Hidden away for a scarred hand, Beatrice Holley spent her season in dark rooms counting trade routes — until the most ruthless duke in England found her reading maps, and refused to leave her hidden. “I owe your stepmother a call,” he said. He kept his word.
PART 1
The London season was a meat market, and Beatrice Holley was the damaged goods her family shoved to the back of the pantry — kept out of sight, hidden from the glittering ballrooms, so she wouldn’t spoil her younger sister’s pristine debut.
But secrets have a funny way of stepping into the light. All it took was one stiflingly hot night, a cracked-open library door, and the most notoriously unforgiving duke in England looking exactly where he wasn’t supposed to.
The carriage smelled of lavender water, nervous sweat, and the sharp bite of impending desperation.
Beatrice sat on the backward-facing seat, spine stiff against the worn velvet squabs. Every jolt of the cobblestones sent a jarring ache up her back, but she did not shift. To shift was to draw attention — and drawing attention in the presence of her stepmother was a tactical error she had learned to avoid before she was ten.
Opposite her, Lady Agatha Holley conducted a frantic inspection of her daughter’s skirts.
“Pinch your cheeks again, Cesily. You look like a corpse.” Agatha’s gloved fingers picked at an invisible piece of lint. “And remember what I said about Lord Davenport. If he asks you to dance, you smile. You cast your eyes downward. And you do not, under any circumstances, mention your morbid fascination with the breeding habits of carriage horses.”
“Yes, Mama,” Cesily whispered, and pinched her cheeks until a high, unnatural red bloomed on her skin.
Cesily was beautiful — the fragile, spun-sugar prettiness London society devoured. She was also entirely unsuited for the vicious games of the marriage mart, which was why Beatrice was in the carriage at all: Cesily had suffered a tearing panic attack an hour before departure, and Beatrice was the only one who could sew fast enough to mend the torn beadwork, and the only one whose quiet, steady voice could pull her sister back from the brink of a faint.
The carriage lurched to a halt outside the townhouse of the Earl of Harrington.
“Right.” Agatha grabbed Beatrice by the elbow; her nails dug sharply through the cheap wool. “You will go through the servants’ entrance. Find a quiet room on the ground floor — a cloakroom, a linen closet, I do not care. You will sit there. You will not move. You will not speak to anyone. If Cesily tears her hem or requires a pin, I will send a footman to fetch you. Do you understand me, Beatrice?”
“Perfectly.”
Her voice was flat — devoid of the resentment Agatha always seemed to be hunting for. Resentment required hope, and Beatrice had bled herself dry of that useless emotion years ago.
Under her thick leather glove lay the puckered, jagged expanse of a burned scar, twisting up past her wrist — a childhood accident that had sealed her fate. In Agatha’s eyes, Beatrice was not merely unmarriageable. She was an active liability: a grotesque reminder of imperfection that might contaminate Cesily’s chances by association.
Ten minutes later, Beatrice sat in the Earl’s secondary library — a small, airless room at the end of a dimly lit corridor, far from the ballroom. The walls groaned under the weight of unread agricultural treatises and dusty encyclopedias. Above her head, the ceiling vibrated: the musicians had struck up a waltz, and the rhythmic thump of hundreds of dancing feet filtered down through the plaster — a constant, mocking reminder of the world spinning on without her.
The window latch was rusted shut. The room suffocated.
She peeled off her glove with a grimace, flexing the scarred fingers against the hot stillness. Then, because she was alone and invisible and safe, she crossed to the Earl’s massive desk and pulled a vellum map of the continent toward her, tracing a route from Calais to Florence with her lips moving silently in calculation.
For the first time all day, her shoulders dropped.
She did not hear the footsteps approaching down the corridor.
Henry Ashford, Duke of Calverton, was three minutes away from committing a murder.
He had escaped Lady Arbuthnot — who had practically shoved her terrified daughter into his waistcoat (“My Henrietta plays the pianoforte with such vigor, your grace”) — with a low, gravelly, “I prefer the dullness. It allows me to hear myself think,” and fled the ballroom’s suffocating heat through the darker veins of the house. He knew the Harrington layout well; he and the Earl had shot together in Scotland.
Halfway down the ground-floor corridor, he saw it: a vertical slice of warm golden light cutting across the dark carpet. One of the heavy oak doors stood cracked open.
He expected a pair of desperate lovers, a sleeping footman, a drunken guest.
He did not expect her.
She stood over the Earl’s desk, illuminated by a single candle, in a dress the color of a fresh bruise. Not classically beautiful — her jaw too sharp, her brows too straight. But as she stared down at the map, her expression was arrested. Alive. A fierce, unguarded intelligence in her eyes that he hadn’t seen in a woman — or a man — in years.
His gaze shifted. Her left hand lay on the desk, the skin heavily scarred, twisted into tight silvery ridges. Beside it sat a discarded leather glove.
He understood the brutal mathematics instantly. An embarrassment, hidden away while the presentable members of the family danced above.
She looked like the only real thing in this entire absurd house.
His boot scraped against the stone floor. Her head snapped up. In a flash she snatched the glove and dragged it over her hand.
“I have no money,” she said, “and there is nothing in this room worth stealing. Unless you have a particular desire for a 1792 almanac on soil drainage.”
He barked a laugh he hadn’t expected to find in himself, and stepped inside.
“I am adequately supplied with agricultural texts,” he said. “Thank you.”
She did not curtsy. “Then you are lost. The ballroom is up the stairs, two rights, and follow the scent of desperation.”
“I am exactly where I intend to be. Who are you hiding from?”
“Everyone. Now close the door on your way out. You’re letting the heat in.”
He closed the door. And stayed.
The map argument followed: her route through the Alpine passes, his correction — the snowmelt delays, the mud of late May, the Brenner instead of the St. Gotthard; her retort — a hundred extra miles, fodder and tolls negating the savings; his answer — a contract with the Austrian customs officials, a bribe, cargo saved from rotting in a Swiss valley.
“You speak from experience.”
“I own three shipping companies. I know exactly what it costs to move things across the continent.”
His gaze dropped to her gloved hand — and passed over it without pity, without the cloying sympathy she was used to, accepted it as a fact of her existence, and returned to her face.
“They are predictable,” he said quietly. “You are not.”
Before she could answer, heavy footsteps echoed down the corridor. Clack, clack, clack.
Her blood ran cold.
“She is coming.” Panic finally sliced through her calm. She grabbed his coat from the chair and shoved it against his chest. “You have to get out.”
“No. I don’t believe I will.”
“If my stepmother finds you here with me, she will assume the worst. She will ruin Cesily’s chances just to punish me. Please — get behind the drapes.”
“I do not hide, miss—” He stopped, realizing he didn’t know her name. “I am not asking you to hide for your sake,” she whispered, pressing her palms flat against his chest. It was like trying to move a brick wall. “I am asking you to hide for mine.”
The doorknob rattled.
He looked down at her pale, terrified face — and saw, not the fear of a ruined reputation, but the fear of a prisoner anticipating the lash.
With a low curse, he grabbed her by the waist and pulled her flush against him, dragging them both into the deep shadow between the bookshelves and the heavy velvet drapes just as the oak door swung open.
Agatha’s voice cut through the dark.
“Beatrice. Where are you, you useless girl?”