She Climbed Out of a Second-Story Window at Dawn to Escape the Man She Was Being Forced to Marry — But When She Fell Into the Arms of a Feared Duke Who Had Buried His Heart for Twelve Years, Neither Knew That One Desperate Fall Would Change Their Lives Forever

PART 1

The scream that broke the hush of dawn was not, Duke Turald of Nethworthy would later insist, the scream of a woman in danger. It was the scream of a woman falling. Sharper. Shorter. Cut off the instant she landed — directly, and with astonishing force, in his arms.

He had been walking the lane below Belcroft House at that gray hour for no better reason than that he could not sleep in a strange bed. A mile of cool air, he had thought, might settle a mind too full of ledgers and unwanted obligations. He had not thought to be knocked half off his feet by a young woman in a white nightdress, her hair loose down her back like spilled ink, climbing out of a second-story window on a rope of knotted bedsheets that had, with a soft and treacherous unraveling, simply come apart.

For one suspended instant she hung in the gray light above him. Arms flailing. Bare feet kicking at nothing. And Turald, who commanded eleven thousand acres, considerable influence in Parliament, and a reputation so forbidding that grown men crossed the street in Marketfield to avoid greeting him, did the only sensible thing available.

He opened his arms and caught her.

She landed against his chest with a whoosh of expelled breath, one hand fisting in his greatcoat, the other slapping instinctively at his shoulder as though she meant to climb him like the wall she had just abandoned. For a moment neither of them moved. He could feel her heart going like a hammer against his ribs. Could smell lavender water, and beneath it the particular sweetness of a woman roused too suddenly from sleep.

Her eyes, when she finally lifted them to his, were a startling gray-green, wide with shock and entirely, gloriously undignified.

“You,” she said in the tone of a woman accusing the weather, “are not a hedge.”

“I regret to disappoint you,” Turald said. “Were you expecting a hedge?”

“I was expecting the ground. Softened, one hopes, by the hedge.”

She became aware all at once of the full impropriety of her position — a lady in a night rail, unshawled, unbounded, in the arms of a strange gentleman on a public lane at five in the morning — and made a valiant effort to extract herself. This resulted only in her elbow catching him sharply under the chin and her bare foot coming down upon a patch of gravel with a hiss of pain.

“Be still,” he said more sternly than he intended, and set her upright with the particular care a man uses when handling something he has no wish to drop twice. “You’ll do yourself an injury attempting to run from a fall you have already survived.”

“I am attempting,” she said with as much dignity as a barefoot woman in a nightdress could summon, “to preserve what remains of my reputation, sir, which is rather more urgent than my ankles.”

“Your reputation,” he observed, glancing up at the window she had so recently vacated — the sheet still dangling from the sill like a flag of surrender — “seems to have taken its leave along with you.”

She followed his gaze and made a small, strangled sound of horror.

“I confess I am eager to hear the explanation for the sheets.”

“It was not meant to be seen by anyone,” she said, wrapping her arms about herself as the cold finally seemed to reach her. “Least of all —” She stopped, taking him in properly for the first time. The cut of his coat. The signet ring catching the first gray light. The height and breadth and unmistakable bearing of a man who had never in his life climbed out of anything.

Her chin lifted. “Whoever you are.”

“Turald, Duke of Nethworthy.”

He watched the name land the way it always did. The small flinch of recognition. The swift recalculation behind the eyes. But this woman did not flinch. Did not curtsy or apologize for her disarray. She merely looked at him with an assessing frankness that no one in a decade had dared turn on him.

“Well,” she said. “I suppose if one must be caught escaping through a window, one might as well be caught by a duke. It saves time. I shan’t have to explain myself twice — once to the neighbors, and once to my aunt.”

Despite himself, despite the hour and the cold, and the twenty years since anyone had made him want to laugh before breakfast, the corner of his mouth moved.

“Escaping from precisely what?”

“Alfreda Trevenian.” She said it quickly. “I live with my aunt, Mrs. Yarnell, at Belcroft House. And I was climbing from my window because if I had gone out the front door, I should have had to pass the breakfast room. And in the breakfast room at this very hour sits Sir Aldus Puit, who arrived last evening with the express purpose of proposing marriage to me before noon. And my aunt has already told him he may.”

She delivered this in one breath, the words tumbling over one another, and then pressed both hands to her face.

“I do not know why I am telling a stranger all this —”

“Because the stranger already caught you falling out a window,” Turald said. “It would be strange to stop confiding in him now.”

A laugh escaped her before she could stop it. Quick and surprised, as though laughter were not a thing she indulged often. It changed her whole face, softened the anxious set of her mouth, put color in cheeks gone pale with cold and fright. And Turald found himself watching that change with an interest wholly disproportionate to five minutes’ acquaintance.

“You find my ruin amusing, your grace.”

“I find your escape resourceful. Most young ladies faced with an unwanted suitor content themselves with a headache and a locked door.”

“I tried the headache. Sir Aldus does not credit headaches. He is not a cruel man, precisely. Only a very determined one. And my aunt owes money to his family. And I have neither dowry nor prospects nor any standing to refuse a match that would settle her debts.”

She shivered, and this time it was not entirely the cold.

“You cannot stand in the lane in your night rail,” he said, shrugging out of his greatcoat and settling it about her shoulders before she could protest. It swallowed her whole, the hem pooling at her bare feet.

“Your grace — if anyone should see —”

“No one will see. It is not yet six, and the lane is empty but for us.”

Even as he said it, he heard the creak of a garden gate. He turned his head toward the front drive. A man in a rumpled coat, cravat askew, stood in the gateway, his eyes moving with slow, dawning outrage from Alfreda’s bare feet to the Duke’s coat wrapped around her to the tumbled sheets still hanging from her window above.

“Miss Trevenian,” Sir Aldus Puit said in a voice gone thin with fury, “what is the meaning of this?”