She knew what she was doing was improper. Three weeks was far too soon — she should have remained inside for at least another two months, veiled, kept out of public view, and permitted to see only members of her family. But after her fiancé abandoned her, she married London’s most feared Duke to save her family — only for a hidden ledger to reveal the heartbreaking reason he had chosen her from the very beginning.

PART 3

They took the piano first.

Beatrice sat in the centre of the drawing room with a ledger open on her lap and watched two burly men carry her mother’s mahogany pianoforte out through the front door, tilting it sideways to clear the frame, scraping a long white line into the doorpost as they went.

The house was cold. The fires had not been lit. They could not afford the coal.

Her mother was upstairs with a compress over her eyes, weeping softly into a linen handkerchief and apologising, between sobs, for weeping.

“Miss Croft.”

She looked up. A thin man with a clipboard stood in the doorway, pen hovering.

“The library is cleared. We will be moving to the dining room next. The silver service is on the manifest.”

“Take it,” Beatrice said. Her voice was hoarse. “Take all of it. Leave the bed my mother is currently occupying.”

The man nodded, looking faintly ill, and scurried away.

She closed the ledger. It did not matter how many times she added the columns. The mathematics of their ruin were absolute. They had one week before the house was seized entirely. After that it was the charity of distant relatives who had already stopped answering letters — or the workhouse.

A heavy knock echoed down the empty hallway.

Beatrice did not rise. She assumed it was another creditor, come for a mirror or a rug. The knock came again, and then heavy footsteps sounded on the bare hardwood — slow, deliberate, accompanied by a rhythmic dull thud. The drawing room doors opened.

Gideon Rothwell stood on the threshold.

He looked even larger in the stripped, desolate room. He wore a dark riding coat with dust clinging to the hem and carried a leather portfolio under one arm. A silver-tipped cane rested heavily in his right hand — the first time she had seen him use it. He had not used it at the ball.

He surveyed the room: the pale rectangles on the walls where portraits had hung, the rolled carpets, the single threadbare armchair Beatrice was sitting in.

“Your Grace,” she said. She was too exhausted to stand, or to feel shock. “If you have come for the furniture, you are late. The creditors have a system.”

The Duke’s scarred mouth twitched. It was not a smile, exactly. It was close.

“I have no need of secondhand chairs, Miss Croft.”

He walked further into the room, leaning his weight onto the cane with every second step. He stopped a few feet from her and looked down with those pale, dissecting eyes.

“Your situation is entirely untenable.”

A statement of fact. No apology attached to it.

“Your powers of observation are staggering,” Beatrice replied, lifting her chin. Cynicism was the only armour she had left. “Did you come to gloat, or merely to observe the mechanics of poverty?”

“I came to offer you a position.”

She froze.

“A position.” The word came out wrong. “A governess?”

“A wife.”

The word dropped into the cold room like a lead weight.

Beatrice stared at him, waiting for the punchline. Waiting for the cruel joke to reveal itself, for the laugh, for the ton’s most famous cruelty to show its teeth.

But the Duke of Ashborne did not look like a man who told jokes. He looked like a general outlining a battle strategy.

“Pardon me,” she breathed.

Gideon drew a single sheet of heavy parchment from the portfolio and dropped it onto her lap, over the ledger. “My terms,” he said. “I have already purchased every claim against your father’s estate — every creditor now answers to me. By noon today the bailiffs will leave. The house remains in your mother’s name. She receives an annual stipend of five hundred pounds — sufficient to keep her comfortably for the rest of her life.”

He paused.

“In exchange, you will marry me by special licence by the end of the week.”

Beatrice looked down at the paper. It was a legal contract. Neatly written. Sharply defined.

“Why?”

The question tore out of her throat before she could stop it.

“I am ruined. I have no dowry. My name is dirt in the mouths of every gossip in London. You are a duke — you could have any desperate debutante in the city.”

“I do not want a debutante,” Gideon said.

He leaned forward slightly on the cane, and the sheer physical presence of the man became overwhelming.

“I require a duchess. I require a woman to manage my northern estates, to sit at the end of my table, and to ask absolutely nothing of my heart.” His voice did not change. “I do not want affection. I do not want tears. I do not want a love match.”

He gestured at the empty room — at the pale walls, at the rolled carpets, at the place where the piano used to be.

“You have just learned the brutal reality of this world, Miss Croft. Romance is a fiction invented to sell poetry. Survival is the only truth. You are pragmatic. You did not weep in the ballroom. You stood your ground.” He met her eyes. “I need a woman with iron in her spine. You need a shield. It is a mutually beneficial transaction.”

Beatrice’s hands shook as she picked up the paper.

The numbers were staggering. Enough money to wipe away the terror of the last three weeks with one stroke of a pen. Enough to save her mother. Enough to save herself from the gutter.

“A transaction,” she repeated, tasting the bitterness of it. “You’re buying me.”

“I am securing an asset,” he corrected coldly. “Just as you are securing a future. Do not pretend to be insulted. Simon Harkort abandoned you because your monetary value dropped to zero. I am offering to raise it to an unassailable height. As the Duchess of Ashborne, the people who cast you off last night will break their necks bowing to you tomorrow.”

He was entirely right, and she hated him for it — hated the way he stripped the polite illusion off their society and showed her the ugly transactional skeleton underneath.

“And what of an heir?” she asked, forcing herself to be as clinical and brutal as he was. Her cheeks burned, but she held his gaze.

Gideon’s jaw tightened. The scar beside his eye pulled stark white against his skin.

“That is an obligation of the title. It will be fulfilled.” A pause. “But beyond the bedroom door, you will have your life and I will have mine. We will reside primarily at Rook Hall in Yorkshire. I have business there that requires my attention. We leave immediately after the ceremony.”

He reached into his coat and produced a silver pen, holding it out to her.

“I have a meeting at Parliament in an hour,” he said, checking a heavy gold pocket watch. “I need your answer.”

Beatrice looked at the pen.

She looked at the empty spaces where her life used to be.

She thought of Simon’s retreating back. She thought of the fear that had kept her awake twenty-one nights in a row, and her mother upstairs with a cloth over her eyes, apologising for weeping.

She took the pen. The metal was warm from his body heat.

“I loathe Yorkshire,” she said softly.

“You will learn to tolerate it,” he replied.

Beatrice signed her name at the bottom of the parchment. The ink was black and sharp.

With a single stroke, Beatrice Croft ceased to be a ruined spinster and became the Duchess of Ashborne — and something else besides, though she did not yet know what to call it.

Gideon took the paper, reviewed the signature, and nodded once.

“My man of business will be here in ten minutes to settle accounts with the creditors directly. Pack your trunks, Beatrice. We marry on Thursday.”

He turned and walked out.

He did not say goodbye.