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 6

Bella walked through the heavy oak front doors.

The entrance hall was cavernous, smelling of old wax and cold stone. Stag heads stared down with glass eyes from the paneled walls. It was freezing.

Augustus followed her inside and closed the heavy doors, cutting off the howl of the wind. The sudden quiet was heavy.

“You give orders well,” he noted, pulling off his leather gloves.

“You hired a manager, Augustus,” Bella said, unpinning her bonnet and setting it on a dusty side table, entirely unfazed by the gloom. “I intend to earn my keep.”

Augustus looked at the dust on the table, then at his new wife. The stark light from the narrow windows cast half her face in shadow. She did not look frightened by the isolation. She did not look disgusted by the dirt.

She simply looked entirely, ruthlessly competent.

“The study is this way,” he said.

He led her down a dark corridor. The study was the only room in the house that felt lived in — a massive fire roaring in the grate, books and ledgers stacked haphazardly on the floor, a heavy oak desk dominated by geological maps and brass instruments. It smelled of tobacco and ink.

Bella walked straight to the fire and held her hands out to the flames. The heat bit into her numb fingers.

Augustus stood near the door, watching her.

The marriage bargain had been struck. The vows had been said. Now they were entirely alone, and the logistical transaction was over — and the physical reality of their arrangement loomed in the small space between them.

“I have business at the mine office,” Augustus said abruptly, his voice rougher than usual. “I will be gone until dinner. Miller will show you the house. Do whatever you want to it. Hire who you need. The accounts are in the top drawer of the desk.”

He was retreating. The massive, intimidating duke who had threatened to tear a man’s arm off in London was currently fleeing his own study.

Bella turned away from the fire.

“Augustus.”

He stopped, his hand on the brass doorknob.

“We struck a bargain,” Bella said. Her heart was beating a slow, heavy rhythm, but her voice remained level. “An heir was part of the terms.”

Augustus’s jaw tightened. The muscle ticked under his ear.

“You are exhausted. You have spent four days in a carriage. I am not a monster, Bella. I do not demand payment the moment the contract is signed.”

“I am not afraid of you,” she said softly.

He looked at her — his dark eyes tracing the line of her throat, the rigid posture of her shoulders. He let go of the doorknob and took two slow steps toward her. The sheer size of him blotted out the firelight.

“You should be,” he said, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper. “I am not a gentleman. I do not know how to be gentle, and I will not apologize for it.”

He didn’t touch her. He just stood close enough that she could feel the heat radiating from his chest. He looked at her mouth for one long, suffocating second.

Then he turned and walked out the door.

Bella stood by the fire alone, the sound of his heavy boots fading down the hall. She touched her fingers to her collarbone. Her pulse was racing.

She turned and looked at the top drawer of the desk.

She had work to do.

High Ridge Manor surrendered to Bella in exactly six days.

She did not achieve this through gentle smiles or aristocratic charm. She achieved it with a ledger, a terrifying memory for numbers, and a willingness to walk into the dampest, rat-infested cellars without lifting her skirts.

She fired the cook on Tuesday for siphoning household funds to a local tavern. On Wednesday she promoted a terrified but meticulous kitchen maid to the position. By Friday the fires drew properly, because Bella had hired three local sweeps to clear ten years of bird nests from the chimneys.

Augustus was a ghost.

He left the manor before the sun broke over the crags and returned long after dinner had been cleared. He smelled permanently of sulfur, wet wool, and cheap tobacco.

They passed each other in the drafty hallways like ships in a fog. He would nod. She would curtsy.

It was a perfectly functional, perfectly hollow arrangement.

On the seventh day, Bella ran out of patience.

She dressed in a dark wool riding habit, entirely lacking in frills, and pinned her hair tightly to her scalp. She bypassed the carriage and ordered a stable boy to saddle a sturdy mare.

She rode down the steep, craggy hill toward the Pendleton Collieries.

The air grew thicker the closer she got. It tasted of ash. The noise was a physical weight — the rhythmic, deafening crash of the steam-powered water pumps, the clatter of coal carts on iron rails, the shouting of hundreds of men.

This was not a gentleman’s farm. It was a mechanical beast chewing up the earth and spitting out black gold.

A soot-covered foreman tried to block her path near the sorting sheds, waving his hands frantically.

“Here now. No ladies past the gates. It ain’t safe.”

Bella looked down at him from the saddle.

“I am the Duchess of Westford. Point me to my husband.”

The foreman swallowed his objections and pointed a shaky finger toward the massive brick structure housing the main shaft.