“Pretend to be my fiancée until Twelfth Night,” the Duke of Orwater said, “and I will see your father’s physician paid and your sister’s schooling secured.” He forgot to add one thing: that neither of them would fall in love. He was wrong about that, too.

PART 1

“Pretend to be my fiancée until Twelfth Night, Miss Elfenstone,” said Peveral Marchman, Duke of Orwater, without preamble, “and I will see your father’s physician paid and your sister’s schooling secured. There is only one condition, and I will have your word on it before I say another thing. You must never come to love me, nor I you. Whatever passes between us before my household, before the county, before the whole watching ton at my Christmas ball — it is performance. Nothing more.”

Avisia Elfenstone stood very still in the cold, book-lined library of Orwater Hall. A ledger of the estate’s audit accounts lay open on the table before her, the ink not yet dry on the final column. She had been totaling when the Duke had shut the door behind himself and spoken as though the matter were already settled.

She had known him three winters now, in the way a woman who balances a great house’s smaller accounts knows the man who owns it: by the set of his shoulders passing a window, by the low voice giving orders to a groom, never by conversation. For he had never before troubled to have one with her.

“Your grace,” she said carefully, “I do not understand what use I could possibly be to a duke in want of a fiancée.”

“Because you are exactly what I do not want,” he said, and there was no unkindness in it, only a bluntness she would come in time to recognize as the whole architecture of the man. “Lady Imogen Fair Haven has returned to the county a widow, and my aunt tells me she means to renew what she once broke off. I will not be hunted through my own ballroom at Christmas like a stag run to ground. I require a woman on my arm whom no one will suspect of angling for the position — a woman of sense who will not mistake a fortnight’s pretense for anything real, and who has reason enough of her own to keep the secret.”

“And you have decided I am that woman because I keep your household ledgers and have never once flirted with you in the stairwell.”

Something moved at the corner of his mouth that was not quite a smile. “Among other reasons. Yes.”

She ought to have refused him outright. A duke did not summon the vicar’s daughter to his library at nine at night to propose a counterfeit betrothal, and a sensible woman did not entertain it past the first sentence. But her father had coughed blood into his handkerchief three mornings running. The physician in Sethbury would not come again without payment in hand. And Tamson’s letter from the Dame school had arrived that very morning with a note appended in the schoolmistress’s cramped hand, regretting that fees for the coming term remained outstanding.

Avisia had read that letter twice, and then folded it very small, and put it in her sewing box. Because there had been nothing else to do with it.

“How much?” she said, hating herself a little for asking it so plainly. “And for how long?”

“A hundred pounds settled on your father before Christmas Eve, and your sister’s school fees paid through the completion of her education. In exchange, you will be seen on my arm from now until Twelfth Night — at church, at the assemblies, at my aunt’s card evenings, and at the ball itself on Christmas Eve, where I intend the engagement to be announced beyond any possibility of doubt. After Twelfth Night, the arrangement will end quietly. We shall have quarreled, or you shall have had second thoughts, or I shall have proved myself unworthy. The particulars hardly matter. You will return to your father’s house with your reputation entirely intact and a settlement besides, and I will be a free man again.”

He said it all in the flat, competent tone of a man reading out the terms of a lease. And Avisia understood that this was precisely how he wished her to hear it: as business, and nothing but business.

She studied him across the width of the library table. The dark hair swept back from a brow that carried, she thought, more weariness than a man not yet forty ought to own. The eyes that watched her now with the same full attention he must once have turned on his brother’s ledgers, assessing risk. The set of a mouth that had, she suspected, not smiled without reservation in a very long while.

Orwater was called the Iron Duke behind gloved hands in three counties. And she had never until this moment troubled to wonder whether the name grieved him.

“And if I say no?”

“Then I will find another way to be rid of Lady Imogen. And you will go on keeping my accounts. And neither of us will speak of this again.”

He paused.

“But your father still coughs blood in the morning, Miss Elfenstone. And I think you know it.”

It was a cruel thing to say. And she saw, watching his jaw tighten the instant the words left him, that he knew it too. That he had not meant to say it so plainly — had perhaps not meant to say it at all — and regretted it even as it hung between them in the cold library air.

It was the first unguarded thing she had seen him do.

And it undid more of her resistance than all his talk of settlements.

“One condition of my own,” she said. “If we are to be betrothed before the whole county, your grace, I will not be lied to in the particulars. I would know why Lady Imogen troubles you so, and why your aunt is worrying, and what manner of Christmas ball requires a counterfeit bride to survive it.”

He considered her for a long moment. And she had the sense, not for the last time, of being weighed on a scale whose true units she did not know.

“Sit down, then,” he said at last, and drew out the chair across from her, as though she were a steward come to review the harvest accounts rather than a woman he had just asked to be his pretend betrothed. “It will take longer to explain than I had planned to give it.”

She sat.

He did not.

“My brother Edmund was Duke before me,” he began, pacing now to the cold hearth and back. “And this house held a Christmas ball every year of his life, from the year our father died until the year Edmund himself died. Two Christmases past, in a carriage overturned on the Sethbury road, with his wife beside him. There has been no ball at Orwater since. My niece Lucy is six years old and does not remember a Christmas with music in this house. My mother, the Dowager Duchess, believes — rightly, I expect — that Orwater cannot go on being a house of mourning forever. And she has set her heart on reviving the ball this year. For Lucy’s sake, if for no other. I have agreed to it.”

He turned to face her, his expression unreadable in the candlelight.

“I did not agree to be hunted through my own ballroom while I do it.”