Every woman in London was warned never to sit beside Alistair, Duke of Roth. Yet Lydia Penhallow accepted her sisters’ wager and unexpectedly talked with him until the ball ended. The next morning, everyone was stunned when the feared Duke arrived at her door with an offer that could save her entire family.

 PART 4

The harsh morning light was never kind to the Penhallows’ rented townhouse.

It highlighted the water stains on the ceiling of the morning room and exposed the threadbare patches on the Turkish rug. Lydia sat at a scarred mahogany desk by the window with a stack of tradesmen’s bills threatening to bury her. She had a smudge of ink on her chin and a headache blooming at her temples.

The baker was threatening to cut off their credit. The coal merchant had raised his prices again. The pearl earbobs would buy them perhaps two months of grace, if she pawned them quietly.

“I simply do not understand how we are expected to host a dinner party on this budget, Lydia.”

Lady Violet lamented from the faded chaise longue, fanning herself with a fashion plate from Paris. She was a woman made entirely of nervous energy and misplaced priorities.

“Lord and Lady Hastings served three courses of meat last night. Three. We shall be a laughingstock if we serve mutton again.”

“Then we shall not host a dinner party, Mother.” Lydia dragged her pen across the ledger. “We cannot afford to feed Lord and Lady Hastings. We can barely afford to feed the scullery maid.”

Lady Violet gasped — a theatrical sound Lydia ignored.

“You have no vision, Lydia. How are your sisters to secure matches if we do not entertain? You doomed yourself with your stubbornness, but do not drag Charlotte and Georgiana down with you.”

Lydia set her pen down. She was too tired for this argument. Tired of the dust motes dancing in the cold light. Tired of the relentless arithmetic of survival.

Before she could form a reply, the heavy brass knocker on the front door sounded.

It was a sharp, authoritative rap that echoed through the quiet house. At this hour?

Lady Violet sat up, hastily adjusting her morning cap. “Who on earth could that be? Georgiana is still in her bedclothes—”

A moment later John, their single overworked footman, appeared in the doorway. He looked distinctly terrified. His livery was slightly crooked and his eyes were wide.

“My lady,” John croaked, his voice cracking. “His grace, the Duke of Roth, is in the drawing room.”

Lady Violet froze. The Paris fashion plate slipped from her fingers and fluttered to the floor.

“The — the Duke of Roth? Here? At our house?”

“Yes, my lady. He asked specifically.” John swallowed hard, his gaze darting to the desk. “He asked for Miss Lydia.”

Lady Violet whipped her head around to stare at her eldest daughter. The color had entirely drained from her face.

“Lydia. What did you do last night?”

“I won a wager, Mother.”

Lydia stood and smoothed her plain morning gown — a drab gray wool, utterly unsuited for receiving a duke. It did not matter. She knew instinctively that Alistair would not care.

She walked out of the morning room, down the narrow hallway, and paused outside the drawing room doors. She took a deep breath, banished the exhaustion from her face, and pushed them open.

Alistair was standing by the fireplace.

The drawing room suddenly looked impossibly small. His broad shoulders and towering height seemed to consume all the oxygen in the space. He wore a dark gray morning coat and immaculate trousers, leaning heavily on his oak cane, studying a terribly painted portrait of Lydia’s great-uncle with an expression of profound skepticism.

He turned as she entered.

In the harsh daylight, the lines of pain on his face were starker, the shadows beneath his eyes deeper. But his flinty gray eyes were as sharp as ever.

“Your grace.” Lydia dropped into a small, respectful curtsy.

“Miss Penhallow.” His voice filled the room, a low rumble that vibrated in the floorboards. “I trust I am not interrupting your organizational duties.”

Lydia straightened. She did not apologize for the state of the room, or her dress, or the fact that the fire was unlit to save coal.

“You are interrupting my attempts to avoid debtor’s prison, your grace. It is a welcome distraction.”

Alistair’s mouth twitched. The ghost of a smile appeared, softening the hard lines of his jaw.

“I am glad to be of service.”

He moved toward one of the armchairs, his gait slow and measured. The limp was pronounced today — a heavy drag of the bad leg that made Lydia’s chest tighten with a strange, unbidden ache. He lowered himself into the chair with a suppressed exhale.

“You did not strike me as a woman who leaves tasks unfinished,” he said, resting both hands on the head of his cane.

“I don’t. But some mathematics simply do not resolve, no matter how long one stares at them.”

Lydia took a seat on the edge of the sofa opposite him.

“To what do I owe this honor, your grace? Dukes do not typically make morning calls on penniless spinsters.”

“They do not,” Alistair agreed.

He looked around the room, taking in the peeling wallpaper and the missing crystal drops on the chandelier. He didn’t look disgusted. He looked observant.

“But I found myself in possession of an afternoon entirely devoid of purpose. My solicitor is attempting to force me to review land leases in Cornwall. I decided I would rather face the ton’s vicious gossip than a solicitor’s dry ink.”

Lydia raised an eyebrow. “So you are using me as a shield against your paperwork.”

“I am using you for conversation, Miss Penhallow.” He corrected it smoothly. “I found our exchange last night to be remarkably devoid of nonsense. That is a rare commodity in my life.”

Lydia looked at him. Really looked at him.

Stripped of the ballroom’s shadows, he looked less like a monster and more like a man who had survived a shipwreck only to find himself stranded on a desert island of his own making.

“What would you like to converse about, your grace?”

“Not the weather,” he replied immediately. “And certainly not the social season.”

He leaned forward slightly.

“Tell me how you manage it. The endurance.”

Lydia understood what he was really asking. He wasn’t asking about paying the butcher. He was asking how she woke up every day and faced a world that constantly reminded her of her inadequacies.

“You stop fighting the reality of it,” she said quietly. “You stop expecting the world to be fair, or kind, or easy. You look at the mud on the road, and you decide to walk through it anyway — because standing still means freezing to death.”

Alistair held her gaze. The silence stretched between them, thick and resonant.

“I tried standing still,” he murmured. His grip on the cane tightened until his knuckles went white. “It does not work.”

“No,” Lydia agreed. “It doesn’t.”

For a long moment neither of them spoke. Outside, a costermonger’s cart rattled past on the cobbles, and somewhere down the street a child was shouting at a dog. Ordinary London noises, pressing indifferently against the window glass.

Then Alistair said, “You did not ask why I came.”

“I did ask.”

“You asked what you owed the honor.” He turned the cane a quarter-turn in his grip. “I came because I am not certain I have ever met anyone who told me the truth about myself within four minutes of meeting me. And because I find that I do not want to go another eighteen months without hearing it again.”

Lydia did not have an answer for that.

Which was, in its way, the first honest thing about the conversation — because neither of them did.