Page 7 of The Feared Duke’s Found Family

A sudden crunch of gravel echoed from the bend behind her.

Fanny gasped, spinning around, her hands tightening their desperate grip on her torn bodice.

The duke stepped out of the shadow of the rose archway. His broad shoulders seemed to take up the entire width of the gravel path, his dark evening coat glistening with tiny beads of night mist.

A wave of bitter humiliation crashed over Fanny, hotter than the cold wind. Of all the people in Mayfair to find her hiding in the dirt like a wounded animal, it had to be the Duke of Hilgrove.

She lifted her chin, her spine locking into place even as tears continued to track down her face. She had no pride left to save. There was nothing left for him to strip away.

“Go ahead, Your Grace,” Fanny said, her voice shaking slightly despite her best efforts. “Make your clever remarks. You found it so immensely entertaining earlier when you thought I was a schemer. Tell me how foolish I look. I have reached rock bottom, so I assure you, there is nothing you can say to make this evening any worse.”

The duke did not smile. The dry, mocking glint she had seen in his eyes at the ballroom was gone. His face was drawn into severe, unyielding lines, his jaw locked like granite in the moonlight.

“I saw what happened,” he said, his low voice cutting cleanly through the dark. “Bromley did it deliberately. He loosened the hooks and stepped on your hem.”

Fanny blinked, the sharp edge of her guard wavering for a fraction of a second. “You… you saw?” She let out a soft, hollow sigh, looking down at the damp gravel. “It doesn’t matter. Even if Lord Bromley stood in the center of the ballroom and confessed, society would still blame me. They would call me careless, or desperate, or compromised. I will be condemned, and he will walk away untouched. That is how London works.”

The duke shifted his weight, his heavy boots crushing a stray leaf. “Why did you come to this party, Lady Fanny? If your fortunes have been so bleak, why put yourself through the humiliation of the Duke Hunt?”

Fanny felt a fresh prickle of anger at his bluntness. Just when she thought he might have a shred of human sympathy, he proved how cold he truly was.

“Because I had no choice!” she snapped, stepping toward him, her amber eyes blazing through her tears. “Four years ago, my father vanished into the night, taking every single penny of my sister’s dowry and mine with him! He left us destitute! I was practically ruined the moment he walked out that door, Your Grace! Bromley merely hammered the final nail into my coffin tonight!”

The duke stood unmoving, listening to her with an intense, calculating gaze. His posture shifted, his gray eyes narrowing as if he were conducting an interrogation rather than standing in a garden with a weeping woman.

“So nothing has truly changed about your circumstances, has it?” Lysander asked, his voice entirely devoid of pity. “You were penniless yesterday, and you are penniless tonight. Or was there something else you still hoped for?”

The question struck her like a blow. It was the exact, harsh logic she had tried to force upon herself moments ago, but hearing it spoken aloud by a man who had everything broke the last lock on her restraint.

Fanny lifted her trembling hand, roughly wiping the remaining wetness from her cheeks with the back of her wrist.

“My chance to be a mother,” she whispered, her voice cracking under the weight of the confession. She looked up, meeting his cold gaze without hiding a single piece of her grief. “That is what was stolen tonight. No respectable man will ever look at me now. I will never have a home. I will never have a child of my own.”

Unable to bear his silent, piercing stare for another second, Fanny turned on her heel and pushed past him.

She rushed blindly down the gravel path, her hands still clutching her torn dress, her heart hammering against her ribs. She turned left, then right, then left again, frantically searching for the iron gates that led back to the carriage drive. But the dark hedges towered eight feet high on either side, identical and endless. Every turn led to another dead end, another wall of thorns and wet leaves.

She stopped in a small, enclosed clearing, her chest heaving, realization sinking in. She was entirely lost.

“Do you require assistance finding the exit, Lady Fanny?”

The duke’s low, rumbling voice sounded from the opposite side of the hedge, no more than ten feet away.

Fanny rounded on the wall of green, her jaw tight. “I do not need your help, Your Grace! I can manage perfectly fine on my own!”

She spun around and darted down a narrow opening to her right, only to run dead into a thick, impenetrable wall of boxwood. Frustration boiled up in her throat as she backed up, her slippers slipping on the wet mud.

“You are heading toward the fountain,” his voice came again, closer this time, smooth and infuriatingly calm. “The exit is in the opposite direction.”

“Leave me alone!” she shouted into the dark.

A quiet rustle of branches echoed to her left, and Lysander stepped out from behind a tall rose trellis, cutting off her only path.

Fanny froze. Her breath hitched in her throat as she backed up until her shoulders hit the cold leaves of the hedge behind her.

The duke did not close the distance. He stood in the silver moonlight, looking at her with a heavy, deliberate intensity that made the air between them feel thick and still.

“All of your problems could be solved if you became my bride.”