Her Groom Let Her Fall at the Altar to Save His Polished Shoes—But the Feared Duke Caught Rosalind, Carried Her Out Before Three Hundred Guests, and Refused to Return Her to the Family That Had Nearly Killed Her.

PART 1

The lilies always meant a funeral.

Rosalind had learned that at eleven, standing beside her grandmother’s coffin in a cold chapel in Kent, holding a stem so long the bud tipped past her ear. White lilies: the flower of the dead. Everyone knew it. It was in every etiquette book her mother had ever pressed into her hands.

Today there were four hundred of them, banked in tiers along the altar rail of St George’s, Hanover Square, and they were for her wedding.

She stood at the top of the chancel steps and tried to breathe.

There was no room for breath. There had never been room for breath. Her mother had laced her that morning with the flat of one hand braced against her spine, pulling each cord tight enough to crease the canvas, and when Rosalind had said Mother, I cannot — Lady Abernathy had said, You can. Other girls manage it. Do not be tiresome on today of all days.

Whalebone. Thirty pounds of ivory silk. Two thousand seed pearls sewn by hand in Paris, and a train so long that two footmen had been assigned to carry it.

Rosalind had not eaten in three days to fit into the thing.

She had drunk water and eaten nothing, because a bride who could not close at the waist would shame the family, and the family had debts, and the debts were the reason she was standing here at all.

Beside her, Viscount Linus Hastings shifted his weight from one polished shoe to the other.

She could smell him through the lilies: stale port underneath a heavy, imported bay rum, applied generously enough to cover the smell of a man who had been drinking since ten in the morning.

He was smiling. She could see it from the corner of her eye, the wet, self-satisfied curve of it.

Why shouldn’t he smile? He was buying two-and-twenty years of virginity from an ancient bankrupt bloodline for the price of her father’s gambling debts. Thirty thousand pounds, she had gathered, from a footman’s careless remark. Thirty thousand pounds, paid to Thomas Abernathy so that the Abernathys could keep the roof, keep the land, keep the fiction, and so that Linus Hastings could acquire the last respectable name in the county for less than the cost of his stables.

It was a bargain.

The archbishop droned on. His voice was a low, rhythmic hum that came back off the vaulted ceiling a half-second later, so that every phrase arrived twice.

Rosalind stared at the gold cross on the altar.

The edges of it had begun to blur.

In the front pew, sitting with the rigid, bored posture of a man fulfilling an obligation, was Dominic, Duke of Wickliffe.

He was not family. He was not a friend. He was simply the wealthiest man in the room — a creditor to half the congregation, whose presence the ton had required out of pure habit, the way one requires a storm to pass.

He hated weddings. He had said so, once, loudly, at a dinner where Rosalind had been seated too far away to hear it herself but close enough to hear the retelling for a month afterward: morbid affairs, full of liars dressed in pastel silk.

His dark eyes were fixed on her.

Not with admiration. With the flat, clinical attention of a man reading a set of accounts he did not intend to sign.

He noticed what nobody else noticed.

He noticed her knuckles, bloodless white around the lily stems. He noticed the erratic, shallow rise and fall of her collarbone. He noticed the fine sheen of cold sweat along her temple, the way she was swaying by a fraction of an inch, back and forth, back and forth, like a sapling in a slow wind.

She’s going to drop, Dominic thought.

He uncrossed his legs and planted both boots flat on the stone floor. The muscle in his jaw ticked once.

He waited for Hastings to notice. He waited for the archbishop to pause. He waited for someone, anyone, to look at the girl in the centre of this pageant and see what was happening to her.

Nobody did.

Hastings was adjusting his cuffs. Lady Abernathy was in the third row, glaring at a cousin who had whispered.

The archbishop raised both hands.

“Do you, Linus—”

Rosalind’s vision tunnelled. The gold cross disappeared, swallowed by a creeping grey fog at the edges of her sight. The pain in her ribs, which had been a sharp blinding ache for three hours, flared into a single solid band of fire across her whole chest.

