Lady Ashley Never Behaves

He was ice and distance. She was done freezing.

Ashley had not expected her wedding night to be a coronation of loneliness, but there she stood — a wife in name, untouched in truth, staring at the empty half of a marriage bed. Somewhere in this vast and silent house, the Duke of Blackstone prowled like a ghost, chained to a memory she could never compete with.

Well. She refused to be a shadow in her own life.

She would not shrink. She would not wither. And she would not — would never — surrender her heart without a fight. If her husband intended to spend their marriage locked behind guilt and cold courtesy, then he would learn what it meant to be pursued. To be tempted. To be undone.

Because Ashley did not merely want a title. She wanted him.

His hands. His mouth. His heart.

And even if she had to set fire to every rule ever written for a duchess, she would teach her husband to burn with her.

Prologue

Lady Ashley Ware, stood in the shadows watching the ballroom at the Duke of Blackstone’s magnificent London townhome. With a sigh, she recalled that three years ago, she’d caused a scandal and was still barely tolerated at events such as these. Hence the reason she stood in the shadows.

This ball was supposed to be a glorious night, the celebration for her best friend Lady Courtney’s marriage to Lord Lucien Furoe, a man who had come back from the dead. For five long years, Courtney had mourned him, but he’d returned to her, somewhat damaged, with amnesia, but like a fairytale, true love could not be stopped, and Courtney got her second chance.

The ball was hosted by His Grace. A man so proper every woman here had doubled checked her appearance and was on their best behavior. But they needn’t have bothered. The handsome staid duke was drinking as if there were no tomorrow.

No one but a handful of his close friends knew that the man’s drinking was driven from loss. The love of his life, Kitty, a mistress from a gentleman’s establishment, had been killed by Lord Lucien’s enemy.

This public display of grief was so unlike Blackstone, and it fascinated Ashley, considering the duke took every opportunity to ensure she knew exactly how distasteful he found her unpardonable behavior. He had forbidden his younger sister Farah to be in her vicinity. He didn’t want Farah tainted by association with her. But Farah, too, was now married.

As the evening progressed, Blackstone made his way steadily through what appeared to be several bottles of his finest brandy. His grief for Kitty, carefully hidden behind aristocratic composure during the day, seemed to manifest itself in increasingly reckless drinking as the night wore on.

Ashley noticed his condition when she stepped onto the terrace for a breath of fresh air, needing respite from the crowded ballroom and the pitying looks that still followed her wherever she went in society since her very public scandal several years ago.

She’d never seen His Grace drunk. Had never seen him with a hair out of place or showing any weakness, come to think of it. Perhaps this display confirmed he was human after all. When she heard His Grace stumble and curse, followed by a loud crash, she knew she should simply get one of the stuffy duke’s servants, but being her impetuous self, and being a kind person, she realized the duke was hurting and probably wouldn’t want his guests to know anything. She decided to help him.

Moving further into the garden, she found the duke slumped on a stone bench in a secluded corner, his usually immaculate appearance disheveled, his dark hair falling across his forehead. In the moonlight, he looked younger than his thirty years, as handsome as ever, but more vulnerable than she’d ever seen him.

“Your Grace?” she approached cautiously, concerned despite their history of mutual dislike. He barely acknowledged her presence if they were in the same room. “Are you quite well?”

He looked up at her with eyes that held a grief so profound, it took her breath away. “Lady Ashley,” he said, his voice slurred but still recognizably aristocratic. “Come to witness the mighty fall?”

“I came for air,” she replied honestly, studying his face with growing concern. “But I can see you’re…unwell. Perhaps I should call for someone—”

“No.” The word came out sharper than he’d intended, and he visibly struggled to moderate his tone. “No one else. They’ve all seen enough of my…weakness.”

Ashley had intended only to check on the duke’s welfare—a simple act of kindness from one wounded soul to another. But as she sat beside him on the stone bench, listening to his raw confession of grief, something fundamental shifted between them.

