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 3

The carriage was black lacquer with no crest, drawn by four matched greys, and it was already moving when Dominic pulled the door shut behind them.

Finch, on the box, took one look at the Duke’s face and put the horses into the street without being told.

“To Mayfair, Finch,” Dominic said through the window.

“Not a hospital, your grace?”

“No. Get us out before that mob of vultures spills out of the church.”

The wheels cracked against the cobbles. St George’s and a riot of scandal fell away behind them.

Inside, the light was dim. The heavy velvet shades were drawn tight against the afternoon. Dominic laid Rosalind out flat on the long leather bench seat and then sat on the opposite bench and looked at her.

She had not moved.

The blue around her mouth had deepened. Her chest made small, jerky movements, fighting for air and hitting a wall two inches in.

He had seen that before. He had seen it in field hospitals on the Peninsula, in men whose ribs had gone through their lungs, in men who had drowned in the Tagus and been pulled out half an hour later.

He had also seen, once, in a drawing room in Lisbon, a woman at a function breathe exactly like that for twenty minutes while forty people drank punch around her, and then simply stop.

Dominic swore, softly, and reached down into his boot.

The knife was small, silver-handled, seated in a sheath inside the leather. He caught the heavy ivory silk at her collar and drove the blade through it, and then he cut downward, one long tearing stroke, and three hundred pounds of Parisian workmanship opened like a pod.

Under the silk was the corset.

He had seen women’s stays before. He had never seen this. The canvas was warped out of true where the lacing had been hauled past the point the maker intended, and the whalebone had bent inward at the ribs so hard that the fabric had ridged around it. Whoever had laced this had not been dressing a body. They had been packing it.

He rolled her carefully onto her side, found the knotted cords at her back, and slid the flat of the blade beneath them, twisting upward.

The lacing snapped open with a sound like a branch breaking.

Rosalind’s chest expanded all at once, so violently that her spine arched clear off the leather, her hands flying up to claw at her own throat while her lungs finally, desperately filled.

Then she started coughing.

Dominic sat back and slid the knife home into his boot and watched her fight her way back to equilibrium, and did not touch her again.

Her eyes flew open.

The world was dark. It was moving. It smelled of leather and horsehair and something sharp and dry — sandalwood, and under it the faint metallic tang of the knife. Her ribs screamed as they came back to their natural shape. The enormous weight of the dress was gone, hanging loose around her shoulders in ruined strips.

She stared at the ceiling of the carriage.

Then she turned her head.

He was sitting opposite her in the shadows, long legs stretched out, cravat already pulled loose from his throat. He was watching her with a calm, unblinking attention.

Cold panic went through her.

She scrambled backward, shoving herself up against the corner of the seat, clutching the destroyed bodice to her chest with both hands.

“Where am I?”

Her voice came out as a cracked, dry whisper.

“In my carriage.”

“Where—” She stopped. Her mind, sluggish and bruised, was assembling events out of order. The heat. The lilies. The cross. The roaring in her ears.

“The wedding,” she breathed.

“Cancelled, I should imagine.”

He reached into a compartment beneath the seat and came up with a silver flask. He unscrewed the cap and held it out.

“Drink.”

She stared at the flask, and then at his face.

She knew who he was. Everyone knew Wickliffe. He bought debts. He broke rivals with quiet, patient efficiency. He spoke perhaps twice a session in Parliament and always got precisely what he had come for. He was not a saviour. Men like him were the reason there was anything to be saved from.

“I don’t understand.” Her hands were shaking so badly she did not dare reach for the flask. “Why am I here? Where is my mother? Where is Lord Hastings?”

“Your mother was primarily concerned with the wrinkles in your skirt,” Dominic said. “Hastings was offended that you had the audacity to interrupt his wedding by collapsing on the altar. I judged neither of them qualified to render medical assistance.”

“You cut my dress.”

She said it flatly, looking down at the ruined silk, and then the full meaning of it arrived and hit her like a blow to the sternum. A man who was not her husband had cut her clothes off her body in a moving carriage. There were five hundred people in London who would hear that sentence before nightfall and not one of them would need the rest of the story.

