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 8

Augustus reached out.

His hand hesitated for a fraction of a second before his fingers brushed her jaw. His skin was incredibly rough, the thick calluses scraping gently against her cheek. It was not a smooth touch, but it was violently careful — he was holding back his strength, terrified of breaking her.

He leaned down and kissed her.

There was no poetry in it. It was a heavy, claiming kiss, tasting of whiskey and desperation.

Bella gasped, her hands coming up to grip his forearms. They felt like carved marble beneath her palms. He wrapped one massive arm around her waist, pulling her flush against his chest.

The transaction ended there. The cold, logical ledger burned to ash in the heat of his grip.

He carried her to the massive four-poster bed and laid her down against the pillows. The mattress sank under his weight as he followed her down.

Bella’s breath hitched. She saw, in the firelight, the pale scars across his chest and shoulders — old marks from falling rock, from a life spent underground. The violent history of the Pendleton Collieries written in his flesh.

He was not a pristine lord. He was a survivor.

“Augustus,” she whispered.

He went still, his dark eyes snapping to her face, searching for panic. “Do you want me to stop?”

“No.” She reached up and traced a particularly nasty scar across his collarbone. “I want you to finish what we started.”

He was careful with her in a way that surprised them both — pausing, watching her face, checking again as though she might change her mind and he needed to know it the instant she did.

“Don’t stop,” Bella murmured against his shoulder, her voice steady despite everything else in her that was not. “Don’t you dare stop now.”

He didn’t. Whatever passed between them after that was not gentle in the way courtship novels described gentleness, and it was not practiced, and it did not need to be. It was raw and honest and entirely without pretense — two people who had spent their lives holding up crumbling structures, finally allowing the walls to fall.

When it was over, Augustus collapsed beside her, his broad chest heaving. The firelight flickered across his sweaty skin. Bella pulled the heavy quilt over them both.

Her body ached in a way that felt entirely new, but the cold, hollow emptiness that had lived in her chest for years was gone.

Augustus lay silently, staring at the canopy. Minutes ticked by.

“I thought,” he said finally, his voice rough with exhaustion, “that you would close your eyes and endure it like a punishment.”

Bella turned her head to look at his profile.

“I am done enduring things, Augustus. From now on, I participate.”

He turned his head to meet her gaze. The flat, dead earth of his eyes had shifted. There was a spark there now — something fiercely protective, something dangerously close to awe.

He reached under the quilt and found her hand. He didn’t interlace their fingers. He just wrapped his massive, calloused hand completely around hers and held it tightly.

“Tomorrow,” he said quietly into the dark room, “I will show you the ledgers for the shipping company.”

Bella smiled, her eyes drifting shut. “I will find your errors by noon.”

“I have no doubt you will, Duchess.”

They fell asleep like that, holding onto each other in the dark. The contract fulfilled. The real work finally beginning.

Winter arrived on the Yorkshire moors with the blunt force of a swinging anvil.

Frost choked the windows of High Ridge Manor, sealing the heavy stones in a layer of jagged ice. Inside the study, a massive fire roared, casting a fierce, warm glow over the oak desk.

Bella sat in Augustus’s heavy leather chair.

An ink-stained ledger lay spread open across her swollen belly. She was seven months pregnant. The child was an active, violent presence, kicking against her ribs with the same brutal energy its father applied to a collapsed tunnel.

She dipped her pen, meticulously crossing out a bloated expenditure from the London townhouse accounts.

A bell began to ring.

It was not the polite chime of the front door, nor the muffled clatter of the kitchen bells. It was a deep, resonant, terrifying clang that vibrated through the floorboards.

The colliery alarm.

Bella snapped the pen in half. Ink splattered across her knuckles.

She stood up, her chair crashing backward onto the rug. She didn’t wait for Miller or the maids. She grabbed Augustus’s heavy wool coat from the hall stand, threw it over her shoulders, and walked out the front doors into the freezing, biting wind.

“Harness the carriage!” she screamed toward the stables, her voice tearing through the howling gale.

The ride down the craggy hill was a blur of violent jolts. Bella gripped the leather handstrap, her knuckles white, her jaw locked.

The sky above the valley was wrong. Instead of the usual steady stream of black coal exhaust, thick plumes of gray dust and yellow sulfur choked the horizon.

Panic tasted like copper.

The carriage hadn’t completely stopped when she forced the door open.

The pit yard was a scene of unmitigated chaos. Women from the village were already running through the gates, screaming names into the dust. Miners who had been working the upper level staggered out of the main shaft building, coughing violently, their faces masked in pale rock dust.

Bella shoved her way through the frantic crowd, her heavy coat dragging in the black mud.

“Miller!” she shouted, spotting the steward pulling a coughing boy away from the pump house. “Miller. Report.”

The steward turned, his face pale beneath the soot.

“Cave-in, your grace. Eastern seam. Deep down.”

Bella’s stomach dropped out of her body.

“My husband.”

Miller swallowed hard and looked away.

“He went down at dawn, Duchess. He’s in the eastern seam.”

The world tilted.