“Everything is about her,” Blackstone whispered, his usual aristocratic reserve stripped away by brandy and anguish. “Every breath, every heartbeat, every waking moment. She’s gone, and I… I don’t know how to exist without her.”

The naked pain in his voice struck something deep in Ashley’s chest. For three years, she’d been defined by her scandal, reduced to a cautionary tale whispered about in drawing rooms. But here was the Duke of Blackstone—the man who had cut her dead at countless social events, who had looked through her as if she were invisible—revealing himself to be as broken as she was.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly, her anger at his past treatment of her dissolving in the face of his genuine anguish. “I know what it’s like to lose someone you love.”

“Do you?” He turned to look at her properly for the first time, taking in her face in the moonlight. Without his usual mask of aristocratic disdain, he looked younger, more vulnerable. “I’d forgotten…your scandal. A love affair gone wrong.”

She was talking about her father. The familiar sting of that assumption—that she had been some naive girl seduced and abandoned—rose in her throat. But tonight, with grief hanging between them like morning mist, the old defensive anger seemed pointless.

“It wasn’t quite what everyone believes,” she said carefully. “But the consequences were…severe.”

His jaw tightened with unexpected anger on her behalf. “Society is cruel to women who dare to feel, to want, to love. I know. I’m guilty of that. You deserved better than their judgment.”

“Did I?” Ashley’s laugh held three years of accumulated bitterness. “I’ve been a cautionary tale for so long, I’ve almost forgotten what it felt like to be anything else.”

“You were nineteen,” he said, leaning closer. In the moonlight, his dark eyes held something she’d never seen before—compassion, understanding, recognition of shared pain. “Nineteen and caught up in circumstances beyond your control. Taken advantage of by a cad. What crime is that?”

The gentleness in his voice, so at odds with the cold disapproval she’d grown accustomed to from him, cracked something inside her chest. When he reached out to touch her cheek, she didn’t pull away.

“You’re not alone,” he said quietly. “You don’t have to carry this burden alone anymore.”

Three years of careful composure of maintaining dignity in the face of whispers and snubs, suddenly crumbled. The tears came without warning, great gulping sobs that she tried desperately to muffle against his shoulder as his arms came around her.

“Shh,” he murmured, his voice infinitely gentle. “Let it out. You’re safe here.”

Safe. When was the last time anyone had made her feel safe? When was the last time someone had held her without judgment, without calculation of what association with her might cost them?

When he tilted her face up to his, his thumb brushing away her tears, Ashley saw her own loneliness reflected in his eyes. Two people who had been surviving rather than living, finding unexpected solace in each other’s pain.

The kiss, when it came, was born of desperation rather than passion—two drowning souls reaching for something, anything, to anchor them to hope. His lips were warm against hers, tasting of brandy and grief, and she kissed him back with equal fervor, pouring three years of isolation and loneliness into that single moment of connection.

Time seemed suspended in the moonlit garden. The distant sounds of celebration faded away, leaving only the whisper of wind through the trees and the thundering of her own heartbeat. This was madness—kissing the Duke of Blackstone, the man who had been her harshest judge, in a garden where anyone might see them.

But for these stolen moments, Ashley allowed herself to forget consequences, to forget propriety, to forget everything except the warmth of his embrace and the desperate comfort they offered each other.

It was the shocked gasp that brought reality crashing back.

“Good God!”

They sprang apart as if burned, Ashley’s hands flying to her disheveled hair while Blackstone struggled to straighten his cravat. Lord Derrick stood at the entrance to their secluded alcove, his wife and two other society matrons gaping behind him like carrion birds who had discovered a particularly choice piece of scandal.

The Duke of Blackstone, disheveled and clearly intoxicated, caught in passionate embrace with the notorious Lady Ashley Ware. In a garden. At the most prominent wedding of the Season. With witnesses.

Ashley felt the blood drain from her face as the full magnitude of her situation crashed over her. This wasn’t merely another scandal—this was complete and utter ruin. No amount of careful behavior, no years of quiet dignity, could overcome being caught in such a compromising position. One scandal might be eventually overlooked but two…

“I…we…” she stammered, her mind reeling as she tried to find words that might somehow salvage this disaster.

