For Four Seasons, She Sat Alone and Unclaimed at Every Ball—Until the Duke Crossed the Crowded Room, Leaned Close, and Whispered, “Act as Though You’re Mine,” Unaware Their Carefully Staged Lie Was About to Become Real

PART 1 

“Four seasons and not a single offer. Poor Miss Neville. One does wonder why her aunt persists in bringing her out year upon year, when she is so plainly unclaimed, and likely to remain so.”

The words carried across Lady Cathcart’s ballroom with the particular relish some women reserve for the misfortunes of those too poor to answer back. Friedwide Neville sat very still in her gilt chair beneath the East Gallery, her hands folded over a fan she had not opened all evening, and felt her face heat and her spine go rigid. She did not look toward Lady Marberry’s voice. She fixed her eyes upon her own gloved hands rather than give anyone the satisfaction of watching her flinch.

It was the fourth ball of the season. And the season before that. And the season before that. Four years she had been brought out into society, dressed and coiffed and paraded before London’s eligible gentlemen with a hope her aunt had never entirely abandoned. Four years of being looked past — not cruelly, precisely, but thoroughly — the way one looks past a chair that does not match the room.

She was four-and-twenty, plainly gowned in blue muslin let down twice already, her mother’s pearls at her throat — the single ornament her diminished circumstances still afforded her. She possessed neither fortune nor family consequence enough to recommend her to the notice of anyone who mattered. She had told herself an hour past, watching her cousin Cresia claim yet another partner, that she did not mind. She had very nearly believed it.

Then Lady Marberry’s voice had carried, sharpened by laughter, and Friedwide had endured what she had learned to endure in four years of being invisible. She did not see the Duke of Winerth cross the room. She knew only that one moment she sat alone in her small circle of humiliation, and the next his shadow fell over her — tall and dark, unmistakable even before she raised her eyes.

He was bowing. Bowing to her. Before the whole of Lady Cathcart’s ballroom — a duke bowing to a woman nobody troubled to remember the name of — and asking, in a voice that permitted no refusal, whether she would do him the honor of the next dance.

The ballroom had gone, for one suspended instant, entirely silent. Friedwide was aware only of a hundred heads turning, of Lady Marberry’s mouth falling open mid-sentence, of Cresia going quite still across the room with her fan frozen halfway to her face — a stillness Friedwide would only later come to understand had held rather more envy in it than surprise. She had risen because there seemed nothing else to do — because a duke’s outstretched hand was not a thing one refused, whatever bewilderment attended the offer — and because some small, stubborn, long-starved part of her had simply wanted, desperately, to take it.

Now they stood at the edge of the floor, his hand warm and sure at her waist, and he was asking her — no, telling her — to act as though she belonged to him.

“Your Grace did not save me,” she said low as they began to turn. “You used me.”

“Lady Marberry has spent the better part of this season attempting to press her daughter upon me,” he admitted. “You were sitting alone and unkindly spoken of. It occurred to me that a public gallantry would serve two purposes at once. I am aware of how that sounds.”

“It sounds as though I am to be your shield.”

“Yes.”

She had expected him to soften it, to wrap the admission in flattery. He did not. He simply said yes and watched her, waiting as though her answer genuinely mattered to him, and he had not yet decided whether he expected her to refuse. It was, she thought, the strangest courtesy she had ever been paid — to be told plainly that she was being used, and trusted in the same breath to decide for herself whether the bargain was worth taking.

As the dance ended, he did not release her hand at once. “Would it be too great a presumption,” he said, low enough that only she could hear it, “to claim the supper dance as well? A single dance may be read as chivalry. A second will be read as intention — which I confess is rather the point.”

She should have refused. Propriety demanded she refuse. Instead she found herself inclining her head, and felt the ballroom’s attention sharpen around them like a held breath, and understood that whatever she had agreed to an hour ago had already begun to take on a shape considerably larger than either of them had planned for.