“Give Me an Heir and You’ll Be Free,” the Ruthless Duke Told the Stranger He Married — He Never Guessed She Had Loved Him for Seven Years, or That Her Ruined Physician Father’s Forbidden Knowledge Could Save His Life

PART 2

He never guessed that Glenna Viner had met the Duke of Edshot before.

She had met him on a June night, seven years gone, at the assembly rooms in White Cross. He had not yet been a duke then—only Varden Marcus, his father still living, dark and careless and laughing among his friends. She had been eighteen, awkward, standing against the wall in a made-over gown while the young men’s eyes slid past her as though she were part of the plaster.

She had stood there two hours. No one had come.

And then he had come. Some idle gallantry, some private wager—she had told herself a hundred cold reasons since. But he had crossed the whole length of that bright room and bowed to the plain girl no one wanted, and asked her to dance. He had not remembered her name a week later. She knew that. She had learned it soon enough, and it cost her something to learn.

But she had carried the memory of that single dance through three years of her father’s ruin, through the death of every hope she had been raised to. Carried it the way a soldier carries a letter next to his heart. When the discreet inquiry had come—a great gentleman, name withheld, seeking a wife of no connections—some instinct she could not have defended in a court of law had made her answer it.

She had not known it was him until she stood in that room. She had very nearly walked out again when she saw him.

And then she had seen his mouth. The blueness gathering faint at the corners of it. The particular gray tiredness under his eyes that she had watched come up in her father’s patients a hundred times—when the heart began to fail, or when it was being helped to fail by the very physic meant to mend it.

Glenna Viner was a physician’s daughter. Her father had been the best diagnostician in the West of England before ruin took him, and he had taught his clever motherless girl everything he knew—the reading of a pulse and a breath, the color of a lip, the whole quiet art of it. She could not hang out a shingle. No one would suffer a woman to physic. To be known for it now would finish what her father’s disgrace had begun.

But standing in the Duke’s cold drawing room, hearing him pronounce his own death with a young man’s flat certainty, she had seen at once, with her father’s terrible clarity, the thing his fine London physicians had not thought to look for.

She was not at all certain the Duke of Edshot was dying of his father’s disease.

But she was certain that if she said so, she would be turned out within the hour, and he would go back to his poisoning cures and be dead by leaf fall as he had promised.

So she had folded her hands and lowered her eyes and said, “Yes, Your Grace. I can do that.”

And she had signed her name to his cold bargain, and let him believe he had bought a stranger’s compliance.