She Ran From Her Unfaithful Fiancé Into a Dark Room—Unaware England’s Most Feared Duke Was Inside, Waiting in the Shadows.

Chapter 2

The door swung wide, and the light spilled in like water breaking over a dam.

A cluster of guests stood in the corridor, candles lifted high, faces turned toward the firelit room with expressions that shifted — in the space of a heartbeat — from concern to shock to a horrible, delicious hunger. Lady Bracewell was at the front. Pride saw the exact instant the woman’s gaze traveled from her, to the Duke, and back again. Saw the calculation bloom behind those sharp little eyes like ink spreading on wet paper.

The silence that followed had an almost physical weight.

Pride’s heart went very cold. She understood, in one sickening slide, the mathematics of the scene they made: an unchaperoned woman, a bachelor duke, a dark room, a dead fire. Every whisper that had ever ruined a girl in England had been born of less.