But Blackstone had already risen to his feet, his aristocratic composure sliding back into place despite his obvious intoxication. When he offered her his arm with perfect propriety, as if they hadn’t just been discovered in the most compromising circumstances imaginable, Ashley could only stare at him in bewilderment.

“Lord Derrick,” he said with icy politeness. “Lady Derrick. I trust you’re enjoying the wedding festivities.”

The casual tone, as if nothing untoward had occurred, seemed to momentarily nonplus their audience. But Ashley could see the gleeful calculation in Lady Derrick’s eyes, could practically hear the scandal being refined into its most damaging form.

By tomorrow morning, all of London would know. By tomorrow evening, she would be completely ostracized, and the Duke of Blackstone’s reputation would suffer considerably by association.

As Blackstone escorted her back toward the ballroom, Ashley’s mind raced through her limited options. She could flee London entirely, perhaps to Scotland or Ireland, where her notoriety hadn’t yet penetrated. She could throw herself on her brother’s mercy and hope he would find some remote corner of one of his estates where she could live in quiet exile.

Or she once again could face the scandal head-on and brazen it out, though she doubted even her courage was equal to that task.

What she hadn’t expected was Blackstone’s calm pronouncement when her brother Wolf appeared at their side.

“Lord Wolfarth,” the duke said without preamble and in a voice loud enough to hear, “I’ve come to request your sister’s hand in marriage.”

The silence that followed was absolute. Never in a crowded ballroom had the absence of sound been so complete, so thunderous. Ashley felt the world tilt around her as she realized what he had just done.

Marriage. To the Duke of Blackstone. The man who had spent three years treating her as if she were invisible, who had judged her harshly for circumstances he didn’t understand. And now, because of a moment of shared grief and desperate comfort, he was offering to tie himself to her forever.

“I beg your pardon?” she managed to whisper.

“We are to marry,” Blackstone repeated, his dark eyes meeting hers with steady resolve. “Why don’t we make our way to my study to discuss the arrangements?”

As he guided her through the gaping crowd toward the privacy of his study, Ashley’s mind reeled with the implications. This wasn’t love—it was honor, duty, the aristocratic response to a compromising situation. But it was also salvation for them both, a way to transform scandal into respectability through the alchemy of marriage.

The question was whether she could bear a lifetime tied to a man who saw her as an obligation rather than a choice, married to someone whose heart lay buried with a red-haired Irish woman in an inconsequential grave.

 As soon as they were all seated in the duke’s study with the door firmly closed, he poured another drink for all of them. Ashley took her glass without thinking, deciding the sherry would help warm the cold inside. She sat silently as he explained the situation to Wolf.

“I can’t believe this,” Wolf said harshly, finding his voice at last. “How did you let this happen, Blackstone. You compromised my sister, and now you’re doing what honor demands.”

“Honor has very little to do with it,” the duke replied coolly. “I’m offering marriage because it’s what Lady Ashley deserves—protection, position, and the respect of my name.”

Ashley sank into a chair, overwhelmed by the sudden turn her life had taken. Marriage to the Duke of Blackstone—the man she’d spent three years viewing as the embodiment of everything judgmental and cruel about society.

“I don’t understand,” she said faintly. “You were grieving another woman. Tonight, you were drunk, not thinking clearly. Surely in the morning—”

“The morning won’t change anything,” Blackstone interrupted. “A second scandal will destroy you and your sister, Lady Ivy.”

Wolf stepped forward, his protective instincts overriding his confusion. “My sister doesn’t need your pity, Your Grace.”

“It’s not pity,” Blackstone said firmly. “It’s the honorable thing to do and you know it.”

Ashley looked up at him, searching his face for any sign of the tenderness she’d glimpsed in the garden. What she saw instead was resolve, determination, and something that might have been hope.

“A marriage of convenience?” she said quietly.

“Yes,” he agreed honestly.

Wolf looked between them, his anger gradually giving way to understanding. “You’re serious about this.”

