She Ruined Herself by Kissing a Stranger to Save Him From a Society Trap — Never Knowing He Was England’s Richest Duke, Until He Appeared at Her Door the Next Morning and Said He Intended to Marry Her.

PART 2

The man stopped. He turned to face her under the flickering light of a gas lamp. He didn’t look grateful. He looked intensely curious.

“Am I?” he asked quietly.

“They were going to ruin you. The compromise trap. You had your hands on her bare skin. Lady Rutledge was drawing breath to scream. By morning, you would have been buying a ring or picking out a second for a duel.” Lydia wrapped her arms around herself, shivering as the damp fog settled over her thin silk gown. “You looked like you didn’t know what you were doing. So I stopped it.”

He stared at her. He looked at her bruised, swollen lips, then up to her wide, defiant eyes.

“You stopped it,” he repeated, tasting the words, “by ruining yourself.”

“My reputation,” Lydia said with a bitter scoff, “is worth considerably less than a lifetime shackled to Agatha Rutledge. Consider it a charitable donation. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to walk home before the entirety of the ton decides to stone me in the street.”

She turned on her heel and began to march down the pavement into the fog. She expected him to call out. She expected a thank you, perhaps an offer of his carriage. She got nothing.

When she finally risked a glance over her shoulder a block later, the gas lamp was empty. He was gone.

Lydia walked the two miles back to her rented terrace house in Bloomsbury, the cold seeping into her bones, the reality of what she had done settling like lead in her stomach. She had saved a stranger. And tomorrow, she would have nothing left.

Morning broke over London with a dull gray apathy. Lydia sat at the small, scarred dining table of her Bloomsbury home. The tea in her cup had grown a skin, completely cold. The half-eaten piece of toast on her plate looked like a brick.

Her older sister, Margaret, paced the length of the narrow parlor. Margaret was a widow, pragmatic to a fault, and currently vibrating with a suppressed, terrifying rage.

“A kiss,” Margaret said for the fourth time. She stopped, pressing her fingers to her temples. “In the middle of the Danbury ballroom. In front of Lady Jersey. In front of the patronesses. Lydia, tell me I am having a nightmare. Tell me it was a trick of the light.”

“It wasn’t,” Lydia said softly. Her lips still felt bruised. Her nose still ached.

“Why?” Margaret’s voice cracked, losing its anger and dipping into despair. “We are barely holding on, Lyd. The pension barely covers the rent and coal. Your reputation was the only clean thing we had left. It kept us invited to the fringes. It kept us respectable. And you threw it away. For who? Who was the man?”

“I don’t know,” Lydia admitted, staring at the cold tea. “A stranger. He was about to be trapped by the Rutledges. I couldn’t just watch it happen. Not after what they did to Thomas.”

Margaret froze. The mention of their late brother drained the remaining color from her face. She sank into a chair opposite Lydia, burying her face in her hands.

“Thomas is dead, Lydia. Saving a stranger won’t bring him back. It only destroys you.”

Silence fell over the room, thick and suffocating. The mantel clock ticked like a judge’s gavel. Then the street outside changed.

The usual clatter of milk carts and the distant shout of street sweepers was drowned out by a heavy, thunderous rhythm — the synchronized, ground-shaking thud of massive hooves, accompanied by the sharp crack of a whip and the deep rumble of iron-banded wheels on cobblestones. It stopped directly outside their window.

Margaret dropped her hands. She walked to the window and pulled the lace curtain back an inch. Lydia watched her sister’s back go rigid.

Margaret let the curtain fall. She turned around. She looked terrified.

“Lydia,” Margaret whispered. “There is a carriage outside. It has four matching Hanoverian bays. It is black lacquer. The crest on the door — ” She swallowed hard. “It’s a ducal crest. Crowned with strawberries.”

Before Lydia could process the words, a heavy, authoritative knock echoed through the small house. It didn’t sound like a polite inquiry. It sounded like an eviction.