The Duke Hid His Royal Crest to Watch How She Handled His Deaf Brother— He Fell for Her Immediately

Chapter 1

The chandeliers threw their light down in a thousand broken flakes, and somewhere past the string quartet the laughter rose in a bright, unkind chime that no one in the Ashmore ballroom thought anything of. Laughter was the currency of a London season, after all. It purchased introductions, approved gowns, excused what could not be excused. Julian Carrick, sixth Duke of Ashmore, stood against the far wall with a glass of claret he had not once lifted to his lips, and watched his brother be laughed at. Again. He had watched it eleven times this season alone, and he had not yet learned to stop counting.

Oliver was nineteen. He had been deaf since the fever of his sixth year — the fever that had taken their father only a week later, as though the house had been asked to choose between them and had miserably decided it could not keep both. Oliver survived it, and Julian, fourteen years old and newly the head of a broken household with a grieving mother and no instructions at all, had made a private covenant with himself that night that he would never, so long as he lived, allow anything to take anything else from his brother.

He had kept that covenant the only way he had known how: by keeping Oliver safe. By keeping him close. By teaching him, when the time came, to pass through the world as though he were ordinary.

Tonight Oliver was dressed in a coat their grandmother had ordered from London, cut by a tailor who believed a lapel could speak for a boy who could not — a piece of faith Julian had paid a great deal of money to secure. Three young women in pale silks had arranged themselves in a half-circle around him, their fans moving in the easy, practiced rhythm of women who had done this a hundred times and would do it a hundred more. The one in lemon — Miss something, a baron’s daughter, Julian had been told and had already forgotten — asked a question Oliver could not hear, and waited, eyebrows lifted, for an answer that would never come.

Oliver produced the small, careful smile he had been taught to produce whenever a stranger’s mouth moved faster than his eyes could follow. It was a good smile. It had taken him years to learn it, and it served him well, because it looked almost like a genuine, self-deprecating shrug — the smile of a young man politely declining to repeat a joke he could not be bothered to tell. It was a beautiful, heartbreaking, entirely convincing lie.

The girl in lemon took it for a smile of assent. She laughed. Her companions laughed with her, a high silver sound that rang across the floor like spoons on glass, and Julian saw the three of them lean in, closer, eager, the way a flock turns toward a splash of something that might be thrown food. They were not cruel. That was the worst of it. They were simply young and bored and unthinking, and Oliver was the evening’s novelty, and cruelty had never once occurred to them as a word they would need.

Julian could not cross the ballroom. He had learned this over five years of trying, and the lesson had cost him his hands on his brother’s arm more times than he cared to count. The instant a duke materialized at his brother’s elbow, every fan in the hall snapped shut and then open again, and every whisper began the same slow, thirsty calculation — the deaf one is worth how much of the Ashmore fortune? And who among us is patient enough to wait for it? — and Oliver, who could not hear the whispers but could read the faces of the whisperers better than any man Julian had ever known, would not eat for two days afterward. The knowledge that he had been pitied in public was a poison that worked on him slowly, but it always worked.

So Julian stood, and watched, and held a glass he could not drink, and rehearsed, for the twelfth time, the arithmetic of what he could and could not do for the boy the fever had left him.

And then he noticed her.

She stood against a pillar half in shadow, near the far doors, in a dove-grey gown of such plain, unadorned simplicity that it amounted to a kind of armor — a woman dressed purposely not to be seen, in a room built entirely on being seen. She was not laughing. She was watching Oliver the way Julian was watching Oliver, with the particular stillness of a person who had witnessed this exact scene before and knew precisely what it cost, down to the last coin of dignity and the last broken hour of sleep.

He could not see her face. She stood at an angle to the light, and the shadow crossed her features at the brow. But he saw her hands. They were gloved, folded against her waist, and they were moving against each other in a small, unconscious gesture — a whisper of motion, a ghost of speech. He had never seen the gesture before, and it disturbed him in a way he could not name, because it looked, for just a moment, like a person rehearsing words she had no one left to say them to.

By the time he had blinked and looked again, she was gone. The pillar stood empty; the patch of shadow where she had stood had closed up like water behind a hull. He scanned the room, found nothing, and was surprised to discover that the absence of her felt like a small, unfinished sentence.

He found Lord Heysham by the wine table and asked, with careful indifference that he did not feel, who the lady in grey had been.

Heysham, who was being talked at by a wine merchant, waved a thick hand and said she was some Northumberland lady, one of the Pettigrews’ quiet creatures, brought up to London on sufferance and probably brought down again as soon as the season allowed. He turned back to his merchant without waiting for thanks.

The next morning, in the carriage that bore him and Oliver home through a cold drizzle, Julian drew the signet ring from his finger — heavy gold, a black stone cut with the hawk of Ashmore, the ring that had sat on his hand since his father’s funeral and on his father’s before that — and slid it into the inner pocket of his coat. He looked at it there, glinting vaguely in the light, and he did not put it back on.

He did not know yet why. Only that the sight of it had begun, in the space of a single night, to feel like a lie he was tired of wearing.