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 2 

Alfreda went white. Turald felt her hand close without her seeming to notice it on the sleeve of the coat he had given her, as though she meant to hold onto something solid while the ground opened beneath her a second time.

Puit’s gaze swung to Turald with the particular loathing of a small man discovering a large one has beaten him to a prize he had already secured in his mind.

“The Duke of Nethworthy. Meeting a young lady half-dressed in a public lane at dawn. I wonder what your aunt will make of that, madam, when I tell her — as I fully intend to.”

“You will tell her nothing.”

Turald’s voice carried the flat, quiet certainty of a man who had spent twelve years learning exactly how much authority his name could command. Puit’s chin jerked back half an inch.

“You will tell her that Miss Trevenian suffered a fall from her window. That I happened to be passing and caught her. And that no further comment upon the matter is either warranted or welcome.”

“A fall.” Puit’s eyes flicked to the dangling sheets. “At the very hour she was meant to give me her answer. I think, your grace, we both know precisely what sort of fall this was.”

Behind them, the front door of Belcroft House opened. A stout woman in a wrapper and nightcap came hurrying down the steps, her face already arranging itself into horror, calling Alfreda’s name.

Mrs. Yarnell arrived at the garden gate with her wrapper clutched to her throat. For a long moment she simply stood and stared at her niece wrapped in a stranger’s greatcoat, standing barefoot in the mud, at Sir Aldus purpling with outrage, at the tall dark gentleman whose bearing announced before he had said a word that he was not a person to be spoken to carelessly.

“Madam.” Turald stepped forward, and something in the movement made Mrs. Yarnell’s mouth shut with an audible click. “I have not had the honor of an introduction. Turald, Duke of Nethworthy. I am newly arrived at Ashford Priory to see to business left unfinished by the previous tenant. I was walking the lane this morning when your niece had a fall from her window. I caught her. That is the whole of the incident.”

Sir Aldus, still simmering, found his voice again. “A fall. Conveniently arranged with a rope of bed sheets at the precise hour she was engaged to give me her answer.”

Turald turned to face him fully. “You will choose your next words with considerably more care, Sir Aldus. Or I shall be obliged to take an interest in precisely how you came to be standing in a lady’s garden at this hour yourself — uninvited — and what account you mean to give of your own conduct when I do.”

Puit’s mouth opened and shut. He was not, Turald judged, a man built for confrontation with someone who could not be intimidated by rank — for rank was the only weapon he possessed, and it had just been turned back upon him.

“There is,” Turald went on into the silence, “a simple remedy for any doubt cast upon Miss Trevenian’s honor this morning. I compromised her, however unintentionally, by catching her in a public lane in her night attire. The remedy, as I understand country custom, is marriage. I am prepared to offer for Miss Trevenian’s hand this morning — with Mrs. Yarnell’s blessing.”

The words fell into the cold morning air and seemed to stop everything. The birds. The wind. Mrs. Yarnell’s breath.

Alfreda stared at him with an expression of such pure, undiluted shock that he almost regretted the speed of the offer. Though not, he found, the offer itself.

“Your grace,” she managed. “You cannot possibly. You do not even know me. We met a quarter of an hour ago.”

“I have made a great many decisions in my life on a good deal less consideration than a quarter of an hour,” Turald said. “And few of them have troubled me half so little as this one.”

PART 3 

“I would rather compromise myself into a match with a woman who climbs out of windows to escape men who bore her,” Turald said, “than spend another season being courted by women who would never dare.”

A sound escaped Mrs. Yarnell that might have been a sob of relief or simple astonishment. Sir Aldus, robbed entirely of his advantage, drew himself up with what dignity remained to him.

“Well. If Miss Trevenian prefers to be a duchess to being my wife, I shan’t stand in the way of her ambition.”

The word landed with deliberate unkindness, meant to wound. And Turald watched Alfreda’s chin come up against it with the same defiance she had shown him not ten minutes before.