“Completely serious,” Blackstone confirmed. “Lady Ashley will have the protection of my name, title and money. She will have my homes to manage and have a life of luxury.”

“And if I refuse?” Ashley asked, though she already knew the answer.

Wolf’s expression grew grim. “You don’t have that luxury, Ashley. If you don’t marry him, you’ll be completely ostracized. No invitations, no social standing, no prospects whatsoever. And think of Ivy. She’ll be ruined too.”

“Your brother is correct,” Blackstone said gently. “I’m afraid I’ve left you with very little choice. But I promise you this—as my wife, you’ll be treated with every courtesy and respect. You’ll want for nothing, and no one will dare to slight you again.”

Ashley closed her eyes, feeling the walls of her carefully constructed life crumbling around her. Three years of exile had been difficult enough, but at least she’d retained some small measure of independence. Marriage to the duke would mean trading that independence for security and status, binding herself to a man who saw her as an obligation rather than a choice. A man who had made it clear he didn’t like her.

But what alternative did she have? Ivy—she had to protect her younger sister who was already tarnished by association from the first scandal she’d been involved in.

“Very well,” she said finally, opening her eyes to meet his steady gaze. “I accept your proposal, Your Grace.”

Something flickered across Blackstone’s features—relief, perhaps, or satisfaction. “Thank you,” he said simply. “I promise you won’t regret this decision.”

“Won’t I?” Ashley rose from her chair, gathering what remained of her dignity around her like armor. “I will hold you to those words, your Grace.”

As Wolf and Ashley took their leave, with Wolf promising to call again later to discuss the arrangements, Ashley wanted to crawl into her bed and cry.

“You could do worse,” her brother said finally, his voice gentler than it had been. “He’s wealthy, titled, and despite everything, he has a reputation for treating women with respect.”

“He’s also in love with a dead woman,” Ashley replied quietly. “Marriage lasts a lifetime.” How lonely would she be?

“You’ll have your children,” Wolf suggested. “And society to rule over.”

Her stomach clenched. Children—oh my god, she’d have to share his bed. An unexpected wave of heat washed over her. Why was that thought not terrifying?

Ashley turned to look out the window of the carriage, she’d stopped dreaming of a happy ever after when her first scandal broke. She’d had dreams of spinsterhood and being the best aunt, she could be. Those dreams seemed very far away now. Never had she foreseen marrying—let alone marrying the Duke of Blackstone.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter what I want,” she said softly. “This is my life now. Duchess of Blackstone, wife to a man who sees me as a duty to be discharged rather than a woman to be loved.”

Wolf placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Love can grow, Ashley. Sometimes the strongest marriages are built on respect and understanding rather than passion.”

“Are they?” She leaned into her brother’s comfort, drawing strength from his steady presence. “I suppose I’ll find out, won’t I?”

Chapter One

London – 3 months later

A woman set on seducing her husband had to at least find a way to entice him into sharing her bed. Unfortunately, Lady Ashley had no idea how to entice a man who barely looked at her or spent any amount of time in her company.

The night of her wedding to the Duke of Blackstone, Raven Perrin or Raven as he had asked her to call him in private, didn’t come to her bed. Ashley had breathed a sigh of relief until a thought occurred. She wanted the one thing Raven could give her to make her life bearable—a child.

She might be innocent in the ways of men and women, but she knew enough to know it was unlikely she’d become enceinte if he didn’t sleep with her.

He’d loved Kitty, his mistress, who, a few months ago, was killed by the man trying to hurt Ashley’s friend Lady Courtney. Kitty had tried to stop the evil man, Baron Lockwood, and paid a dreadful price—her life. Courtney’s husband Lord Lucien, along with Raven, had killed the Baron when they rode to save kidnapped Lady Courtney.

Raven still grieved Kitty, maybe he always would, but surely, he could do his husbandry duties by her. She wasn’t that ugly. Many men had tried to seduce her when they thought her a lady of easy virtue. So how did she get his attention in the most Biblical sense?

