Lord Thomas Reed slapped the Duchess of Summerton in a velvet alcove, certain no one would ever know — until the door behind her opened. Her husband had heard what Thomas said. But when the Duke saw the red mark on her cheek, it was not the anger in his eyes that chilled her. It was the question he asked Thomas: “How long do you think I was standing outside that door?”

PART 1

The sound of flesh striking flesh does not echo in a crowded ballroom. It gets swallowed by the string quartet, by the scrape of dancing shoes on waxed parquet, by the clinking of champagne flutes and the high, brittle laughter of people who have paid a great deal of money to be seen.

That was the trouble with it. The sound stayed local. It stayed in the room where it happened.

By eleven o’clock, the heat inside the Earl of Carmichael’s ballroom had become a physical weight. It pressed down from the chandeliers — a low, gilded fog of melting beeswax, wilted lilies, and the sour edge of nervous sweat buried under heavy French perfume.

Beatrice, Duchess of Summerton, stood at the edge of the dance floor with her spine locked in a posture of rigid indifference.

Her jaw ached.

She had been smiling for three hours. Not a real smile — the tight, practiced one. The one a woman learns when she understands that her face has stopped being her own property and has become an extension of her husband’s estate. She took a shallow breath, restricted by the bone of her corset, and felt the Summerton emeralds settle cold against her collarbone.

They were magnificent stones. Ten generations of them. They felt like a very expensive collar.

“Your grace.”

Beatrice did not flinch. She had stopped flinching at the age of nineteen.

She turned slowly.

Lady Hemp stood there with her eyes glittering — that particular predatory gleam that only bores well into their fifth decade of entertaining themselves can produce.

“Lady Hemp.”

“We were just wondering,” the older woman murmured, gesturing vaguely with a feathered fan toward a cluster of whispering matrons, “if the Duke intends to make an appearance tonight. It is quite late.”

“Parliament ran long.”

It was a smooth lie. Well rehearsed. She had said it eleven times this season.

The truth was that Henry, the Duke of Summerton, might have been at Parliament. He might also have been in his study with a ledger open in front of him and a glass of scotch going warm in his hand, in total silence. She never quite knew. In a year of marriage, she had never quite known.

He was thirty-four, hardened by duty, intensely private, fiercely analytical. She was twenty-two, cynical enough to accept a loveless marriage, and still human enough to feel the hollow ache of it at three in the morning, alone in a bed built for two.

“Such a shame,” Lady Hemp cooed. “A young bride, left to her own devices in a room full of wolves.”

Beatrice offered her a dry, humorless smile.

“I assure you, Lady Hemp, I have quite lost my taste for mutton.”

The fan snapped shut. Lady Hemp’s mouth thinned into a line that made her look, briefly, like a disappointed fish.

Beatrice inclined her head before the retort could form.

“If you will excuse me. The heat is rather overwhelming.”

She turned away without waiting for a dismissal. She was a duchess. She did not need one.

She needed air.

She moved along the perimeter of the ballroom, dodging trailing silk and gesticulating elbows, slipped past the main double doors, bypassed the crowded terrace, and went down the eastern corridor.

The Carmichael estate was vast, and she knew it the way she knew all of them — from childhood, from a hundred parties, from a decade of standing in corners memorizing floor plans and exits. There was a small antechamber near the library. Quiet. Poorly lit. Used for storing surplus chairs during large events.

She stepped inside and closed the door behind her, and the air was instantly cooler.

Beatrice let her head fall back against the heavy mahogany and closed her eyes. She pressed two fingers to her temples and rubbed at a dull, throbbing headache.

She hated London. She hated the season. She hated the constant, suffocating performance of pretending that everything was perfectly fine.

“Hiding, Beatrice?”

Her eyes snapped open.

The voice came from the shadows near the unlit fireplace. A figure stepped forward, and the dim light from the corridor caught on the gold embroidery of his waistcoat.

Lord Thomas Reed.

He was holding a half-empty glass of brandy. His cravat was slightly askew. His eyes were bloodshot, and the smell of liquor reached her a full second before the smell of his stale cologne did.

Beatrice stiffened, and dropped her hands from her face. She did not want him to see her tired. She did not want him to see anything at all.

