Page 8 of The Feared Duke’s Found Family

The wind died. The distant music seemed to drop into utter silence.

Fanny stared at him, her lips parted, her amber eyes wide with sheer, unadulterated shock. “I beg your pardon?”

The Duke of Hilgrove took a single, slow step toward her, his broad shadow falling over her torn gown.

“You said you are searching for a way out, Lady Fanny,” he said softly, his gray eyes locked onto hers. “I could be your way out.”

Four

Fanny stared at him, her amber eyes wide in the pale moonlight. The high hedge walls seemed to shrink, pressing in around them, locking her in this small, shadow-draped clearing with a man who sounded completely out of his mind.

“You…” Fanny’s voice cracked, barely a whisper against the rustle of wet rose leaves. “You cannot be serious.”

“I am never anything less than serious, Lady Fanny.”

“Why?” Fanny’s grip on her torn bodice tightened until her knuckles turned bone-white. She took a small, instinctual step backward, her heels digging into the soft gravel. “Why in heaven’s name would you—a duke, a man of power and wealth—choose me? Look at me! I am a spinster with a ruined reputation and not a single copper to my name. Five minutes ago, I was compromised in front of the entire ton. Half of London watched my dress tear open! I am a social corpse, Your Grace, and you are offering me marriage?”

A faint, humorless exhale escaped the duke’s nose. He clasped his gloved hands securely behind the small of his back, stepping closer until his shadow completely enveloped her.

“I despise the concept of the Duke Hunt,” he said, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly register that seemed to vibrate against her ribs. “I despise the artificiality of it. I despise the desperate mothers waving their daughters like livestock at a fair. And I despise, more than almost anything in this world, the prospect of having to negotiate with fortune-hunting lords to arrange a marriage with their squeamish, painted daughters.”

He tilted his head slightly, his dark gray eyes piercing straight through her. “Or, God forbid, having to sit in a drawing room and actually court a lady myself.”

Despite the cold, despite the tears drying tight against her cheeks, a sudden, sharp spark of indignation flickered in Fanny’s chest.

“Oh, truly, Your Grace,” she murmured, her voice dripping with pure sarcasm. “My heart bleeds for you. How terribly harrowing it must be for a duke to suffer through a cup of tea and five minutes of pleasant conversation. Men truly do have it so extraordinarily difficult.”

The duke’s lips twitched, a fleeting, barely perceptible shadow of a smirk that vanished as quickly as it appeared. He took a half-step forward, refusing to let her divert his focus.

“You must know the gossip surrounding me, Lady Fanny,” he said, his tone turning heavy, almost searching. “A woman as sharp as you cannot have navigated Mayfair without hearing the tales spun about my name.”

Fanny hesitated, the sarcasm draining from her as quickly as it had come. She shifted her weight, the cold linen of her chemise pressing uncomfortably against her bare skin. She remembered Dorothy’s urgent, terrified face in the alcove, the way her friend had clutched her arm, and the strange silence that fell whenever his title was whispered across a room.

“I…” Fanny swallowed hard, her throat feeling painfully dry. “I only discovered tonight that you are a father. Dorothy told me you have triplets, and that their mother is no longer…” She met his intense gaze directly. “That is all I know. Nothing more.”

The duke’s eyes narrowed into dark, calculating slits. He leaned in an inch, scrutinizing every line of her face, reading the tension in her brow, the pulse fluttering in her neck, searching for the slightest trace of deceit.

“Is that truly all?” he pressed, his voice sharp as a blade. “You heard no whispers in the dark corners of drawing rooms? No matrons warning you to stay far away from the dark monster of Hilgrove Manor?”

“I speak the truth!” Fanny snapped, her amber eyes flashing with genuine frustration. “My father ran away four years ago and dragged our name through the mud! I do not attend fashionable tea parties, Your Grace. I do not receive society papers, nor do I linger to hear who is being ruined this week! My sister and I have been far too busy trying to keep a roof over our heads to care for Mayfair’s venomous little rumors!”

The duke stood completely unmoving, staring down at her. For three long, agonizing seconds, he searched her expression until the hard, suspicious tension in his shoulders subtly shifted.

“Then allow me to enlighten you,” he said softly, his voice devoid of any warmth, flat and unvarnished. “My wife died four years ago, three years after bringing three infants into this world.”

Fanny’s chest gave a small, painful squeeze. “I am sorry.”

“Do not waste your sympathy,” he cut her off, his tone brutally direct. “Her death was complicated, and society does not like complications. They prefer simple, villainous stories to tell over their afternoon tea.”

He stepped closer, so close she had to tilt her head back to look into his dark, stern face. “The unanimous conclusion of the ton, the whisper that follows me into every ballroom I enter, is that I had something to do with her death. They believe I broke her, or worse, that I deliberately brought about her end.”

Fanny froze.

The words lingered between them in the cold night, weighty and shadowy. She observed the stern, unwavering angle of his jaw, the dark hollows under his cheekbones, and his gray eyes, which showed no fear or begging for reassurance. He wasn’t pleading for trust but was instead presenting the stark, threatening reality of his reputation as straightforward facts.

He was a man accused of a terrible crime by the very people dancing inside Greystone Manor. And she was a woman whose dignity had just been shredded on their ballroom floor.

“That,” the duke murmured, his voice cutting through her spiraling thoughts, “is the man offering to stand between you and the world.”