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 8

She set the shears down, wiped her hands on a scrap of muslin, and opened the ledger. The columns were tallied in Gideon’s sharp handwriting. At the bottom of the final page, the balance was written in red ink.

Zero.

The shop went quiet. Outside, carriage wheels rattled over the Bond Street cobblestones, a rhythm from another world entirely.

Norah ran a calloused finger over the red ink. Two years ago, Gideon had fronted the capital for the lease, materials, and wages. She had given him fifty percent of net profits every month since. Fourteen-hour days. Ruined eyesight by candlelight. Every seam bled into with something that had nothing to do with thread.

She had done it.

“The debt is paid,” Gideon said quietly. He didn’t sound triumphant. He sounded hollow.

A crushing weight lifted off Norah’s chest, immediately replaced by a sudden, terrifying vacuum. For two years, the debt had been the tether between them — a business arrangement. Safe. Defined.

“The shop is entirely yours,” Gideon continued, stepping closer, his tall frame casting a long shadow over the scattered patterns. “Lease in your name. Accounts transferred. From tomorrow you keep every penny. I have no legal claim to any of it.”

Norah closed the ledger. The thud echoed.

“You held your end of the bargain,” she said, keeping her voice professional. She refused to look at him. If she looked at him, she would see the way his eyes tracked her every movement — the man who had pulled her from the ashes not as a charity case, but as an equal.

She moved to the wooden lock box on the shelf, unlocked it with the key on the chain around her neck, and withdrew a thick envelope. She slid it across the table.

“The final fifty percent. This month’s profits.”

Gideon looked at it, didn’t touch it. “What happens now, Norah?”

“Now I hire an accountant. I hire a clerk. I continue to dress the women who drove my father into the grave, and I drain their bank accounts doing it. I survive.”

“You’re already surviving,” he said, voice dropping low. “You won, Norah. The game is over. So what happens now?”

“You go back to your life,” she said sharply, defensive walls slamming into place. “You go back to Oak Haven, drink your port, find another wager to keep yourself entertained. I am no longer your project.”

Gideon flinched as if struck. “Do you really think that’s what this was? A project?”

“What else could it be?” she fired back. “You are the Duke of Westford. I am a tailor’s daughter who used to clean your fireplaces. Do not romanticize this, Gideon. We made a transaction. It is complete.”

“Damn the transaction.” He slammed a hand flat against the table. The chalk jumped.

Norah froze.

Gideon breathed heavily, his usual cultivated calm entirely shattered. “I haven’t thought about a wager in two years. I haven’t sat in that drawing room. Every room I walk into that doesn’t have you in it feels like a tomb.”

Her breath hitched. She gripped her measuring tape, wrapping the yellow ribbon around her knuckles like an anchor.

“You think I stayed for the profit?” A bitter, self-deprecating laugh escaped him. “I stayed because this back room, smelling of hot iron and chalk dust, is the only place in the world I feel alive. I watched you build an empire out of spite and silk, and it was the most magnificent thing I have ever seen.” He looked at the ledger, then at her. “I didn’t want the debt paid. Because the moment you didn’t need my capital, I knew you wouldn’t need me. And you are perfectly, ruthlessly capable of walking away and never looking back.”

Norah stared at him, heart hammering. She thought of the morning after the dinner — Roberts gaping, Gideon’s voice ringing through the hall: my new business partner. That was the morning it had started, though she hadn’t let herself name it until just now. Not the night by the ash bucket, when he was still a stranger buying her humiliation for sport. The morning after, when he had looked at a scullery maid and offered her fifty percent instead of a coin.

“You’re right,” Norah said quietly, the anger draining out of her, leaving only the truth. “I don’t need your capital anymore.”

Gideon’s jaw tightened. He nodded once, sharp and defeated, and reached for the envelope.

“Leave it,” Norah commanded.

He froze, fingers brushing the paper.

She unwrapped the tape from her knuckles and stepped around the table into his space. The proximity was electric.

“I don’t need your capital,” she repeated, looking up into his dark eyes. “Which means anything that happens between us now is not a transaction. It is a choice.”

“A choice,” he repeated, the word foreign on his tongue.

“Yes.”

She raised the measuring tape.

“Take off your coat,” she said softly.