“Lord Thomas. I wasn’t hiding. I was merely seeking a moment of quiet.”

“Quiet.” He tasted the word like it was something spoiled. A sneer twisted his handsome, weak features. “Of course. The Duchess requires quiet. The noise of us lesser mortals must be terribly grating.”

“You are drunk. Go back to the ballroom.”

She reached for the brass handle behind her.

He moved faster than she expected. He closed the distance in two strides and slammed his palm flat against the wood, caging her against the door.

“Don’t turn your back on me.”

Beatrice did not shrink. She tilted her chin up and met his erratic, glittering gaze with a stare made of ice water.

“Remove your arm, Lord Thomas. Now.”

“Or what?” He laughed — a bitter, ugly sound with no joy anywhere in it. “You’ll call for your husband? Where is the great Duke of Summerton tonight? Counting his money. Ignoring you, just like everyone knows he does.”

Something cold spiked through her chest. She kept her face absolutely blank.

She knew Thomas Reed. Two years ago, before Henry’s proposal, Thomas had fancied himself in love with her — or rather, he had fancied the idea of possessing her. He had sent her clumsy poetry. He had demanded dances. He had assumed that her family’s poverty made her easy prey for a man with a title and a temper.

Then the Duke of Summerton had swept in with a name and a fortune Thomas could never match, and Thomas’s pride had shattered, and it had not reassembled since.

“My husband’s whereabouts are none of your concern,” Beatrice said, her voice dropping into a low, dangerous register. “And my marriage is certainly not up for your review. Step aside.”

She shoved at his chest.

He did not budge. His free hand snapped out and closed around her upper arm. His fingers dug into the bare flesh above her silk glove.

“You think you’re untouchable.” His breath was sour. “You strut around these ballrooms in his jewels, looking down your nose at everyone. You think a title makes you something special?”

His grip tightened.

“You’re nothing but a bought woman in a tiara.”

Beatrice’s breath hitched — not from fear. From a sudden, violent surge of rage.

“Let go of me.”

“You humiliated me.” The words ground out of him. “You let me court you. You let me believe I had a chance. And then you spread your legs for the highest bidder.”

Beatrice did not think.

She reacted.

She raised her free hand and slapped him hard across the mouth.

The sound was sharp as a pistol crack in the small room.

Thomas stumbled back half a step, stunned. His hand fell from her arm. He touched his lip. He looked at his fingers.

The silence stretched, taut and vibrating.

Beatrice stood tall, her chest heaving, her knuckles stinging.

“Do not ever touch me again,” she said. Her tone was absolute. “And do not ever speak to me again. You are pathetic, Thomas. You always have been.”

She turned the knob.

The rage in his eyes shifted into something wild — something completely untethered from reason or consequence. The humiliation had broken whatever fragile restraint the brandy had left intact.

He swung.

It was clumsy and heavy, driven by drunken momentum and bitter malice. The back of his hand caught her squarely across the left cheekbone, and the force of it snapped her head sideways.

Her shoulder hit the oak door.

Her ears rang — a high, piercing whine that drowned out the muffled music from three corridors away. She tasted copper. Warm, slick blood pooled instantly against the inside of her cheek where her teeth had cut into the flesh.

She did not fall. She caught herself on the door frame, gasping, her vision blurring at the edges.

The physical shock was paralyzing.

No one had ever struck her. Not in her entire life.

Thomas stood there with his chest heaving and his hand still raised in the air. For a split second, the adrenaline drained out of him and left behind the stark, terrifying reality of what he had just done.

He had struck a duchess. He had struck a peeress of the realm.

“You —” His voice came out small. Trembling. “You provoked me.”

Beatrice slowly raised a trembling hand to her face. The skin was already burning, radiating a deep, pulsing agony. She looked at him, eyes wide, the cynical armor she wore so well completely fractured.

She opened her mouth to speak. To scream. To curse him into the ground.

And a sound stopped her.

Behind her. Quiet. Deliberate.

The click of the door latch being pressed down from the outside.

Beatrice stepped forward, stumbling slightly, as the heavy mahogany door swung open inward.

Light from the corridor spilled into the dark room, cutting a sharp rectangle across the patterned rug.

Standing in the center of that light was Henry.