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 5

“Your father’s claim is yours by right, Beatrice,” he said. “Now we are going to use it to destroy the family that destroyed yours. We are going to bleed the Harkorts until they beg in the streets.”

She should have screamed at him. She should have thrown the candle, the ledger, the glass.

Instead she stood there in her nightdress with her father’s handwriting under her palm, and something cold and hungry uncoiled in her chest.

Gideon reached out. His large rough hand closed around her chin, tilting her face up to meet his gaze.

“You asked why I chose you,” he murmured. “I chose you because I knew that the moment you learned the truth, you would not weep.”

His thumb rested against her jaw.

“You would want blood.” A pause. “Tell me I am wrong.”

Beatrice stared up into the eyes of the devil of Ashborne. Her heart hammered against her ribs — not with fear. With a sudden, terrifying rush of adrenaline.

She thought of Simon’s mouth curving over Lord Hastings’s joke. She thought of Lady Kalpa turning deliberately toward the opposite wall. She thought of her mother upstairs in a cold house with a cloth over her eyes.

“You aren’t wrong,” she whispered.

Gideon’s thumb brushed along her jawline. A fleeting, dangerous touch.

“Good,” he said. “Then let us begin.”

The heavy oak door between their bedchambers remained locked. But the invisible wall between them had shattered, and neither of them acknowledged it.

The next morning Beatrice did not wait for a servant to bring breakfast on a tray. She dressed quickly in a dark wool gown, pinned her hair back with ruthless efficiency, and marched downstairs.

She found Gideon exactly where she had left him — at the mahogany desk, surrounded by stacks of financial reports and legal precedent. He looked up as she entered. The hard morning light off the moors threw the scar on his face into sharp relief.

He did not ask how she had slept. He simply slid a stack of banking records across the polished wood toward the empty chair opposite him.

“Harkort funnelled the extorted funds through three shell companies,” he said, his voice a low rasp. “A shipping firm in Bristol. A textile mill in Manchester. A landholding company in Cornwall.” He set his pen down. “He was thorough.”

Beatrice pulled the chair out and sat. She picked up the top sheet. The numbers swam for a moment and then snapped into sharp, damning focus.

“He was arrogant,” she corrected, tracing a column of figures with her fingertip. “He assumed my father would never tell anyone, let alone keep a second set of books. He used the same holding company to absorb the Croft estate’s liquid assets that he used to purchase his new town carriage.”

Gideon paused. His pen hovered over the parchment. Those pale eyes flicked to her face, assessing — the way a man looks at a tool he has just discovered is sharper than advertised.

“You understand double-entry bookkeeping.”

“I spent three years trying to keep my father’s sinking ship afloat, Your Grace. I know how to read a ledger.” She met his gaze squarely and did not look away. “And I know my father’s accounts better than your solicitors do. Give me the Bristol manifests.”

For a long, silent moment the Duke of Ashborne simply looked at her. It was a look that had sent seasoned politicians sweating out of rooms.

Beatrice did not flinch. She held out her hand.

A corner of Gideon’s mouth hitched upward. The ghost of a smile.

He handed her the manifests.

For the next ten days, the library at Rook Hall became a war room.

They worked side by side, locked into a rhythm of cold logic and mathematics. They ate their meals at the desk, ignoring the vast empty dining room entirely. The silence between them was no longer the heavy suffocating quiet of strangers forced together.

It was the humming, charged silence of two predators stalking the same prey.

Beatrice learned things about him. That Gideon was relentless — that he required very little sleep, operating on black coffee and a grim burning energy that seemed to come from somewhere below his ribs.

And she learned the subtle mechanics of his pain.

When the damp coastal winds battered the stone walls, his limp grew worse. He never complained. He simply leaned harder on the silver-tipped cane and set his jaw until the bone went white.

On the eighth day he dropped a heavy file onto the desk and leaned his weight onto his good leg. A sudden spasm took him: his hand clenched on the edge of the mahogany, knuckles bleaching.

Beatrice stood up.

She did not ask whether he was all right. That would have been an insult to his pride.

Instead she walked to the sideboard, poured two fingers of brandy into a heavy crystal glass, and set it near his right hand.

“The Cornwall accounts are finalised,” she said evenly, eyes fixed on a sheet of paper she was not reading. “He funnelled sixty thousand pounds through those companies over five years. It is enough to break the Harkort Bank entirely if we demand it back at once, and enough to hand the Crown’s solicitors a case that would take his title with it.”

Gideon stared at the glass of brandy.

Then, slowly, he picked it up. His rough fingers brushed against hers for a fraction of a second. The contact was brief and it sent a sharp electric jolt up her arm.

“We leave for London tomorrow,” he said, and drank. The liquor warmed the gravel in his voice. “The Season is at its peak. Lord Harkort is hosting a ball on Friday. It is time the ton remembered that the Duke of Ashborne does not merely exist in the north.”

He set the glass down.

“And it is time they met his Duchess.”

Beatrice looked out of the window. The grey sea was thrashing violently against the cliffs below.

“They expect me to hide behind you,” she said.

“Let them expect it.” Gideon stepped closer, towering over her. He smelled of ink and brandy and cold rain. “You are not a shield, Beatrice.”

She turned to face him.

“You are the sword. I will simply provide the leverage to swing it.”