SHE PRETENDED TO BE A “BOY” FOR 7 MONTHS TO AVOID AN ARRANGED MARRIAGE—UNTIL THE DUKE FOUND OUT…
Chapter 7
Two days after the dinner, Josephine was in the Duke’s study dusting the bookshelves when the door opened behind her.
She turned, startled, and nearly dropped the cloth.
“Your Grace. I did not realize you had returned.”
“Clearly.”
He crossed to his desk and began sorting through correspondence with quick, efficient movements — opening letters, reading them, setting them in two neat piles. “Continue your work. I will not disturb you.”
She resumed dusting, acutely aware of his presence in a way that made her fingers clumsy. The scratch of his pen. The rustle of paper. The sound of his breathing in the quiet room. The fire she had lit an hour before crackling softly at the far wall.
Minutes passed.
Then: “Joseph.”
She turned. “Yes, Your Grace.”
“Come here.”
Her heart stuttered, but she obeyed, crossing the carpet to stand before his desk.
The Duke set down his pen, leaned back in his chair, and studied her with that unsettling intensity that had become as familiar to her as the sound of his boots in the corridor.
“Lady Evangeline has taken an interest in you.”
Her mouth went dry. “I do not know why, Your Grace.”
“Do you not?” He tilted his head. “She seems to believe you are unusual. For a servant.”
“I am only what I appear to be, Your Grace.”
“And what is that, precisely?”
She held his gaze. “A boy who works. Who is grateful for employment.”
“Hm.”
He stood, and Josephine fought the urge to step back. He circled the desk slowly, deliberately — the way Evangeline had circled her, except that where Evangeline’s movement had felt like a blade, his felt like weather. Inevitable. Enormous. Nothing you could argue with.
“I find it curious,” he said. “Lady Evangeline is rarely wrong in her assessments of character. She has a talent for detecting deception.”
“I have nothing to hide, Your Grace.”
“Have you not?”
He stopped directly in front of her. Close enough that she had to tilt her head back to keep his eyes. Close enough that she could see the fine grain of his skin, the precise line where his collar met his throat, the small scar through his eyebrow catching the firelight.
“You are trembling,” he observed.
“It is cold, Your Grace.”
“The fire is quite warm.”
She tried again. “Then I am nervous, Your Grace. Your presence is intimidating.”
“Good.” His voice did not change. “You should be intimidated. I could destroy you with a word, Joseph. Send you back to whatever desperate circumstances brought you here. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“And yet you look me in the eye.” He tilted his head the other way, studying her. “Most servants cannot. They cower. They scrape. But you — you meet my gaze as though you have every right to.”
“I mean no disrespect, Your Grace.”
“I did not say it was disrespectful. I said it was unusual.”
His hand lifted.
Josephine’s breath stopped.
But he only adjusted her collar again — that same gesture he had used a month before, deliberate, proprietary, his fingers brushing the side of her neck where the fabric had twisted. Warm knuckles against cold skin.
“You wear your clothes carelessly,” he said quietly. “As though you are uncomfortable in them.”
“They are all I have, Your Grace.”
“Perhaps I should have the tailor make you something better suited.”
“That is not necessary, Your Grace.”
“I will decide what is necessary.”
His thumb traced the line of her collarbone through the fabric — slow, deliberate, a touch that made heat pull low in her stomach and her mind go white and empty for a full second.
“You have very fine bones, Joseph. Delicate.”
She could not breathe. Could not move. She stood trapped between his body and the desk with his hand at her throat and his eyes searching hers, and for one terrible moment she understood exactly how a rabbit feels in the shadow of a hawk.
“Your Grace,” she whispered.
“Please.” His voice dropped. “Please what?”
“I—” She swallowed. “I do not understand what you want from me.”
Something flickered in his expression. Surprise, perhaps. Or the recognition of a question he had never asked himself.
He stepped back.
The loss of his proximity felt like cold water thrown in her face.
“Return to your duties,” he said, his voice carefully neutral. “And stay away from Lady Evangeline. But if she questions you again, inform me immediately.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
She fled the study with her heart slamming so hard against her ribs she thought something inside her might break.
Because she had felt it.
The heat in his touch. The hunger in his gaze. And the terrible, impossible truth she had been refusing to look at for weeks: the Duke was beginning to want her.
Not as Joseph, the stable boy.
As something else. Something he could not name and did not understand and would hate himself for once he did.
She reached the servants’ stairs and stopped, and pressed both hands flat against the cold stone wall, and stood there for a long minute with her eyes shut.
You cannot want him back, she told herself. You cannot.
But the wanting was already there, and it had been there for a while, and pretending otherwise was just another lie in a life that had learned to run on them.
And somewhere above her head, in a bare room with a locked desk and a fire she had built with her own hands, Raymond Hawthorne was standing at his window, looking out at the snow, thinking about the boy with the dark eyes who did not look away.