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 7

Summer arrived and baked the dampness out of Alderly’s ancient stones, and as the estate thawed, so did the Duchess.

She stopped taking her meals in her suite. One Tuesday morning she appeared in the dining room, took the seat at the far end of the long mahogany table, smoothed her napkin across her lap, and quietly asked the footman for coffee. Gifford looked up from his correspondence, nodded once, and went back to his letters with his chest tight and his face carefully blank. He read the same line eleven times.

By July she was running the household.

She did not shout. She did not command with the arrogant bluster of the peerage. She managed the staff with a quiet, efficient grace, and she went through the domestic ledgers with a merciless eye, finding inefficiencies Mr. Pryce had missed for a decade. She stopped flinching when a door closed too loudly. She stopped hovering near the walls. She walked down the center of the corridors with her chin raised and the heavy keys of the estate jingling at her waist, a sound Gifford came to listen for the way other men listened for church bells.

She was building a life. He watched her do it from the periphery, captivated and terrified in equal measure. He kept the distance he had carved out on their wedding day. He was afraid that if he crossed it, he would become one more man making demands of her.

The second week of August broke the heat like a struck bell.

Gifford was at the far edge of the property inspecting a repaired irrigation ditch when a stable boy came pounding up the lane on a lathered pony. The boy was shouting before he was in earshot. A carriage had broken through the southern boundary gate. It had torn past the lodge. It was racing up the main drive.

Gifford did not wait for the boy to finish. He was already in the saddle. He knew with the cold certainty of a man who reads ledgers exactly whose carriage it was.

He reached the gravel forecourt as the doors of Alderly Hall crashed open. Baron Hemsley stood on the threshold, and he looked terrible. His coat was rumpled, his cravat stained and undone, and the florid red of his face had deepened into a mottled, unhealthy purple. Debt and desperation had stripped away the thin veneer of nobility, leaving only the brute beneath. The smell of stale gin rolled off him in waves.

“Alderly, you thieving bastard!” he roared as Gifford swung down from the horse. “Where is my daughter?”

“You are trespassing.”

Gifford climbed the steps slowly. He carried no weapon. He did not need one.

“I want my money.” Hemsley took a heavy step forward, fists clenching. “Or I take the girl. She is my blood. You voided the contract when you locked those funds away. She comes back to Kent with me today.”

“She goes nowhere.”

The voice did not belong to Gifford.

He froze. His eyes flew to the doorway.

Brunwin stepped out of the vestibule’s shadows. She wore a day dress of pale blue muslin. Her hair was pinned up neatly, exposing the long, elegant line of her neck. There was no veil. There were no shadows left to hide in. She stood at the top of the stone steps and looked down at the man who had terrorized her for twenty years.

For a fraction of a second Hemsley was genuinely confused. His mouth hung open. He could not reconcile the poised woman on the steps with the trembling, bruised creature he had kept in the dark.

Then the rage reasserted itself.

“Get your things.”

His voice dropped into the low, rumbling register that used to send her scrambling beneath furniture.

“You ungrateful little wretch. You are coming with me.”

He lunged for the steps.

Gifford moved to intercept. But Brunwin did not flinch. She did not retreat into the house. She stood perfectly still, one hand resting on the stone balustrade, and her voice cut through the heavy summer air with the precision of a scalpel.

“If you take another step, my husband will kill you.”

Hemsley stopped on the bottom stair, breathing hard. He looked from his daughter to the Duke, three feet away now, dark eyes fixed unblinkingly on the baron’s throat.

“He is bluffing.” A bead of sweat rolled down the thick neck. “He wouldn’t risk the scandal.”

“He is not bluffing, father.”

Her voice was utterly devoid of fear.

“He does not care about society. Neither do I. If you touch me, he will beat you to death on this gravel, and I will personally instruct the staff to wash your blood into the drains. Then I will write to the magistrate in London and tell him precisely how my mother died.”

Hemsley recoiled as if struck.

The color drained from his mottled face. He looked at his daughter, truly looked at her for the first time in his life, and saw that the terrified girl was dead. Alderly had forged a duchess in her place.

“You have nothing,” Brunwin said, and the stone facade gave her voice back to them. “You have no money. You have no daughter. You have no power here. Turn around. Get into your carriage and do not return. If I ever see your face again, I will ruin you.”

Silence descended on the courtyard, absolute and ringing.

Hemsley looked at the stone walls. He looked at the servants gathered in the doorway with hard, unwelcoming faces. Finally he looked at Gifford, who offered him a slow, predatory smile.

The baron’s shoulders sagged. The fight went out of him and left a hollow, broken man. He turned without a word, dragged himself into the hired carriage, and slammed the door.

Wheels crunched over gravel. The carriage dwindled down the oak-lined drive until it was only dust, and then nothing.

The heavy doors clicked shut behind them, sealing them into the cool foyer. And the adrenaline left Brunwin in a sudden, violent rush. Her knees buckled.

She did not fall. Gifford was there before gravity could take her. He caught her by the waist and pulled her flush against his chest, and she gripped the lapels of his coat and buried her face in the hollow of his shoulder, trembling with a fine, high tremor that ran through them both.

“He’s gone.” His hand came up and cupped the back of her head, his fingers tangling in her pins. “He’s gone, Brunwin. It’s over.”

They stood like that for a long time.

Gifford squeezed his eyes shut and fought the desperate, selfish urge to tighten his arms and never let her go. She had faced her monster and she had won. She did not need his protection anymore.

The realization tasted like ash.

Slowly she pushed back. He let his hands drop at once and stepped away, re-establishing the boundary, giving her the space he had promised on their wedding day. She looked at him in the dim foyer, at the rigid jaw and the white-knuckled fists at his sides, and saw a man trying with everything he had to hold a cage door open.

“Come to the library,” she said quietly.

She did not wait for an answer.