The Duke’s Borrowed Lie: He Whispered, “Kiss Me, and Let Him Believe We Share a Secret”—She Never Expected One Desperate Kiss to Save Her Family and Change Their Lives Forever

PART 5

News of their secret excursion could not remain contained for long in a household as observant as the Vern estate during a crowded house party. Servants talked, and a duke riding out with two men and returning after dark, mud-splashed and grim, in the company of an unmarried guest, was not the kind of thing that stayed unremarked past breakfast. By morning, whispers had already begun to circulate. The Dowager Duchess summoned her son to her sitting room before breakfast, her expression sharp with the particular displeasure of a mother who suspected she was being kept in the dark.

“You will explain to me, Allaric, precisely what occurred last night.”

Allaric hesitated only a moment before deciding the time for secrecy, at least with his own mother, had passed. He told her everything — the forged documents, Vain’s scheme, Nathaniel Price’s confession. Constance listened in growing horror, her composed expression cracking for the first time since Isolda had met her.

“Vain,” she breathed, sinking into her chair. “I always found him disagreeable, but I never imagined him capable of something so calculated. Our family’s entire legacy, nearly destroyed by forged papers.”

Her sharp gaze shifted to Isolda, waiting at the door. “And Lady Isolda’s role in all of this?”

“She found the clerk when my own man could not,” Allaric said, a quiet pride in his voice that made Isolda’s chest tighten with warmth. “Without her, we would still be searching blindly.”

The Duchess studied Isolda for a long, measuring moment. Something in her expression softened.

“It seems I owe you a debt of gratitude, Lady Isolda, and perhaps an apology for my earlier suspicion. Very well. Whatever assistance I can offer in the days ahead, you have it, both of you.”

That evening, the estate hosted a grand ball to mark the midpoint of the season, and despite the danger simmering beneath the surface, the celebration proceeded as planned. Isolda found Allaric near the refreshment table, his expression tense despite his polished composure.

“Vain has not yet appeared,” he murmured. “Josiah reports he spent the afternoon in private conversation with his solicitor. I do not like what that might mean.”

“Perhaps he intends to strike first,” Isolda suggested. “Before we can present our proof formally.”

As if summoned by their words, Lord Edric Vain appeared at the top of the grand staircase, drawing the attention of the entire ballroom.

“Your grace,” Vain called out, his voice carrying clearly across the sudden hush. “I wonder if I might have a word before certain rumors circulating this evening grow entirely out of hand.”

“Lord Vain,” Allaric said evenly, stepping forward to meet him. “I was not aware there were rumors requiring correction.”

“Were you not? I have heard whispers that you have been making rather serious accusations against my character — based on the word of a dismissed clerk with a well-known history of dishonesty and debt.”

Murmurs rippled through the crowd. Isolda felt her heart pound with fury at his audacity.

“The clerk’s testimony,” Allaric said, his voice carrying steady authority, “is corroborated by documents and witnesses that leave little room for doubt. I would advise you to consider carefully before continuing this conversation in front of so many guests.”

Vain’s smile faltered, though he pressed on. “Accusations are easily made, your grace, but far harder to prove. I wonder if your judgment has been clouded of late by more personal matters.” His gaze flicked deliberately toward Isolda, and she felt the weight of dozens of curious stares shift toward her.

He was trying, she realized, to twist the truth into something petty — to paint Allaric’s pursuit of justice as a jealous man’s vendetta, fueled by a woman’s influence rather than genuine evidence.

Isolda stepped forward before she could stop herself, her voice ringing clear across the hushed ballroom.

“Lord Vain threatened me himself in a darkened corridor only days ago. He believed he could silence me with fear, just as he silenced Nathaniel Price before forcing him to forge the Duke’s documents. I will not allow him to twist that truth into something shameful simply because it has become inconvenient for him.”

Gasps rippled through the guests. Vain’s composure cracked entirely, fury flashing behind his eyes before he could smooth it away.

“You dare accuse me publicly, with nothing but the word of a frightened woman and a disgraced clerk?”

“I dare,” she said, her voice steady despite the trembling in her hands, “because it is the truth, and I am no longer willing to let fear keep me silent.”

The Dowager Duchess appeared then, moving through the parting crowd with regal authority.

“Lord Vain. I suggest you consider your next words with great care. This family has proof of your treachery, proof that will be presented formally at the appropriate time. Do not compound your crimes tonight with a scene unbecoming of your station.”

