“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 2 

“And Lady Imogen?”

The Duke’s mouth thinned. “Lady Imogen Fair Haven was Miss Imogen Vane when I was a younger son with no expectation of a title. And she broke our engagement three weeks before the wedding to marry the Earl of Rosemuir instead. Because an earl with land in hand was a surer thing than a second son with none.”

He said it without heat. Which somehow made it worse than if he had raged.

“Rosemuir is dead a year now. And she has discovered, I am told, that a widowed countess is not so very grand a prize after all. And that the Duke of Orwater — the very man she once discarded — has become, through no virtue of his own, a considerably better one. My aunt believes Imogen means to renew her suit at the ball publicly. Where refusing her will cost me dearly in gossip either way. I will not give her the chance to try. A public betrothal ends the matter cleanly.”

Avisia sat with that a moment, turning it over. It explained the bluntness, the flat terms, the insistence on the one condition before he would say anything else. A man burned once by a woman’s calculation would build his defenses accordingly. And hers, she supposed, was meant to be a wall he could see through entirely — precisely because there was nothing behind it to mistake for feeling.

“You believe that if I understand from the outset that none of it is real, I cannot wound you as she did.”

“I believe that clarity spares us both a great deal of trouble.”

“And Lucy? Does she know you mean to produce a fiancée for her Christmas ball as though I were a decoration hired for the mantel?”

For the first time, something crossed his face that was not calculation — a flicker, quickly smoothed, of a man caught out.

“Lucy knows only that her uncle means to give her a Christmas with music in it, and that a kind lady will be staying at the hall through the season. She is six, Miss Elfenstone. She will not trouble herself with the particulars of a betrothal contract.”

“No,” Avisia agreed. “But she will trouble herself, I think, with whether the kind lady is kind in earnest — or only performing kindness for a hundred pounds.”

She watched him absorb that. Watched the flicker of discomfort deepen very slightly before he mastered it.

“I will not be unkind to a grieving child to satisfy the terms of a business arrangement, your grace. Whatever else I agree to — that much I will not perform.”

“I would not ask it of you.”

“Then we understand one another on that point at least.”

She drew a slow breath. Outside the library window, the first true snow of the season had begun — fine and silent against the black glass. And somewhere above them in the sleeping house, a small girl who did not remember Christmas music lay dreaming, perhaps, of nothing at all.

Avisia thought of her father’s handkerchief. Of Tamson’s careful, hopeful hand, asking whether the fees might yet be found.

And she thought, too — though she would not have admitted it aloud for any sum — of the strange, unlooked-for pull she felt toward a man who had just confessed his deepest wound to her across a ledger table because she had asked him plainly to.

“Very well,” she said. “I accept your terms, your grace. I will be your fiancée until Twelfth Night. And I will never come to love you. And you will never come to love me. And at the end of it, we shall part as strangers with a settlement between us.”

She rose and extended her hand across the table — the ink-stained fingers of a woman who kept another man’s books, meeting the gloved hand of the most feared duke in three counties.

“Though I confess I have never before shaken hands on a broken heart in advance of having one.”

He took her hand. His grip was warm through the kid leather, warmer than she had expected of a man so carefully cold. And he held it a fraction longer than the business of the agreement strictly required before he released it and stepped back, as though the table between them were not distance enough.