The Duke Thought He Was Marrying an Ugly Girl to Save His Crumbling Estate—Until the Veil Lifted, Revealing a Beautiful Bride Trembling Beneath a Hand-Shaped Bruise, Certain Her New Husband Would Hurt Her Just as Her Father Had

 PART 6

March brought a vicious, biting thaw, and with it the first letter.

Gifford was going over the quarterly agricultural yields when Mr. Pryce placed a thick vellum envelope on the desk. It bore the crest of a prominent London legal firm. He read the formal script twice. His expression did not change, but the room seemed to lose ten degrees.

“Bad news, your grace?”

“Lord Hemsley has realized his purse strings have been cut.” Gifford tossed the letter onto the mahogany. “He is threatening legal action to recover the money and have the trust declared invalid. He also claims he will petition the courts to have my wife declared mentally unfit.”

Mr. Pryce’s face went gray. “Can he do that, your grace?”

“A baron with a title and a physician who can be bought? He can try.”

The threat was legal. The danger was not.

Hemsley was hemorrhaging money at the card tables of St. James, burning through what little he had left, and a man pushed that hard was not a man who settled disputes in chambers. Desperate men broke things. The last time one of his rages had been aimed at his daughter, she had worn the evidence on her jaw.

“Shall I reply, sir?”

“Not yet.” Gifford folded the letter and put it in his breast pocket, against his heart. “Not until I have decided how to say it.”

He found her in the conservatory that evening.

It was a glass-domed room on the south side of the house, long given over to dead ferns and dying lemon trees. In the past month she had taken it upon herself to resurrect it. She wore an oversized gardening apron over her dress, her hands dark with soil, and she was repotting a struggling rose bush by the last of the light. The wild terror was gone from her eyes now. When he came in, she looked up without flinching.

“You are working late.”

“I received a letter from London today. From your father’s solicitors.”

The trowel slipped from her fingers and rang against the terra-cotta.

All the color left her face. The sanctuary they had built, brick by careful brick, seemed to shatter in a single second.

“He wants the money back,” she said. It was not a question.

“He wants access to it. He claims I broke our arrangement.”

She stepped back from the potting table, wiping her hands frantically on the apron as if trying to scrub off a stain.

“He will come here. If you deny him, he will not use lawyers. He will come himself. He will drag me out by my hair to prove I am unfit, to prove you are a fraud.” The panic was rising in her throat, strangling the words. “He will tell them I am mad. He will have me committed. He threatened it before.”

Gifford’s jaw tightened. He had told her nothing of that. She had simply known, after twenty years, exactly where her father would put the knife.

“Brunwin —”

“An asylum in Yorkshire.” She was speaking faster now, breath catching. “He said if I ever told anyone about the bruises, he would lock me where they chain people to the walls.”

Gifford crossed the room in three long strides.

For the first time since the wedding, he did not telegraph his movements. He did not respect his own careful rules. He caught her by the shoulders, grip firm and anchoring, and stopped her pacing cold. She gasped and flinched, but he did not let go.

“Look at me.”

Sharp. Absolute.

She forced her eyes up to his. She was trembling so hard he could feel it in his own arms.

“He is not coming here. And if he did, he would not get past the iron gates. You are not a frightened girl in Kent anymore. You are Brunwin Simpson. You are the Duchess of Alderly.” His grip tightened, just slightly. “Do you understand what that means?”

She shook her head blindly. Tears spilled over her lashes.

“It means you belong to the peerage now. It means you have the protection of an ancient title and a man who does not give a damn about polite society.” His voice was fierce and low. “Your father is a baron with a gambling addiction and a violent temper. I am a duke with an army of loyal tenants and seventy thousand pounds of his money in a vault he cannot touch. He has no power here. None.”

She searched his face desperately for a crack, a lie, a flicker of weakness. She found nothing but unyielding, terrifying resolve.

And for the first time in her life she understood that ruthlessness could be turned in her favor.

“He is a monster,” she whispered.

“Then let him meet another.”

He released her slowly and stepped back half a pace. She drew in a deep, shuddering breath. The evening light was going amber on the glass above them, and the rose bush, half potted, leaned in its cracked terra-cotta like a sleepwalker.

“I will write to my solicitors in the morning,” he said. “If Lord Hemsley continues to harass this estate, I will personally fund an inquiry into the sudden death of his first wife. I imagine that will silence him.”

Her eyes widened.

“My mother died of a fever.”

“Perhaps.” His expression was perfectly blank. “But ten thousand pounds spent on investigators, witnesses and legal counsel might uncover a very different account of her death. As I said, Brunwin, I am not a gentleman when it comes to my property.”

He used the word deliberately. Property. The cold, transactional term that had defined their bargain since the wedding day, meant to remind them both of the lines he had drawn.

But as he watched her standing among the roses, her hands black with earth and her dark eyes lifted toward him with something dangerously close to awe, he knew it for the lie it was.

She was not a line in a ledger. She was the only thing in his crumbling world that mattered.

Later that night he wrote to his solicitors in a hand so cold that the clerks in London would wonder about it for a week. And when he had sealed the letter, he sat for a long time in the dark with his hand pressed flat against the breast pocket where the baron’s threat still lay.

God help anyone who tried to take her away.