They Tore Her Gown at the Bride Selection and Three Hundred Guests Laughed — But the Feared Duke Had Heard the Tear, Seen the Cruel Hand Behind It, and Refused to Let Her Shame Become Their Triumph

PART 2

“They will say I sought your notice by design,” she went on, her gaze fixed on some middle distance in the dim gallery, as though holding herself together by main force of will, and could not spare the effort to meet his eyes as well. “They will say I tore it myself.”

“They will say what small and frightened people always say,” Oscar answered, “when they have been caught in their own cruelty, and must invent a way to survive it.”

He paused. Something in him, something he had kept locked very tightly for a very long time, made him add — more quietly than he had meant to —

“It was not by design, Miss Beauchamp. I watched it happen. I know precisely whose hand did it. And I do not forget such things.”

She looked up at him then, and in the low gallery light he saw for the first time the whole of her face unguarded. Not the composed mask she had held before three hundred strangers, but something raw, more startled — as though she had not expected any man in that grand house, least of all its Duke, to have seen her at all before tonight. Let alone seen her clearly enough to know the difference between an accident and an act of malice.

“Why,” she asked, “would you trouble yourself to remember, Your Grace? I am no one of consequence here. I was told, quite plainly, by more than one lady in that hall, that I was included on your grandmother’s list only out of some old debt she felt owed to my father’s memory. And nothing more.”

Oscar considered her for a long moment before he answered, weighing how much of the truth he was prepared to give a woman he had known for less than half an hour — however forcefully she had already lodged herself somewhere behind his ribs.

“Your father,” he said at last, “was not owed a debt by my grandmother.”

He watched the confusion bloom in her face and did not yet explain it further. That was a story for another night, when there was less at stake in the telling, and more trust built between them to bear its weight.

“He was owed one by me.”

Somewhere behind the closed doors, the orchestra struck up again, bright and indifferent, as though nothing at all had happened. As though a young woman’s dignity had not just been torn from her in front of the whole watching world, and handed back to her — however imperfectly — by a duke the entire kingdom called unfeeling.

“I must go and change,” Morwin said softly, drawing his coat a little closer about her shoulders — an unconscious gesture that struck him harder than he cared to admit. “Before your grandmother.”

“Take whatever time you require,” he said. “No one will trouble you again tonight. I will see to that personally.”

She dropped a small, careful curtsy, mindful of the coat’s weight and the torn seam it concealed, and turned to go. It was only as she reached the far end of the gallery — a small gray and black figure retreating into the shadow beyond the candlelight — that Oscar allowed himself, for one unguarded instant, to feel the full force of what had moved through him in that ballroom.

Not simple pity. Not simple duty to an old debt. Something far more dangerous. Something that had cracked, however slightly, a door in him he had kept bolted since the war had taught him precisely what it cost to care for anyone too openly.

He stood alone in the gallery a long while after she had gone, listening to the music, thinking of a torn seam catching candlelight, and a chin lifted against three hundred laughing strangers, and understood — with the same cold clarity that had once told him a battle was already lost, or won, before the first shot was fired — that whatever his grandmother’s list of rules demanded, whatever Lady Cresida Ashworth and her scheming mother had set in motion tonight, he had already begun, in some quiet and irreversible chamber of himself, to choose.

He turned back toward the ballroom, straightened his shoulders beneath a coat he no longer wore, and went to find his grandmother.

There was a great deal to be arranged before the sun rose over Gcoat Hall. And he intended that Lady Cresida Ashworth should sleep very little that night, wondering exactly how much the Duke had seen — and exactly what a man they called the Iron Duke was prepared to do about it, now that the veil had already begun to tear.