And then everything went numb.

The humming in her ears swelled into a roar. She did not feel her knees go. She only felt the sudden, terrifying weightlessness of falling backward, thirty pounds of silk going over like a felled statue.

Somewhere behind her, before she even reached the floor, she heard her mother’s voice rise above the murmur of the choir.

“The dress! Someone catch the dress!”

The lilies left her hands. They scattered across the marble, white heads rolling, one of them coming to rest against the archbishop’s shoe.

Three hundred people took a breath at the same time and there was no air left in the church.

Hastings flinched.

He jumped backward. He actually stepped back, both hands lifting away from her, saving the polish on his shoes from the falling train.

He did not make a single movement toward her.

Dominic moved.

He took the pew in one motion, cleared the distance to the altar in three strides, and got his arm under her waist and his other hand beneath her shoulders about an inch before the back of her skull would have cracked against the marble step.

The weight came down onto his chest hard and solid and entirely lifeless.

Her head lolled back over his forearm. The veil tore where it caught on his sleeve.

Silence slammed down on the church. Absolute, horrified silence.

Then the noise broke.

“Good God —” Hastings found his voice at last, a step forward, his face flooding an ugly mottled red. “What is the meaning of this? Wickliffe. Put her down.”

Dominic did not look at him. He was looking down at the face resting against his dark coat.

Her lips had gone the faint, frightening blue of a woman fighting for air and losing. Her eyelids fluttered. They did not open. She felt like ice through his sleeve.

“Rosalind!”

Lady Abernathy came up the aisle at a run, skirts gathered in both fists, and reached the altar and went straight past her daughter’s face to the crumpled ivory train.

“The dress — you are crushing the silk! Put her down this instant, your grace. She is merely overwhelmed. It is only a swoon.”

Dominic shifted his grip and lifted Rosalind entirely off the floor, gathering her against his chest with a terrifying ease, the way a man picks up something he intends to keep.

He looked at Lady Abernathy.

His eyes were flat. Dark. Utterly without warmth.

“She can barely breathe, you fool.”

He did not raise his voice. It cut through the murmuring crowd like a serrated blade, and Lady Abernathy recoiled as though he had struck her.

“How dare you speak to me —”

“Stand aside.”

“Your grace.” The archbishop came down off the altar with both hands raised, placating. “Perhaps we might lay the bride down in the vestry and give her a moment to recover her senses. The ceremony must be completed. There are—”

He stopped.

Dominic had looked at him. And then past him, at Hastings, who was staring at his unconscious bride with the irritated impatience of a man whose new horse had refused to walk.

This was the machinery of their world. A girl was choking for air on the floor of a church with three hundred witnesses, and the only question in the room was how to get the ring on her finger before the settlements went stale.

Something in Dominic’s chest, which had been rusting quietly for four years, gave way entirely.

“No,” he said.

Hastings blinked. “No? What do you mean, no? Hand me my wife.”

“She is not your wife yet.” His voice dropped into a low, dangerous register. “And if you leave her in this dress another five minutes, she never will be anything at all.”

He turned his back on the altar.

Three hundred people watched the Duke of Wickliffe walk the length of St George’s, Hanover Square, carrying the unconscious bride.

“WICKLIFFE!” Hastings’s voice cracked in the middle. “Stop! You cannot take her — this is an outrage, this is a kidnapping —”

Dominic did not stop and did not look back.

His boots came down on the flagstones like gunfire, long measured strides, past row after row of blurred pastel silk and gloved hands pressed to open mouths. He saw none of it.

He felt the faint, stubborn flutter of a heartbeat against his forearm, and it was the only thing in the building that mattered.

He reached the doors. The two footmen there were staring with their mouths open.

“Open them.”

They scrambled. The oak groaned outward and the blinding white of the London afternoon came in like a blade.