For a long, tense moment, Vain stood frozen, calculating his options. Finally something in his expression shifted — retreat replacing aggression, though the cold fury in his eyes remained unhidden.

“This is far from finished,” he said quietly, the words meant only for Allaric and Isolda, though venom carried them further than he perhaps intended. “You have made a grave mistake tonight, both of you.”

He turned and strode from the ballroom without another word, leaving behind a stunned silence that slowly dissolved into a rising tide of whispered speculation.

Allaric turned to Isolda, his expression a complicated mixture of concern and fierce admiration. “That was either remarkably brave or remarkably reckless.”

“Perhaps it was both,” she admitted, her heart still racing. “But I could not stand silently and let him twist the truth in front of everyone.”

“No,” he agreed softly, taking her hand and pressing a kiss to her knuckles, uncaring now who might see. “And that is precisely one of the many reasons I have come to admire you so deeply.”

He did not release her hand afterward. Instead, with the ballroom still humming behind them, he drew her toward a quieter alcove near the long gallery windows, where the noise of the party thinned to a murmur.

“May I tell you something I have not told anyone at this party?” he asked, and there was none of his usual composure in it.

“You may.”

“My father did not simply grow old and tired, the way the physicians like to say. He grew ashamed. In the last year of his life he half-suspected something was wrong with the accounts and could not prove it, and it ate at him until he stopped trusting his own memory of what he had and had not signed. I watched a man who had managed this estate faultlessly for thirty years begin to doubt his own hand on a page. He died believing he might have ruined us through simple carelessness.” Allaric’s jaw tightened. “I am not only trying to save the land, Isolda. I am trying to prove my father was not a fool in his final year. That is not a reasonable thing to want. It is not going to change what he believed when he died. And yet I want it anyway.”

Isolda’s chest ached with a tenderness that had nothing to do with the danger between them. “That is not unreasonable at all. It is the most human thing I have heard you say.”

“And you?” he asked, turning the conversation before it could settle too heavily on him. “You have spent every waking hour since that corridor helping me chase my ghosts. What is it you want, when none of this is asking anything of you?”

The question caught her off guard. “I want—” She stopped, then made herself finish it honestly. “I have kept my father’s accounts since I was fifteen, because someone had to and there was no one else. I am rather good at it, though no one has ever thought to ask. I should like, one day, to put that to some use that is mine — a school, perhaps, for girls who will otherwise be taught nothing more useful than watercolors and French. I have never said that aloud to anyone. It sounds absurd next to forged documents and a duke’s ruin.”

“It does not sound absurd,” Allaric said, quiet and certain. “It sounds like exactly the kind of thing you would do.”

It was, she would think later, the moment the pretense finally and fully gave way — not the kiss, not the dancing, but this: two people admitting what they wanted when nothing forced them to.

It did not mean they agreed on everything. Two days later, when Allaric announced he intended to ride to London alone to consult a second solicitor without telling her beforehand, Isolda found him in the stables and did not trouble herself to soften her displeasure.

“You were simply going to leave. Without a word.”

“I did not wish to worry you over a journey that may amount to nothing.”

“You did not wish me to argue that I should come. Which I would have. Allaric, you cannot decide, each time danger draws close, that protecting me means deciding things without me. That is not partnership. That is only kindness wearing partnership’s clothes.”

He was quiet long enough that she thought she had wounded him. Then: “You are right. I have spent so many years being the only one responsible for anything that I do not yet know how to share the deciding, only the doing. I am learning. Badly, it seems.”

“Then learn faster,” she said, though some of the heat had already gone out of her voice.

“I will send word before I go anywhere from now on,” he said. “Even when it frightens me to. Is that fair?”

“It is a beginning,” Isolda said, and let him take her hand.

Later that night, once the last candles had been extinguished, Ren found Isolda still awake by her window, staring at the dark garden below.

“You are frightened for him,” Ren observed quietly. “More frightened than you have admitted, even to me.”

“I am frightened for us both,” Isolda admitted. “Vain has proven himself willing to threaten, to forge, and tonight very nearly to twist the truth into something monstrous. A man who has lost everything has little left to restrain him.”

“Then trust that Allaric knows this as well,” Ren said, taking her friend’s hand. “You have both come too far, survived too much already, to lose everything now, when justice stands so close.”