He was a busy man, and she accepted that with his title came many duties both to the House of Lords and his tenants and family. Maintaining and growing his fortune consumed a great deal of time and of course he was doubly occupied because of the anonymous investment wager that he did not know to this day, had been issued by a group of ladies, the Sisterhood, of which she was a part. Winner took all…. The ladies had issued an anonymous challenge to Raven and Fane Deveraux, Earl of Marlowe, that they could generate the better return over twelve months. The men had no idea who their challenger was.

She couldn’t wait for Raven and Fane to lose, beaten by a group of women. Only a few months to go now. Tiffany was the brains behind it all. She was the Sisterhood’s investment guru and the ladies learned from listening to their men talking about what they were investing in, so they knew they were currently winning the wager.

On a sigh, she turned her thoughts back to her problem–Raven and his reluctance to bed her. She tried to think of how she was to progress their marriage. There was precisely four things she was good at.

The first was looking serene when she felt anything but. The second was making conversation so smooth and effortless that people forgot they were being managed. The third was finding solutions to problems that polite society would rather pretend didn’t exist. And the fourth, which she had never been permitted to use in public, was an absolutely scandalous imagination.

And her imagination was working overtime.

It was the fourth skill that was going to save her marriage. She was nearly certain.

She sat now in the window seat of her sitting room, ostensibly reading a slim volume of poetry, actually staring at the wall and cataloguing everything she knew about the seduction of unwilling men. Which, as it turned out, was considerably less than she would have liked, especially considering her scandalous reputation.

She thought trying to be the perfect duchess would do it. But no.

Three months. Three months of flawless ducal table settings, of conversation that stopped just short of anything real, of Raven looking at her across the length of their beautifully appointed dinner table like a man standing outside a warm room and refusing to open the door. She understood grief. She did. Kitty had been his—well… Whatever she had been, she was something Ashley clearly was not.

But a woman could only stare at her untouched pillow for so long before she began to develop opinions about it.

He does look at you, she reminded herself. He watches you when he thinks you cannot see him. That was something. That was, in fact, everything, because it meant the problem was not desire. The problem was whatever it was that was locked behind those green eyes that he kept so very carefully shuttered.

Ashley had always been good at opening locked things.

The sound of a commotion in the front hall interrupted her thoughts. A particular kind of commotion she recognized immediately. It had a specific rhythm, from the butler’s measured tones, to the sound of expensive slippered heels that didn’t slow down for anyone, and then a voice like warm laughter.

“I know she’s in. Her carriage is in the mews. Don’t be tiresome.”

Ashley set down her book and straightened, pressing her lips together to prevent the smile she could already feel breaking across her face.

Farah.

Lady Ware appeared in the doorway thirty seconds later, windblown from the cool air and entirely unrepentant about it, trailing a rather helpless-looking footman who appeared to have tried and failed to make her wait in the parlor.

“You may go,” Ashley told him pleasantly. “Lady Ware is always welcome here.”

Farah swept in, dropped into the chair across from Ashley with the boneless grace of someone who had never once sat where she was told, and fixed her with a look of unapologetic assessment.

“You look terrible,” Farah said. “Beautifully dressed and absolutely terrible.”

“How kind.” Ashley rang for tea. “You look disgracefully happy, as usual.”

“I am disgracefully happy. I love being married.” Farah propped her chin on her hand, wholly unashamed. “It is my permanent condition and I recommend it strongly. Which is why I’m here.” She pointed one accusatory finger. “You are not disgracefully happy. You are gracefully miserable, which is both more exhausting and considerably less entertaining.”

Ashley considered denying it. She had been denying it, with considerable skill, for three months. But this was Farah, who had once helped her hide a goat in Ashley’s brother, Wolf’s bedchamber, which was a story they had sworn never to discuss in polite company and there was no point in performing for Farah.

“He hasn’t come to my bed,” Ashley said.

The words landed between them with the dull thud of something that had been sitting unsaid too long.

Farah’s expression didn’t change. To her credit, she had always been quick, but she drew a slow breath through her nose. “Not once?”

