Champagne tastes of stale apples when you are twenty-five and officially a spinster. Bella Halloway toasted the ballroom doors and swore she would marry the next man through them — and the Duke of Westford walked in with coal dust under his nails, just as her reckless promise began spreading across the ballroom.

PART 1 

Lady Arrington’s ballroom felt less like a celebration and more like a besieged fortress.

Too many bodies crammed into the stifling heat. Too much lavender water masking the sharp scent of anxious sweat. Gaslight flickered and cast harsh, trembling shadows across the painted faces of London’s elite — and every one of them was calculating something.

Bella Halloway stood in a forgotten alcove behind a massive potted fern that smelled faintly of dust.

Her gown was yellow silk, three seasons old, twice let out at the seams, and it was scratching an angry red line against her collarbone. She was tired. Tired of the corset bruising her ribs. Tired of pretending her family was not drowning. And overwhelmingly tired of the men in this room.

Beside her, her brother Philip tugged at his cravat.

He looked entirely too pale. His eyes kept darting across the swirling dancers to a dark corner where Lord Henry Kavanaugh held court — a man who smiled with his teeth and collected other people’s desperation for sport.

Philip owed him two thousand pounds.

“Stop looking at him,” Bella said quietly. “You look like a rabbit waiting for the snare.”

“He sent a note this morning, Bella.” Philip swallowed hard. “He wants the first installment by Friday. Or he goes to the magistrates.”

Bella closed her eyes.

The magistrates. The phrase tasted like ash in her mouth. Their father had left them a crumbling townhouse, a distinguished name, and a mountain of promissory notes. She had spent four years smiling at men with wet lips and soft hands, trying to secure a match that would save them.

But she lacked a dowry. And worse, she lacked the ability to feign adoration.

Men of the ton wanted simpering girls. Bella had all the softness of a rusted nail.

“I will speak to Aunt Matilda,” she said — though they both knew their aunt had closed her purse strings a year ago.

“It’s no use.” Philip stared at his scuffed dancing shoes. “I’ve ruined us. You should have married Lord Davies when you had the chance.”

“Lord Davies was sixty-two and smelled of boiled cabbage and laudanum.” Her patience snapped like an overtightened violin string. “I would rather walk into the Thames.”

She looked out at the glittering, writhing mass of society — fops in bright waistcoats, matrons calculating dowries behind painted fans. It was a meat market, plain and simple, and she was a cut of beef that had sat on the counter too long.

“I’m done, Philip.”

The words slipped out, bitter and utterly exhausted.

“I swear to God, I’ll marry the very next man who walks through those doors just to end this misery. Be he a butcher, a baker, or a chimney sweep — at least a sweep works for a living.”

Philip let out a nervous, breathless laugh. “Don’t say such things.”

“I mean it.”

Bella raised her glass of flat champagne in a mock toast toward the grand double doors at the entrance of the ballroom.

“To my future husband. May he be deaf and wealthy.”

The brass handles turned.

The heavy oak doors parted with a groan that cut through the music. The major-domo pounded his silver staff against the marble floor.

“His grace, Augustus Wallace, the Duke of Westford.”

The music did not stop. But the conversation certainly did.

A collective intake of breath sucked the remaining oxygen from the room. Bella froze, the champagne burning the back of her throat.

Augustus Wallace did not look like a duke.

He looked like a man who had been dragged out of a tavern brawl and stuffed into a formal evening coat. Massive — not elegantly tall, but broad and thick, with shoulders that threatened to split the dark wool of his jacket. Ten years managing a grimy, soot-choked coal mine in Yorkshire had built him differently than London built its lords. He had inherited the title only six months ago, after a carriage accident wiped out his uncle and two cousins in one bloody swoop.

He stepped into the ballroom. He did not carry a walking stick. He carried himself like a blunt instrument.

His hair was dark and shorn roughly. His jaw was shadowed with heavy stubble that defied the clean-shaven fashion of the ton. His nose had clearly been broken and set poorly.

“Well,” Philip whispered, his voice trembling. “He certainly isn’t a chimney sweep.”

Unfortunately, Bella was not the only one who had heard her declaration.

Lady Kalpa — a woman with ears like a bat and a mouth like a town crier — had been standing just on the other side of the fern.

Bella watched in slow, agonizing horror as Lady Kalpa’s eyes widened and her fan snapped shut. The dowager pivoted instantly and whispered fiercely into the ear of the woman beside her. Within sixty seconds, the whisper rippled through the crowd like wind through wheat — reaching the doorway at almost the exact moment Augustus crossed the threshold.

Eyes darted from the hulking figure in the doorway to the faded yellow silk in the corner.

Augustus stood at the edge of the dance floor. He looked distinctly murderous. He hated London. He hated the aristocracy. And the rumor mill reached him before he could even signal for a drink.

A bold young lord — one of Kavanaugh’s sycophants — stepped into the Duke’s path, laughing. The young man pointed a gloved finger toward Bella’s alcove, his words carrying over the violins.

Augustus turned his head.

His eyes found her.

They were not sparkling or expressive. They were the flat, hard brown of packed earth. He did not look amused. He did not look intrigued.

He looked directly at her with a heavy, suffocating calculation.

Bella couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t look away. The silence stretched, thin and brittle —

and then Augustus broke the gaze, turning his back to signal a footman for whiskey.

Bella set her glass down so hard the crystal cracked.

“Get my cloak, Philip,” she whispered, her hands shaking. “We are leaving.”

Morning light did no favors to the Halloway townhouse.

It crept through the grime-streaked windows of the drawing room, illuminating the water stains on the ceiling and the worn, threadbare patches on the Persian rug. Bella sat at a scarred wooden desk, her fingers stained black with ink. It was ten in the morning. She had not slept.

Every time she closed her eyes she saw the flat, muddy gaze of the Duke of Westford — and heard the mocking laughter of the ballroom.

She was staring at a ledger that proved, in stark mathematical terms, that they would have to sell the silver candlesticks just to buy coal for the week.

A sharp, heavy knock echoed from the front door. It wasn’t a polite tap. It was a knock that rattled the doorframe.

A moment later the lone maid — a terrified girl of sixteen — poked her head into the drawing room.

“Miss Bella, there is a — a gentleman —”

Before Bella could ask for a calling card, the gentleman filled the doorway.