SHE PRETENDED TO BE A “BOY” FOR 7 MONTHS TO AVOID AN ARRANGED MARRIAGE—UNTIL THE DUKE FOUND OUT…

Chapter 17

The study was warm, and the fire she had built that morning had long since burned down to embers.

Josephine stood before his desk with her hands clasped and her heart still going too fast. Raymond walked past her to the window and stood looking out at the drive where her uncle’s horse had disappeared.

“You did well.”

“It was not courage.” She said it honestly. “It was just refusing to be a horse at auction again.”

“That is courage.” He turned. “Most people lose their nerve the moment a member of their family is involved. Especially when they have been trained from birth to obey.”

She said nothing.

Raymond crossed to the desk and opened a drawer. He took out a folded document and a small velvet box, and set both on the desk between them.

“This is a deed of gift,” he said, tapping the paper. “Foster Hall. Your father’s estate.”

Josephine’s whole body went still.

“Foster Hall was sold years ago. My uncle mortgaged it—”

“Your uncle mortgaged it. He did not sell it. He sold everything in it, mortgaged the land, and let the estate fall into disrepair because he could not afford the interest. It came to me at auction four years ago for a debt.” Raymond’s voice was level. “I have owned it since. I never set foot in it.”

She stared at the document.

“You own my father’s house.”

“I own the shell of it. There is nothing left inside. The furnishings were sold, the tenants were dismissed, and the roof has been leaking for years.” He pushed the paper a fraction of an inch toward her. “It is yours if you want it.”

“I cannot accept—”

“You can.” His voice did not change. “It was never your uncle’s to sell, and it is not mine to keep. It belonged to your father, and your father is dead, and you are his only surviving child. That is the whole of the law.”

Josephine looked at the deed and felt something enormous and complicated come up in her chest — her mother’s garden, her father’s study with the smell of pipe smoke, Thomas’s boots by the back door, all of it, gone, and yet somehow not entirely gone, if this paper were real.

“Why?” she said. “Why would you do all of this for me?”

Raymond did not answer for a long moment.

Then he opened the velvet box, and turned it toward her.

Inside was a small brooch — a plain silver bird, wings folded, eye of dark garnet. Worn smooth at the edges, as though someone had held it very often.

“My mother’s,” he said. “She died when I was nine. My father kept it in his desk and never spoke of her again.” He paused. “I found it when he died. I have kept it in that drawer for six years and never once taken it out before tonight.”

Josephine could not look away from it.

“Why now?”

And Raymond Hawthorne, who had never married, who had never once in fifteen years been seen to smile, who moved through the world like winter and left frost behind him, looked at her across his own desk and said, very quietly:

“Because I have spent six years keeping things locked in drawers. And I am tired of it.”

The room was very still.

Josephine understood, with a clarity that made her hands cold, what was being offered. Not the brooch. Not the house. Something behind all of it, something that had been building between them since a frozen paddock in December, since a hand adjusting her collar, since you wear your grief quietly.

And in that moment, the whole of her joy turned over and revealed itself as terror.

He does not know about the letter.

Evangeline had a copy. Signed with her name, in her own hand, describing everything. A woman who had entered his house under false pretense, deceived his household, slept in his servants’ quarters, stood in his chamber. Evangeline could put that letter anywhere — into a scandal sheet, into the hands of Arthur Foster, into the county gossip mill — and the Duke of Hawthorne would be a laughingstock.

And worse. He would be a man who had knowingly kept a woman of questionable birth in his house and elevated her. It would ruin him socially. It could ruin him politically. A man in his position could not marry a runaway liar with a scandal attached to her name, not without becoming the scandal himself.

“Your Grace.” Her voice came out uneven. “I cannot accept either of these things.”

Something in his face closed.

“Why.”

She could not tell him. She could not tell him about the letter without having to explain everything else — that she had agreed to spy on him, that she had written a confession for Evangeline’s keeping, that she had been a coward and a co-conspirator for a week before she found her courage. He would never trust her again. And she would deserve it.

“Because you do not know who I am,” she said.

“I know exactly who you are.”

“No.” She shook her head. “You know what I told you. That is not the same thing.”

For a long moment he looked at her, and she watched the cold come back into his face, layer by layer, like ice over a pond.

“Very well,” he said, and closed the velvet box, and slid the deed back into the drawer. “Then it stays here.”

“Your Grace—”

“Good night, Miss Foster.”

It was the first time he had ever called her that. It landed like a stone.

She left the study, and walked through the dark house, and sat down on the back steps in the rain and put her face in her hands.

She had just refused the only man she had ever loved, for his own protection, and he would never know why.

And somewhere in London, in a velvet sleeve, a letter was waiting to be used.