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 5

Nora froze. “You don’t know that.”

“I know it.” He stepped closer, the air between them electric, heavier than the storm. “She’s beautiful, and she’s desperate, and she would make a perfectly acceptable duchess. But she would bore me to death within a month, and I would make her miserable.”

“Then choose someone else.” Her voice cracked. “Choose Lady Shelby. Choose the viscount’s daughter. Do not choose me.”

“Why?”

“Because I told you — I am the ballast. If you pull me up, my family drowns.” Tears mixed hot with the rain on her cheeks. “If you don’t choose Rosalind, Lord Croft takes the house. We’ll have nothing.”

Nathaniel reached out, uncaring of the mud, and caught her face gently in his hands, thumbs brushing her cold cheekbones. “I told you in the library. I’m drowning too. I need someone to bail the water.” He stepped into her space, his chest brushing the wool she wore. “Let me worry about Lord Croft. Let me worry about your mother’s debts. You just have to tell me one thing.”

She couldn’t breathe. The corset was tight, but it was his proximity suffocating her now.

“What?”

“If I ask you to stay behind the curtain with me,” he said, dark eyes burning with quiet, desperate intensity, “will you stay?”

The silence in the guest bedchamber afterward was thick enough to choke on — the brittle silence that follows a carriage crash, before the screaming begins.

Nora stood on the faded Persian rug, shivering, still wearing Nathaniel’s coat like a heavily tailored tent, smelling of wet wool, cedar, and him. Lady Edith stood rigid by the window. Celia had been dismissed to the dressing room. Rosalind sat on the edge of the bed, composed, though her peach gown was ruined with water spots.

“Take it off.” Edith’s voice was flat, drained of its usual frantic energy.

Nora gripped the lapels, fingers numb from the cold. “I’m cold, Mother.”

Edith turned. Not anger in her eyes — terror. The look of a woman who’d just watched her last lifeboat catch fire and sink. “Take the Duke’s coat off, Nora. Now.”

Nora slowly let the heavy garment slide from her shoulders. It hit the floorboards with a wet thud. Without it, the chill slammed into her, raising gooseflesh.

Edith walked forward, didn’t strike, only looked at her daughter with hollow devastation. “Do you know what you’ve done?”

“I fell. I slipped on a stone. He helped me up.”

“He carried you into the trees. He left Rosalind standing in the rain while he stripped off his own coat to cover you. Thirty of the worst gossips in England watched him do it.” Edith rubbed her temples, breathing shallow and erratic. “Lady Shelby was laughing. I heard her. Laughing at us — the Montgomerys parading their eldest daughter while the Duke runs off with the clumsy, unremarkable spare.”

The word stung, precise and sharp.

Nora looked at Rosalind, braced for anger, expecting her sister to join the firing squad. Instead, Rosalind was staring at her ruined hem, hands folded neatly in her lap.

“It’s over,” she said quietly.

“It is not over.” Edith wheeled on her eldest. “We’ll say Nora was taken ill. A dizzy spell. The Duke was merely acting the gentleman. You’ll wear the crimson silk tonight and ask him for the first dance. We can fix this.”

“Mother.” Rosalind raised her head. Her beautiful face was drained of color, the artificial pink on her cheeks suddenly clownish. “He looked at her when he picked her up from the mud. He didn’t look at me once today. Not really.” Her composure finally cracked at the edges. “He looked at her the way a starving man looks at bread. I cannot compete with that. I don’t know how.”

“You will learn.” Edith’s voice broke, rising into a shrill, panicked cry. “Lord Croft’s solicitor sent a letter this morning. I didn’t tell you — I didn’t want to ruin your nerves. They’re foreclosing on the Yorkshire estate on the first of November. Three weeks, Rosalind. Three weeks before we’re living in a boarding house in Cheapside, sewing shirts for a penny apiece. He has to choose you.”

Nora felt the blood drain from her face. Three weeks. The walls of the room seemed to rush inward. She looked down at the mud on her hands and thought of Nathaniel’s face in the rain, the desperate intensity in his eyes. Let me worry about Lord Croft.

He didn’t understand. A duke didn’t understand the crushing, breathless terror of poverty. He could wave away a twenty-thousand-pound debt because he had land to borrow against. The Montgomerys had nothing. If Nathaniel chose her, he chose a penniless girl with no dowry — and her family would be thrown to the wolves. Society would not tolerate a duke bailing out his mother-in-law’s gambling debts. It was scandal. Social suicide.

“I won’t go down to dinner,” Nora said, her voice hollow, belonging to someone else. “I won’t attend the ball tonight. I’ll pack my trunks. Tell him I left. Tell him I was a passing fancy.”

Edith stopped pacing, a brutal calculation happening behind her eyes. “Yes. You’ll stay in this room. You won’t open the door. If he asks for you, you’re severely ill with a fever. Tomorrow, you take the mail coach back to Yorkshire. Alone.”

Nora nodded numbly, walked to the wash basin, broke the thin crust of ice on the pitcher’s surface, and began scrubbing the mud from her skin. The water stung her scrapes. She welcomed it. It was grounding. It was real.

Downstairs, in the oak-panelled sanctuary of his study, Nathaniel Reed was not thinking about the ball. He sat behind his desk, wet hair dripping onto the leather blotter, still in his soaked clothes, the roaring fire doing little to combat the damp chill in his bones.

Mr. Finch, his solicitor, sat opposite him, thoroughly distressed. Finch was a small, nervous man who thrived on order, and his employer was radiating chaos.

“You wish to do what, your grace?”

“I wish to purchase the debt of the late Lord Montgomery.” Nathaniel’s voice was low, dangerous. “All of it. Currently held by Lord Croft.”

Finch blinked rapidly. “Your grace, that debt is substantial. Croft has already initiated foreclosure. And if I may be so bold — the Aldridge accounts are not exactly flush with liquid capital at this precise moment. We are trying to secure credit, not expend it on charitable ventures.”

“It is not charity. It’s an acquisition.” Nathaniel pulled the green ledger toward him, turning a pen between his fingers without dipping it in ink. “Croft’s a leech, not a fool. He wants the timber, not a legal fight, and a twenty percent premium paid in cash today is worth more to him than a foreclosure that could drag through Chancery for a year. Offer it. He’ll take it before supper.”

“Cash from where, your grace?”

“Sell the London townhouse. The land here is worth ten times what that house is. The banks will lend against acreage — they won’t blink at losing a Mayfair address I never use.”

Finch actually gasped. “The Mayfair property has been in your family for four generations. It’s your foothold in London society.”

“I despise London society.” Nathaniel slammed the pen down, the crack making Finch jump. “I despise the soot. I despise the gossips. And I despise sitting in a house full of people weighing my net worth while eating my food. Sell the damned townhouse, Finch. Buy the Montgomery debt, and draft a settlement.”

“A marriage settlement?” Finch reached for fresh parchment. “For the eldest Miss Montgomery — Rosalind, I believe?”

“No.” Nathaniel leaned back, looking toward the window where rain lashed the glass. “For Nora.”

Finch’s pen paused. “The… younger one?”

“The one who knows how to bail water,” Nathaniel said softly. “Have the papers ready by eight tonight.”