She Grabbed a Stranger to Escape Her Ex — Not knowing He’s a Duke!

Chapter 8

Clara broke the engagement on the fourth of June, exactly as agreed.

She did it properly. A note to the papers. A fortnight of being seen about town looking perfectly well. One dinner at Lady Basingstoke’s, where she said pleasantly and audibly that she and His Grace had found they did not suit.

Half of London decided she was the coldest creature in England. The other half decided she was a woman who had jilted a duke, which turned out to be a form of celebrity. By August, she had more invitations than she could answer and refused most of them.

Nobody ever pitied Clara Ashworth again as long as she lived.

She did not go back to Grovener Square. That had been the arrangement, and she kept it. Five weeks of it. Which nearly killed her. And which she never once complained about, because she had signed a paper and knew exactly what she had signed.

He came to Fen Ditton on the fourteenth of July.

She was in the orchard where the glass house had been, wearing an apron, doing something to a wall. She heard the gate and did not turn around for a moment, because she knew the sound of that particular horse and needed the moment.

“Miss Ashworth.”

She turned. He was standing at the gate in riding clothes, holding his hat.

“Your Grace. Lily has written me eleven letters.”

“I know. I have posted nine of them. I have burned two because they were unkind about me. She is nine. She does not need that in the world.”

Clara put down the trowel.

“Say what you came to say.”

“I have been five weeks,” said the Duke of Blackwood, “working out how to ask you a question you were actually free to answer. And I have failed, because there is no such question.”

He took a breath.

“You owe me for eleven weeks of an engagement and nine hundred pounds on a house. I am the man who kept your name out of a courtroom. There is no version of me standing in this orchard that is not weighted.”

He put his hat on.

“So I am not going to ask you. I am going to tell you a true thing. And then I am going to go home. And if you want anything to come of it, you will have to come and find me. And I will wait as long as that takes.”

“Tell me, then.”

“I have not once thought about the gallery,” he said. “Not since November. Everybody in England thinks that is the beginning of this. It is not. The beginning of it is that you sat down on a floor with a nine-year-old and told her the entire truth about a bargain that made you look bad, because she had asked you a question and nobody had answered one honestly since June.”

He turned toward the gate.

“That is all. Good afternoon, Miss Ashworth.”

He was eleven feet from the gate when Clara said, “You will want to come back.”

He stopped.

“There is no fire lit in the house. There is one chair. And I have a wall to finish.” She picked up the trowel. “But there is tea in the kitchen, and I have been thinking about something Lily said in her last letter, and I would like to know what you did with the two you burned.”

He stood at the gate for a long time. Then he turned around.

“Buried them in the garden,” he said. “Under the rose bush. I thought it was what she would have wanted.”

“She would have wanted you to read them aloud at dinner.”

“Probably. She has her aunt’s nerve.”

Clara looked at him. The sun was in her eyes, and she did not move out of it.

“I am not coming back to Grovener Square.”

“No.”

“And I am not living in London.”

“I did not think you would.”

“And I have nine hundred pounds of debt to you that I intend to pay.”

“I know you do.”

“And I will not be kept.”

“I would not dare try.”

She looked at him for another long moment. Then she picked up her trowel and turned back to the wall.

“There is tea in the kitchen. There is only one cup. You will have to drink from the pot.”

The Duke of Blackwood walked across the orchard. He stopped beside her and looked at the wall she was repairing.

“That is a very bad wall,” he said.

“It is my wall.”

“Yes.” He was quiet for a moment. “It is.”

He did not touch her. He did not try. He stood beside her in the ruined orchard of a house she was buying back from him penny by penny, and he watched her work, and he did not offer to help.

That was the beginning of it.