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 9

For one agonizing second, Bella felt the hysterical urge to drop to her knees in the mud.

The ledger. The bargain. The transaction. It all dissolved, leaving nothing but a raw, gaping terror that threatened to swallow her whole.

Augustus was seven hundred feet below the earth. Buried.

She inhaled sharply. The sulfur burned her lungs and cleared her mind.

Panic was a luxury she could not afford. Augustus was a survivor. If he was alive down there, he needed her up here, holding the line.

“Listen to me.”

Her voice sliced through the screaming. She grabbed Miller by the lapels.

“Send a rider to the village. I want the physician here in ten minutes. Empty the manor of every clean sheet, every blanket, and every drop of whiskey we possess. Clear the sorting sheds. We will use them as a triage hospital.”

Miller blinked, stunned by her absolute lack of hysteria. “Yes, your grace.”

“And Miller.” Her eyes were entirely flat. “Tell the engineers to get that cage working. If they cannot fix the steam winch, I want every able-bodied man pulling those ropes by hand.”

She caught Miller’s sleeve before he could turn away.

“The new beams — were they down?”

“Half the seam, your grace. They’d got the near section done by noon like his grace ordered. It was an old prop further in that let go — nobody had marked it as rotten. It just went.”

Bella nodded once, filing it away because there was nothing else to do with it, and let him go.

For the next four hours, Bella did not sit.

She organized the crying women, putting them to work tearing sheets into bandages and boiling massive vats of water over open fires. She directed the physician, pointing out the most severely injured men as they were dragged from the shallow tunnels.

Her silk gown was ruined, soaked to the knees in freezing, soot-stained mud. Her hands were black.

The winter sun began to set, plunging the yard into a bitter, freezing dusk.

The main shaft winch gave a sudden, agonizing groan. The massive iron gears bit into each other, screaming in protest.

Silence fell over the yard. The weeping stopped. Hundreds of eyes turned toward the gaping mouth of the pit.

The heavy iron cage breached the surface.

It was mangled — the iron bars bent inward. Inside, six men were crammed together. Five of them were bleeding, weeping, clutching broken limbs.

The sixth man was Augustus.

He was holding the heavy iron gate shut with his bare hands. His left arm hung at a sickening angle. His face was entirely black, save for the stark white of his eyes and a jagged gash across his temple that poured thick crimson into his collar.

He looked dead on his feet, kept upright by nothing but sheer, stubborn rage.

The men rushed forward, prying the bent gate open. Augustus practically fell out of the cage, stumbling to his knees in the mud.

Bella broke through the line of engineers.

She didn’t care who saw. She dropped into the freezing muck beside him and grabbed his face with both hands.

He was freezing. He was trembling violently.

“Augustus.” She choked it out.

His dark eyes snapped to her face. He blinked through the soot and the haze of pain. His breathing was a ragged, wet rattle.

He looked at her ruined dress, her bare hands black with coal, and the frantic crowd of organized survivors she had marshaled.

“You didn’t stay in the house,” he rasped, coughing weakly.

“I am balancing your ledgers, your grace.” Tears finally cut hot, clean tracks down her filthy cheeks. “You are my most valuable asset. I will not let you be written off.”

Augustus let out a roar of a sound that might have been a laugh. He leaned his heavy head against her shoulder, his massive, battered body finally giving out.

“Take me home, Bella.”

The physician left High Ridge Manor at two in the morning. He had set Augustus’s broken arm, stitched the gash on his temple, and wrapped his bruised ribs in thick linen.

The Duke was forbidden to leave his bed for three weeks.

The physician had looked terrified delivering the diagnosis, fully expecting Augustus to throw a boot at his head. Instead, Augustus had simply stared at the ceiling, heavily dosed with laudanum, entirely silent.

Now the main bedchamber was quiet. Only the sharp crackle of the fire broke the heavy stillness.

Bella sat in a hard wooden chair beside the mattress. She had bathed, scrubbing the coal dust from her skin until it was raw and pink. She wore a heavy flannel nightgown. She was utterly exhausted, her bones aching with a deep, hollow fatigue — but she could not close her eyes.

Every time she did, she saw the bent iron of the cage.

Augustus shifted against the pillows. He let out a low hiss as his broken ribs protested the movement.

“Stop moving,” Bella ordered, her voice raspy.

He turned his head. The laudanum made his dark eyes glassy, but they were still remarkably sharp.

“You look terrible, Duchess.”

“I spent five hours in a mud pit organizing your workforce,” she replied dryly, pouring a glass of water from the bedside pitcher. She lifted his head gently, letting him drink. “You are not looking your best either.”

He drank, swallowing carefully, and let his head fall back against the linen.

“The men,” he said.

“Seven dead.” She said it plainly, because she knew he would not want her to soften the blow. “Forty injured. The eastern seam is completely buried. We are establishing a fund for the widows tomorrow morning. It will come out of the London accounts.”

“Good.”

He closed his eyes.

“The timber snapped without warning. Just gone.”

“Not the new timber,” Bella said quietly. “Miller told me. It was an old prop further in — one nobody had marked. The section you ordered replaced held.”

Augustus was silent for a moment.

He let out a shaky breath. The indestructible Duke of Westford sounded terrifyingly fragile.

Bella set the glass down. Her hand was trembling. She folded her arms tightly over her chest, trying to hold herself together.

“You were supposed to be safe. You manage the mine. You don’t dig in it.”

“I wouldn’t ask a man to go where I won’t,” Augustus murmured.

“You are an idiot.”

Her voice cracked. The carefully constructed dam finally broke.

“You are an absolute, uncompromising idiot. You could have died.”

Augustus opened his eyes. He looked at her. Truly looked at her. He saw the tremor in her hands. He saw the red, swollen rims of her eyes.

“We had a bargain,” Bella continued, her voice rising, thick with tears. “Security. A partnership. If you die in a filthy hole in the ground, the contract is void. Do not void my contract, Augustus.”

Augustus reached out with his good hand.

His fingers were wrapped in clean white bandages. He caught her wrist. His grip was weak, lacking its usual crushing power — but it was incredibly firm. He pulled her gently toward the edge of the mattress.

“It wasn’t about the contract,” he said, his voice a low, gravelly whisper. “When the roof came down, when it all went black — I wasn’t thinking about the title. I wasn’t thinking about the coal.”

He brushed his thumb across her knuckles.

“I was thinking about the study. I was thinking about you sitting by the fire, crossing out my arithmetic errors.” A pause. “I was terrified you were going to be cold.”