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PART 1 Eleanor Puit broke her last loaf in two, and pressed the larger half into the stranger’s hands before she let herself count the cost of it. The bread was a day old, gone firm at the crust. But it was warm still, where it had lain against the banked embers of her oven,…

PART 1 “If you weep on my waistcoat,” said a voice out of the dark, “I shall be obliged to charge you for the laundering. And I warn you, it is very fine, and the laundering will ruin you.” Pride Ambrose, who had shut the door behind her and pressed her back against it in…

PART 1 Duke Oscar of Gcoat heard the tear before he saw it. A small, vicious sound, like a whisper cut short, rising thin and clear over the hum of three hundred voices and the scrape of violins tuning for the next set. He knew it at once for what it was. A man who…

PART 1 The Duke of Westford had never once raised his voice at his wife, and that, Arthur privately believed, made him the reasonable one in the marriage. He didn’t hate Beatrice Cromwell — hatred required passion, and he could summon none for a woman who smelled of practical wool and lamp oil instead of…

PART 1  The moment the Duke of Sliff’s gaze crossed the ballroom and found her, the candlelight, the crystal, the three hundred murmuring voices — all of it seemed to fall away into a single held breath. She was standing near the tall windows in a gown of soft gray. Her chestnut hair was pinned…

PART 1 The rain had turned London into a smear of gray, and Arthur Pendleton, Duke of Westford, preferred it that way. Clarity had never done him any favors. He stood at the grimy window of Lord Reginald Somerset’s study, hands clasped behind his back, boots still carrying the mud of the road north. Behind…

PART 1 The long gallery of Weathersby House held its breath. Silk rustled and pearls swung as forty women sank in unison, each chin tilted just so, each fan lifted at the precise angle their governesses had drilled into them. Every eye lifted to the tall figure who paused beneath the lintel with the light…

PART 1 I am not writing this for sympathy. I am writing it because I promised myself I would stop pretending things did not happen after they happened. His name is Gideon Harrow. You probably know the name. I knew it too, standing in his ballroom in the spring of 1817, holding a glass of…

PART 1 The Duke of Westford had never once raised his voice at his wife, and that, Arthur privately believed, made him the reasonable one in the marriage. He didn’t hate Beatrice Cromwell — hatred required passion, and he could summon none for a woman who smelled of practical wool and lamp oil instead of…

PART 1 The lace was strangling me. I stood at the back of St. George’s, the weight of my wedding gown pressing down on my ribs like a cage of silk and pearls. Three hundred faces watched me through the haze of candlelight. Three hundred predators dressed in their Sunday best, smelling blood. They knew…