The Duke's Scandalous Bargain

The Duke of Ravenscroft was not, Miss Cecily Ashworth had been told, a man who received visitors on a Tuesday morning.

She presented herself at his townhouse in Grosvenor Square regardless. She was twenty-one years old, recently orphaned, and possessed of exactly seventeen pounds and four shillings standing between herself and a very particular variety of disaster. The morning calls of dukes could accommodate themselves.

The butler conveyed no visible alarm at a young woman in a sensible wool pelisse announcing she had private business with His Grace. He showed her to a small waiting room and returned in twelve minutes to escort her to the study.

Edmund Hartwell was standing at the window when she entered—tall, dark-coated, his attention apparently occupied by the square below. He did not turn immediately. Cecily recognised it as the specific theatrical technique of men who wished to establish command before a conversation began.

She sat down without being invited.

He turned. He was younger than she'd expected—thirty, perhaps thirty-two—and whatever she had anticipated from a duke notorious for gaming debts and cold dismissals, she had not expected a face quite so arresting, or eyes that assessed her with what appeared to be genuine intelligence.

“Miss Ashworth,” he said.

“Your Grace.” She folded her hands in her lap. “You hold a note of five hundred pounds against my father's estate.”

“I do.” He came away from the window and sat across from her. This, too, was deliberate—bringing himself level with her. She noted it. “Your father was a persuasive gentleman. The game was piquet. He was not as skilled at it as he believed.”

“He was not skilled at a number of things to the degree he believed.” The words were out before she could stop them. “The note falls due in six weeks. There is no estate of value. There is a house, a garden, and approximately forty pounds remaining after the funeral expenses. I am here to negotiate terms.”

Something shifted in his expression—the performance of ducal indifference cracked, slightly, at the corner of his mouth.

“Negotiate,” he said. “And what do you propose to offer?”

“I have something that may be of use to you.” She reached into her reticule and produced a folded letter. “This arrived at the Ashworth house three months ago. It was addressed to my father but concerns Your Grace. Its writer intended it as a private communication.”

He took the letter. Read it. His face became very still.

“Who else has seen this?”

“Only me.”

“And your price is the five-hundred-pound note.”

“Yes.”

He set the letter on the desk and looked at her with an expression she could not categorise. It was too layered—calculation, and something that sat beneath calculation, and something beneath that she wasn't certain she was experienced enough to name.

“There is a difficulty,” he said. “The letter alone doesn't constitute the whole of the matter. There are others I haven't located. Your father's solicitor may have copies.” He leaned forward. “I need someone with access to the Ashworth house who can search the papers before the solicitor's inventory begins. Someone with discretion. Someone with reason to be there without raising questions.”

“I live there.”

“Exactly.” He regarded her steadily. “Three weeks. After which the solicitor's inventory begins. Search your father's papers—everything—and deliver to me anything that concerns my family. In exchange, the five-hundred-pound note disappears and I will settle the remaining estate debts beside.” He paused. “I'll have my solicitor establish you with a respectable annuity. You'll have no further need to negotiate with dukes.”

Cecily thought of the house—her house, for three more weeks—and of the letters she had already found among her father's papers, the ones she had not brought today, and of the particular intelligence in Edmund Hartwell's dark eyes. For more stories of forbidden arrangements and unlikely alliances, see The CEO's Convenient Arrangement or the otherworldly bargain in The Shadow King's Captive.

“Agreed,” she said.

She was back at the Ashworth house by noon. She did not find the remaining letters that day or the next. On the fourth day, the Duke arrived in person, on the pretext of inspecting the estate—which was, she supposed, his legal right, given the outstanding note. He found her in her father's study with ink-stained fingers and a ledger she had been cross-referencing for two hours.

He did not pretend to review the estate. He sat across from her and watched her work.

“You're remarkably composed for someone searching through a dead man's secrets,” he said.

“He was my father. I knew he had secrets. I'm simply establishing which ones were mine to carry and which belonged entirely to him.” She turned a page without looking up. “You could help. You know what you're looking for better than I do.”

He came around the desk without asking.

He worked beside her for three hours. He was, she discovered, as intelligent as he looked and considerably more careful than his reputation suggested. He had a methodical mind and a dry wit that surfaced without warning and a way of handing her documents—their fingers meeting at the corner of the page—that grew less accidental as the afternoon wore on.

“You're not what I expected,” she said, when they had found two of the three letters and her back ached from hunching over the ledger.

“Nor are you.” He was still close, standing at her shoulder, and the light through the study window was the long gold of late afternoon. “What did you expect?”

“A man who sends solicitors. Not someone who comes himself.” She turned to look at him, and he was nearer than she'd tracked. The proximity was not unwelcome, which was information she was not entirely sure what to do with. “Why did you come in person?”

His eyes moved over her face. “It seemed important enough to attend to directly.”

The letter in her hand was no longer the thing either of them was thinking about.

He was careful when he kissed her—careful in the way of someone who is choosing to be, rather than someone who is uncertain—and she met him with equal deliberateness, because she had not spent four days in close quarters with Edmund Hartwell to be surprised by her own response. His hands were warm at her waist, steadying her against the edge of the desk, and when she reached up to touch his jaw she felt the sharp exhale of breath against her lips and found it extraordinarily satisfying. He kissed her as carefully as he'd worked—attention undivided, unhurried, the same methodical thoroughness applied to something much more interesting than ledgers.

They found the third letter an hour later, somewhat rumpled from where it had come to rest on the floor.

He burned all three in the fireplace that evening and wrote out a receipt acknowledging the five-hundred-pound note as settled in full.

“You'll receive the annuity documents next week,” he said, as she showed him to the door.

“Thank you.” She stood in the doorway and looked at him in the fading light. “Your Grace.”

“Edmund,” he said. He had been saying it all afternoon, in the privacy of the study, and she had been saying Cecily in return, and now neither of them quite knew what to do with the formality of the threshold.

“Edmund,” she said.

He stood on the step a moment longer than was necessary.

“I find myself,” he said carefully, “with a country house in want of considerable attention in the coming weeks. I find myself further in need of someone methodical and discreet who might assist with the correspondence.” He looked at her. “If such a position were of any interest.”

Cecily Ashworth had seventeen pounds and four shillings, an annuity that had not yet materialised, and a very particular understanding of what was and was not being offered.

“Send me the details,” she said, “and I'll consider your terms.”

He went down the steps into Grosvenor Square, and she watched him go, and thought that the most interesting bargains were always the ones that still needed to be fully negotiated.