“I did not climb out of a window this morning in pursuit of a duchy, Sir Aldus. I climbed out of a window to avoid marrying a man who speaks of me as though I were a debt to be collected. If his grace’s offer proves as ill-considered as your own good opinion of yourself, I dare say I shall find that out soon enough. But I would rather take my chances with a stranger’s honesty than a familiar man’s contempt.”

It was, Turald thought, watching her deliver this with her bare feet planted in the mud and her chin lifted like a woman twice her rank, the finest set-down he had witnessed in a decade of London drawing rooms. And it was delivered by a penniless companion in a borrowed coat to a wealthy baronet at twice her consequence.

Puit, having nothing left to salvage, bowed stiffly to Mrs. Yarnell, cast one last venomous look at Turald, and departed down the lane with the particular stiff-backed haste of a man determined to appear unhurried while walking as fast as his dignity would permit.

The silence that followed was broken by Mrs. Yarnell bursting into tears of relief. For Sir Aldus’s debt-collecting had weighed on her far more heavily than she had ever confessed to her niece, and the sudden appearance of a duke willing to take that burden away struck her as nothing short of providence.

Twenty minutes later, Turald found himself seated in Belcroft’s modest morning room, the fire barely caught, the curtains still drawn against a sun that had not yet cleared the hedgerows, drinking tea from a chipped cup while Mrs. Yarnell alternated between weeping and calculating aloud what a ducal wedding might require. And Alfreda, now decently gowned and shawled, her hair pinned into some semblance of order, sat across from him with an expression that suggested she had not yet decided whether to thank him or interrogate him.

When her aunt finally excused herself to see about breakfast, Alfreda turned to him with the directness that had struck him first in the lane.

“You need not go through with this, your grace. I know what was said in front of Sir Aldus, and I understand why you said it. A gentleman does not leave a lady undefended before a man like that. But we are alone now, and I would rather hear the truth. You are under no obligation to marry a woman you caught by accident and never intended to meet.”

“I am under precisely the obligation I named. Whether I intended to meet you is beside the point. I did meet you, and half the parish will have the story by supper, embroidered considerably past the truth. Your reputation, your aunt’s respectability, your own prospects — whatever remain of them — will bear the cost of an encounter that was entirely my doing as much as yours.”

He paused, weighing the honesty of what he meant to say next, and found he wanted to say it regardless.

“I do not offer for you out of pity, Miss Trevenian. Nor out of some misplaced sense that a duke must rescue every woman who falls into his arms. I offer because it is the only honorable course available to either of us. And because —” He stopped, then continued. “Because in a quarter of an hour, you have interested me more than any woman has managed in several years of determined effort by half the mothers of England. And I find I am not eager to discover what it would feel like to walk away from that and never learn whether the interest would have lasted.”

Color rose in her cheeks. She looked down at her tea rather than at him, though he noted with some satisfaction that she did not look displeased.

“That is either the most honest proposal ever offered to a woman in a morning room,” she said, “or the strangest. And I confess I cannot yet tell which.”

“Perhaps,” he said, “it may be both.”

“I have no dowry, your grace. No connections worth the name. My father’s estate went to ruin before I was sixteen, and I have lived on my aunt’s charity ever since, keeping her accounts and mending her linens, and being by every measure society keeps, entirely unremarkable.”

“Your family, your peers — they will ask what a duke of your consequence means by marrying a woman who owns two decent gowns and no fortune whatsoever.”

“They will ask,” he agreed. “I have never troubled myself overmuch what my peers ask of me, Miss Trevenian. And I do not intend to begin now on your account or my own.”

He set down the chipped cup and met her eyes.

“Marry me. And let them ask. I find I would rather spend my life being asked inconvenient questions beside a woman who climbs out of windows than spend it comfortably unquestioned and entirely alone.”

She was quite a long moment, searching his face as though hunting for the trick in it — the cruelty that a woman raised on charity learns to look for in every generous offer. Whatever she found or failed to find seemed slowly to settle something in her.

“Then I accept, your grace,” she said. “Though I warn you now, I intend to hold you to every word of that proposal. And I have an excellent memory.”

“Good,” Turald said, and found for the first time in longer than he could easily recall that he meant a smile all the way through. “I should be disappointed in a duchess who forgot.”