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

Chapter 9

Morning came grey and pitiless, and Josephine rose with a plan she hated.

She would not spy. That much she had decided before she slept, and the decision had settled into her bones like a stone. But she also would not run — not yet, not while there was still a chance the situation could be survived without abandoning everything she had built.

So she would do the only thing left to her: she would stall.

Buy time. Give Evangeline just enough to keep her satisfied and not enough to commit treason. She would report nothing of importance. She would offer the Duke’s tea preferences and the hour he rose and the fact that he disliked the smell of hyacinths in the drawing room. Small truths. Useless truths. The kind of information any housemaid could have provided if asked.

And she would pray that Evangeline was too proud to notice she was being fed crumbs.

She found the lady in the library that evening, exactly as ordered.

Evangeline was seated by the fire with a glass of wine and the satisfied air of a woman who had already won an argument she had not yet begun. She did not offer Josephine a seat.

“Well?”

“His Grace wakes at six,” Josephine said. “He takes his coffee black, with no sugar. He prefers beef to fowl at dinner. He rides every morning before breakfast, and he reads in the study in the late afternoon.”

Evangeline’s expression cooled by a fraction.

“That is not what I asked for.”

“You asked for his preferences and habits, my lady. Those are his preferences and habits.”

“I asked for his private thoughts.”

“I do not have access to his private thoughts, my lady. No one does.” Josephine kept her voice level, her eyes on the carpet. “He does not confide in servants.”

“Then you must make him confide in you.”

“That is not within my power.”

“Everything is within your power if you are clever enough.” Evangeline set down her glass with a click that was almost a slap. “You have his attention, Joseph. That is a weapon. Use it.”

“I do not know how to use it, my lady.”

“Then learn. You have a week.”

“A week?”

“A week.” Evangeline’s smile was thin as paper. “After that, I will require something considerably more useful than his coffee order — or I will be forced to conclude that your secret is worth more to me as entertainment than your service is worth as an asset.”

She stood, and swept past Josephine toward the door, and paused there with her hand on the frame.

“One more thing, Joseph. Do not think for a moment that you can outlast me. I have patience, money, and a very long memory. You have none of those things.” She smiled again. “You have only a lie, and lies have a way of crumbling.”

The door closed behind her.

Josephine stood alone in the library, and pressed her palms against her eyes, and did not cry, because crying was a luxury a woman in disguise could not afford.

The week passed like a fever.

Josephine did her duties. She built the Duke’s fires. She carried his trays. She stood in corners and kept her mouth shut and watched the days fall away one by one like coins flung from a pocket.

And through all of it, the Duke kept watching her.

His attention had changed since the night in the study. It was no longer simply curious. There was a heat beneath it now, a restlessness, the quality of a man who has noticed an itch he cannot reach and cannot stop thinking about. He found reasons to speak to her at odd hours. He stood nearer than he needed to. Twice she caught him looking at her hands as though trying to solve a riddle he refused to name.

And twice she felt the dangerous, stupid hope that perhaps — perhaps, if the truth came out by itself, in a way she could control —

She crushed the thought before it finished forming.

There was no version of the truth that ended well. Not with him. Not with a man who had been betrayed once and had built a life out of never letting it happen again.

On the sixth night, Dennis caught her crying in the tack room.

She had not meant to. She had gone in to oil a bridle and had sat down on a bale of straw for a moment, just a moment, and then her eyes had begun to sting and then it was too late.

Dennis closed the door behind him and sat down a respectful six feet away.

“Lad.”

“I’m all right.”

“You’re crying in a harness room at midnight, so you’re plainly not.” He pulled a straw from the bale and began to strip it into pieces, and stared at his hands while he talked, giving her the only kind of privacy a stable hand knew how to give. “Something’s got you cornered. I’ve watched men go through that. In the army, before I came here. They get the look. Like the walls are closing in and there’s no door.”

Josephine said nothing.

“I won’t pry,” Dennis said. “I’ve got no right to your business. But I’ll say this much and then I’ll leave you be.” He dropped the straw shreds and looked at her for the first time. “Whatever it is, running doesn’t solve it forever. I ran from something once. Thought I’d left it behind. It caught up because I carried it with me everywhere I went.” He stood and dusted off his trousers. “Sometimes the only way out is through.”

He paused at the door.

“Also, Edith’s been worried about you. And Millie’s been putting extra in your bowl. In case you thought nobody here had noticed you exist.” He shrugged. “You’re not as invisible as you think, Joseph. That’s the trouble with being a decent sort. People notice.”

The door clicked shut behind him.

Josephine sat in the dark of the harness room with her hands full of oiled leather and felt, for the first time in months, something other than fear.

She had come to Hawthorne Estate to be nobody.

And somehow, without meaning to, she had become someone — someone Edith worried about and Millie fed and Dennis sat with in the dark. Someone whose absence would leave a small hollow behind.

It was a comfort, and a liability, and the most dangerous thing of all. Because a woman with nothing to lose could run forever.

A woman with something to lose would stay — and be caught.

The seventh day arrived, and Evangeline found her in the corridor outside the Duke’s chamber at noon.

“A week,” said Evangeline quietly, as if she were discussing the weather. “You have had your week. What do you have for me?”

Josephine drew a slow breath.

And then, from the far end of the corridor, came the sound of boots on stone — measured, unhurried, unmistakable.

The Duke turned the corner and stopped.

His gaze moved from Evangeline to Josephine and back, and something behind his eyes went very still and very cold.

“Lady Evangeline,” he said. “You are a long way from the drawing room.”

“I was exploring, Your Grace. This house has so many corridors.” Evangeline smiled, perfectly composed. “The boy was kind enough to direct me.”

“Was he.”

“He was. Such a helpful creature.” She inclined her head. “If you will excuse me.”

She walked past the Duke without hurrying, and Josephine heard her footsteps fade, and she did not dare breathe.

Raymond Hawthorne looked at her for a long moment.

“Joseph.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“Where were you, exactly, when Lady Evangeline found you?”

“I—” Josephine’s mouth was dry. “Nowhere, Your Grace. The corridor.”

“You are lying.”

“Your Grace—”

“You reek of it,” he said quietly, and stepped closer, and his voice dropped to something that was almost not a voice at all. “I warned you about her. I told you to bring her questions to me. And now I find you meeting with her in a part of the house she has no reason to visit, at an hour when you should be at work.”

He stopped a foot away.

“Tell me what she wanted,” said the Duke, “and I will consider forgiving you.”

Josephine looked up at him — at the cold grey eyes and the scar through his brow and the mouth that had never once, in fifteen years, been reported to smile.

And she realized with a horrible, vertiginous clarity that no answer she could give would survive this man. That he would see through a lie and punish the truth. That whatever she said in the next ten seconds would decide what happened to her, to Evangeline, and to the small, impossible thing that had grown in her chest over four months of firelight and collars adjusted and you wear your grief quietly.

She opened her mouth.

And the truth stepped out before she could stop it.

“She knows, Your Grace. What I am.”

The corridor went absolutely silent.