The Duke Bet £500 That a Scullery Maid Would Humiliate Herself at Dinner — Then She Entered in a Dead Duchess’s Gown, Faced the Laughing Guests, and Asked Him One Question That Made Him Wish He’d Never Placed the Bet.

PART 6

The morning was brutal. The rain had finally stopped, replaced by a biting, frost-edged wind that stripped the last dead leaves from the oaks. The sky was the color of bruised iron.

Inside Oak Haven, the hangover was collective. The guests emerged late, pale, and irritable, drinking black tea in silence. Croft had indeed been forced into a damp carriage the night before, and his absence hung over the breakfast room like a rebuke no one wanted to name aloud.

Gideon had not slept. He had spent the night in the library with the ashes in the grate, turning over the same question until it wore a groove in him.

At six in the morning, he walked out into the main hallway. The air was freezing. He heard the sound before he saw her.

Below him, in the entrance hall, a figure knelt before the hearth. Norah, back in her shapeless gray wool, a canvas apron tied at her waist, hair shoved hastily under a linen cap. She was scrubbing ash from the stones, hands submerged in a bucket of cold, gray water, exactly as she had been yesterday afternoon.

The illusion was entirely gone. And yet Gideon couldn’t see the maid anymore.

He walked slowly down the stairs. Norah didn’t look up.

“I require the hearth clear by seven, your grace,” she said, hoarse from the cold air. “If you intend to stand there, you are in my way.”

“Why?” Gideon asked, genuinely unable to make sense of it. “Why choose the water and the dirt when you could have walked out of here with £500?”

“Because it wouldn’t have been mine,” Norah said quietly, resting her hands on the rim of the bucket. “If I take a man’s guilt money, I am still surviving on his whims. I am a beggar who got lucky. My father built his shop with his own hands, stitch by stitch. If I build a life, I will build it myself.”

She resumed scrubbing.

Gideon stood there a long time. He realized, with absolute clarity, that he was looking at the strongest person he had ever met — stripped of wealth, family, and dignity, and she had forged the remaining scraps into iron.

She didn’t need saving. But he needed her — the fire she carried, the brutal honesty that cut through a decade of sycophantic rot. One dinner, and his heart had shocked back into rhythm.

“What if it wasn’t a gift?” he asked. “What if it was capital?”

Norah stopped scrubbing.

“I am proposing a business arrangement,” Gideon said, stepping closer, uncaring that dirty water was splashing onto his boots. His voice was stripped of the drawl, stripped of pity. “I have empty storefronts on a property I own in Mayfair. I will front the lease, the fabric, and the wages for three seamstresses. You will run the shop, and you will be my equal in it — not my charity case.”

Norah looked at him, searching his face for the trick. “You know nothing about running a tailor’s shop.”

“No. But you do.” He held her gaze. “Thirty percent of net profits to me, until the initial investment is repaid. After that we renegotiate.”

Norah stood slowly, wiping her hands on her apron. “Thirty percent for capital I could raise myself in half the time, once word of last night reaches London.”

“You have no capital, Miss Hayes.”

“Not yet.” A flicker of something sharp moved behind her eyes — not quite a smile, but its ancestor. “Fifty percent, until the debt is repaid. Split evenly, the way a true partnership is split. Not a third for you and the risk left entirely on my back.”

Gideon considered her for a long moment. Then he laughed — a real laugh, rich and startled out of him. “Fifty percent. Agreed.”

“And I choose the location,” Norah added. “I will not be relegated to a back alley.”

“Agreed.”

He offered his hand. Norah looked at his clean, uncalloused palm, then reached out with her raw, soot-stained fingers and gripped it firmly.

“I will need to pack,” she said, pulling her hand back. “I have a trunk in the attic.”

“Leave it. Except the blue dress — it’s already in my rooms. Roberts is keeping it safe.”

Norah’s brow lifted a fraction. “You kept it.”

“I wasn’t going to let it burn with the check,” Gideon said simply. “Some things are worth more than the settling of a debt.”

She looked at him a moment too long before he turned toward Roberts, who lingered at the edge of the hall. “Roberts, have my personal carriage brought round. Miss Hayes is leaving for London.”

Roberts gaped. “Leaving, your grace? The — the maid?”

“No, Roberts,” Gideon corrected, his voice echoing through the grand hall. “My new business partner.”

As Norah untied her apron and let it fall into the bucket of dirty water, she looked back once at the cold stones of the hearth. She would never scrub them again. She walked past the Duke, spine straight, toward the front doors.

The game was over. The work was about to begin.