Three sisters were sent to Aldridge Hall to win a duke’s fortune — one was prepared to charm him, one was the backup, and Nora only wanted to disappear. She hid behind a curtain to avoid being noticed, but the Duke found her first — and from that moment, he never looked at her sisters again.

PART 2

Up close, the shadows beneath his eyes were bruised with exhaustion. He drained his glass in a single hard swallow, lowered it — and turned his head to find he was not alone.

He didn’t flinch. He didn’t gasp. He simply looked at her — her face, her ill-fitting dress, the single bare foot resting atop her other shoe.

“Well,” Nathaniel Reed said, his voice low, dry gravel. “This alcove is remarkably crowded for a place designed to fit precisely no one.”

For a terrifying second, Nora considered apologizing, curtsying, fleeing back into the suffocating heat. It was what Rosalind would do. It was what any sane, desperate woman with a mortgage hanging over her head would do.

But her corset was biting into her ribs, her heel was bleeding, and she was too tired to play the game.

“It was vacant when I claimed it,” she said flatly.

His eyebrow rose. “Claimed it? Are we planting flags now? I must inform my steward that a portion of the east wing has been annexed by—” He waited.

“Nobody,” she supplied. “I am nobody of consequence. Just a casualty of the evening.”

A short, humorless laugh. “A casualty. I like that. Who wounded you?”

“The dowager Countess of Grantham. Her breath is known to strip paint from the walls. My corset, actually.” The words slipped out before she could stop them.

She braced for his disgust. Instead, he leaned heavily against the opposite frame, resting his head against the glass exactly as she had. “If it’s any consolation, my cravat is currently attempting to strangle me. I give it ten minutes before it succeeds.”

She studied him. He wasn’t assessing her hips, or her teeth. He was just a man hiding behind a curtain.

“Why are you hiding? It’s your house. You could simply ask them all to leave.”

“I could,” he agreed. “But I invited them. My solicitor informed me that I’m thirty, unmarried, and if I break my neck jumping a horse next week without an heir, the estate goes to a cousin in Bath who breeds ornamental pugs.”

The laugh escaped her before she could stop it. His eyes flicked to her, a spark of real amusement breaking through the exhaustion.

“So you decided to subject yourself to a cattle auction instead,” she said softly.

The silence stretched, thick but not anxious — nothing like the room beyond the curtain. “Is that how it feels? On your side?”

“How else should it feel? We’re scrubbed and polished and paraded so you might point at the one with the shiniest hair. It’s humiliating for everyone.”

She expected him to defend the system. He was the one holding every card.

“It is,” he said simply.

She looked up, startled.

“They look at me and see a ledger. A title. A vault of gold. They smile with their mouths, and their eyes do arithmetic.” His gaze pinned her. “But you aren’t doing arithmetic, are you?”

“I’m terrible at mathematics,” she admitted.

The corner of his mouth twitched — and it changed his entire face. “I should return. The mothers hunt in packs when I’m gone too long.”

“Take a pool cue. Defend yourself.”

“I’m unarmed. Left it in the armory.” He stared at her smile a long moment, his eyes dropping to her lips, then back. The air shifted — quiet, undeniable tension.

“Put your shoe back on, miss,” he murmured, leaving the sentence open, waiting for her name.

Nora looked at him in the dark and understood, with sudden clarity, that giving him her name meant entering the game.

She didn’t want to be a competitor.

“Good night, your grace,” she said, and slipped through the curtain without telling him who she was.