“You were suffocating,” he said. “The stays were compressing your diaphragm. Another five minutes and your brain would have been starved of oxygen. The dress was a casualty. Deal with it.”

He leaned forward, took her wrist, and pressed the cold flask into her palm.

“Drink it. It will steady your nerves.”

She drank. It was brandy, rough and burning, and it went down her throat like a lit match and forced her heart into a steady rhythm anyway.

She lowered the flask.

The reality of the situation settled over her like a shroud, and she found she could see all of it at once, quite clearly, the way one sees an account laid out in columns.

She was alone in a carriage with the Duke of Wickliffe. Her dress was destroyed. She had left a viscount standing at an altar in front of three hundred people.

“I am ruined,” she said.

It was not a plea for sympathy. It was an entry. In their world it was a death sentence — no other suitors, a family that would disown her by supper, a name that would be a cautionary tale for mothers by the end of the week.

Dominic watched the resignation settle across her face.

He had expected hysteria. He had braced for it — the screaming, the demands to turn the carriage around, the weeping over a lost reputation. He had met a hundred women who would have done exactly that, and he had been prepared to handle it with the same flat competence he brought to a bad quarter’s returns.

What he had not expected was a girl of two-and-twenty sitting up in a torn wedding dress with blue lips and coldly pricing her own destruction.

“Ruin is a social construct,” he said.

She looked up.

“Death is permanent. I suggest you prioritise your gratitude.”

“Gratitude.”

She laughed. It was a harsh, broken sound that scraped her raw throat.

“You did not save me, your grace. You merely changed the method of my execution. Hastings would have bored me to death. Society will starve me to death.” She handed the flask back. “I suppose I should thank you for the variety.”

Dominic leaned back against the squabs. Something moved at the corner of his mouth.

“You are surprisingly pragmatic for a woman who just fainted from wearing too many pearls.”

“I did not faint from the pearls.”

The brandy had put a sudden fire in her stomach, and it came out hotter than she intended.

“I fainted because I have not eaten in three days, to fit into a canvas trap my mother insisted upon, and because the thought of Linus Hastings touching me makes my blood run cold.”

She stopped. Snapped her mouth shut.

She had never in her life spoken to a man like that. Two-and-twenty years of training had gone into the last four seconds and it had all come out sideways. The ruin, she realised with a strange, dizzying lightness, had already loosened her tongue.

What was left to lose?

Dominic’s eyes darkened.

He studied her. The sharp, intelligent angle of her jaw. The defiant flatness in her pale eyes. The tangled mess of dark hair coming down out of its elaborate pins.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked. Her voice had hardened.

“To my home.”

“No.”

She shook her head at once.

“Take me back to my father’s house. I will face the consequences.”

“Your father sold you to Hastings for thirty thousand pounds.”

She froze.

“How do you know that?”

“Because I hold the notes on Hastings’s debts.” He rested his elbows on his knees and closed the distance between them. “I know exactly what you cost, Rosalind. I know exactly why you were standing on that altar. And if I take you back to your father now, he will beat you for losing the investment, and then he will drag you back to St George’s by your hair to finish the job.”

The absolute certainty in his voice chilled her, mostly because she knew he was right. Her father was a desperate man, and desperate men did not forgive broken contracts.

“So what am I?” she asked. Her voice trembled, just slightly, betraying the terror under the cynicism. “You have stolen me from Hastings. Am I a hostage? A pawn in some financial game of yours?”

Dominic looked at her for a long, silent moment.

The carriage rattled on. The noise of the city came muffled through the velvet.

“You are not a hostage,” he said at last.

She waited.

“You were a bird dying in a cage. I opened the door. What happens next is entirely up to you.”

The carriage slowed, turning onto a long gravel sweep.

“But understand this.”

His voice dropped to something low and absolute.

“You are not going back. I did not pull you off that altar to hand you back to the butchers.”

The carriage rolled to a halt. The door swung open and the blinding white of the afternoon flooded the dim interior.