the key back in his pocket.

And he knew what the Dowager, for all her calculation, had never understood — and what he himself had refused to understand until this moment.

He had spent a year teaching himself to be a tomb. And a girl with seven pounds and a borrowed pair of gloves had walked into his house and reminded him, gently, that he was still alive.

He did not sleep that night. He paced the stone floors like a caged animal, the hounds following, until the windows went gray.

By dawn, his decision was made.

His mother had spoken of duty. Of protecting the family name.

But what was a name worth, if it was built on cold, empty stone?

His duty was not to a title. His duty was to a heart — to his own heart, which he could finally admit was bound, entirely and irrevocably, to the quiet girl his mother had sent away.

He did not tell his mother what he intended.

He ordered his horse saddled — a powerful black stallion that stamped and steamed in the cold. He dressed not in the formal attire of a duke, but in the sturdy, practical clothes of a country gentleman.

He summoned his butler.

“A room is to be prepared. The finest guest suite. Fires lit in every room.”

“Your Grace?”

“I want this house to be warm when I return.”

He rode out as the morning mist still clung to the hills.

He did not know for certain where she had gone. But he knew she had no family and no home to return to. She would have gone to the nearest respectable town, to a boarding house, to begin the long, soul-crushing search for another position.

He spurred the horse on. The animal’s powerful stride ate up the miles.

He was not a duke, riding out to reclaim his property.

He was a man going to find his future.

Clara had taken a room at a respectable, if threadbare, boarding house in the town of Alnwick.

The room was small and clean, with a narrow bed and a single window that looked out onto a brick wall. The landlady, a Mrs. Gable, was a kind woman with sad eyes who asked no questions.

Clara had sat on the edge of the bed for a long time after arriving, her hands folded in her lap, listening to the small room press in on her.

She had not cried. The pain was too deep for tears. It sat in her chest as a cold, hard knot.

She had allowed herself, for a brief and foolish time, to feel at home at Thornhold. She had let its stones, and its gardens, and its broken, silent master seep into her heart.

And now she was paying the price.

The severance pay was generous. Almost more insulting than the dismissal itself — blood money, a price paid to quiet a guilty conscience. She had thought about refusing it. Her father’s practicality had won. Pride was a luxury she could not afford.

She spent that first day in a fog of quiet despair. She tried to read; the words blurred. She tried to plan — a new position, another household, another family’s sorrows to quietly manage — and the thought filled her with a weariness that went to the bone.

The following morning, she was sitting by the window mending a tear in her glove when she heard a commotion in the street below.

Horses. A powerful animal being reined in hard. Mrs. Gable’s voice, high with excitement and confusion.

Clara paid it no mind. It was a market town. Horses were common.

Then came a knock at her door.

Not Mrs. Gable’s timid tap.

A firm, solid knock.

“Miss Hailwood.”

A man’s voice.

Clara’s heart stopped.

She knew that voice. She would know it anywhere.

She stood. Her hands were suddenly cold; the glove slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor. She smoothed her dress — a pointless, reflexive gesture — and walked to the door.

She opened it.

The Duke of Thornhold stood in the narrow, dimly lit hallway, and he filled it entirely. His height, the breadth of his shoulders, seemed to draw all the air out of the corridor. He was dressed for riding. His boots were dusty. His dark hair was wind-tossed.

He looked not like a duke, but like a force of nature.

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

He looked at her, his gray eyes searching her face. He saw the new sadness there. The faint shadows beneath her eyes.

It was a knife in his gut.

“May I come in?”

His voice was low.

She stepped back and held the door open.

He entered the small room, and it seemed to shrink around him. The humble furniture looked like dollhouse pieces in his presence. Mrs. Gable hovered in the hallway, eyes wide. He turned and gave her a look — not command, but quiet request — and she vanished.

He turned back to Clara.

The speech he had rehearsed on the ride down seemed foolish and inadequate now. Every polished line had blown away somewhere on the moors.

“The hounds miss you,” he said at last.

It was so unexpected, so absurd, that a small, watery laugh escaped her.

“They will not eat,” he said, entirely serious. “Brutus spent the whole night with his nose pressed to the crack under your door. Cassian has been howling. The staff are threatening to resign.”

She looked down at her hands.

“I am sorry to hear that.”

“I do not think you are.”

He said it gently.

“And neither am I. It is a house in rebellion. A rebellion against your absence.”

He took a step closer.

“I miss you.”

The words were so simple, so direct, that they struck her harder than any of Onoria’s tirades ever could.

She looked up. Her eyes were wide.

“My mother was wrong,” he said. His voice was raw with an emotion she had never heard from him. “She was afraid. Afraid of what people would say. Afraid of breaking the rules. But the rules are what broke this family in the first place.”

He held her gaze.

“The rule that says a man does not show his grief. The rule that says a title is more important than a heart.”

He reached out and took her hand. His was warm and calloused, engulfing hers.

“My brother Edmund would have loved you.”

That, more than anything, undid her. A single tear escaped and traced a path down her cheek.

“He was the sunny one,” Alaric said, his voice thick with memory. “The one who planted the roses. When he died, all the color went out of the world. I thought it was gone forever.”

He paused.

“And then you came. You did not bring the sun back. You did something far more difficult. You taught me how to see the beauty in the shadows. You did not try to fix my grief. You made a space for it. And in that space, something else began to grow.”

He looked around the small, bare room.

“This is not your place, Clara. Your place is not a hired room in a provincial town. It is not my mother’s companion, or anyone’s servant.”

He drew a breath. The words he had spent all night preparing were finally ready.

“Your place is at Thornhold. As its mistress. As the duchess.”

A pause.

“As my wife.”

Clara stared at him. Her heart hammered against her ribs. It was impossible. A dream. A fairy tale. Her practical, vicar’s-daughter mind could not take it in.

“You are asking this because the hounds are unhappy,” she whispered.

A last-ditch attempt at self-preservation.

A slow smile spread across his face.

The first real, unguarded smile she had ever seen from him. It transformed his harsh features, made him look younger, impossibly handsome.

“I am asking because the hounds are excellent judges of character.”

His grip tightened on her hand.

“And they and I have judged you to be the only woman in the world who can make that cold, broken castle a home. The only woman I wish to spend the rest of my days beside.”

He said her name.

“I am asking, Clara, because I love you.”

He had never spoken her name before. Never once. It had always been Miss Hailwood.

The sound of it on his lips — spoken with such tenderness — was her undoing.

The cold knot in her chest dissolved, replaced by a tide of warmth so powerful it threatened to sweep her away.

She did not answer in words.

She simply raised her other hand and laid it over his.

He understood.

He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it — a gesture of profound reverence.

“Come home, Clara,” he said.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Yes, Alaric.”