“Not once.” Ashley reached for the teacup that had appeared at her elbow with grateful efficiency. “He is perfectly courteous. He is thoughtful. Last Tuesday he left a book on my desk that I had mentioned wanting to read, which I found so unbearably considerate that I nearly cried at breakfast.” She paused. “But he doesn’t come to my bed, Farah.”

Farah was quiet for a moment. Genuine quiet, which from her meant she was actually thinking rather than loading her next sentence. “And you want him to,” she said at last. It wasn’t a question.

Ashley looked at her steadily. “I want children. I want a real marriage. I want—” She stopped. Amended. “Yes. I want him to.” A child to love and who would love her in return, that was her goal. A life without love was just too terrifying to contemplate. Raven didn’t love her, and she wasn’t sure he ever would. But a child… A child would love her.

The fire crackled. Outside, a cart horse passed on the street below.

Then Farah sat up very straight, and Ashley recognized that particular light in her emerald colored eyes with equal parts hope and wariness.

“Right,” Farah said. “We’re fixing this.”

“I have been attempting to fix it for three months, and—”

“Have you, though?” Farah tilted her head. “Or have you been hinting that it might be nice if it were fixed, in a very well-bred way, while being too scared to do anything truly alarming?”

Ashley opened her mouth.

Closed it again.

“I have been sensible,” she said, with a certain amount of dignity. “Raven already thinks of me as this scandalous woman. I thought trying to behave as a duchess would help.”

Farah made a sound that was not quite a laugh. “Ashley. Darling. I love you, but since you got caught in your dreadful scandal, you have been sensible since the first time I met you, and it has never once solved any of your problems. The goat was my idea. The time we replaced Lady Marsden’s love poetry with a cookery pamphlet was your idea, but you wrote it in someone else’s handwriting, which I think rather tells us everything we need to know about your instincts when you are actually allowed to use them.”

Ashley pressed her lips together. She had forgotten about the cookery pamphlet. It had been very good.

“The situation,” she said, “requires delicacy. He is grieving. He is—”

“He is a man,” Farah said, not unkindly. “Who has eyes. And you are his wife, who is—” she gestured at Ashley’s general person in a sweeping motion —“quite spectacularly wasted in a cold bed.”

There was a pause.

“Thank you,” said Ashley.

“You’re welcome. Now.” Farah set down her teacup with the air of someone who had decided. “What do you actually know about seduction?”

The answer was embarrassingly brief. Ashley had learned the theory of it from novels that her governess had not known were novels. She had observed it, in a very peripheral way, at various assemblies and house parties, in the way certain women angled their fans and certain men completely lost the ability to hold a conversation. And of course, her brothers, both reformed rakes, had been an education in themselves. But she had no practical knowledge whatsoever, and her one attempt at strategic dinner flirtation last month had resulted in Raven refilling her wine glass very attentively and then excusing himself with perfect politeness, which she was fairly sure counted as a defeat.

She said none of this.

“I have some ideas,” she said instead.

Farah looked at her. “Ashley.”

“I have the beginnings of ideas.”

“Tell me the beginnings.”

Ashley put down her own cup and looked at the ceiling, because it was easier to speak to the ceiling than to Farah’s far too perceptive face. “There is a logical sequence to it. He keeps himself away from me in the evenings, which suggests that proximity is the issue — he is afraid of what happens when we are close. Therefore, the first step must be finding reasons to be in his proximity. Innocuous ones.” She paused. “I have been engineering reasons to be in the library at the same time. That has had some success.”

“What kind of success?”

“He read to me out of a horse-breeding manual for forty minutes and seemed almost to enjoy it.”

Farah’s expression was exquisitely controlled.

“That is an excellent first step,” she said, after a moment. “Step two?”

“Dinners. I’ve been having dinner with him more often. I’ve been—” She hesitated, because step two, when said aloud, left her feeling exposed. “I have been wearing slightly different necklines. Nothing improper. Just. Slightly lower…”

“And?”

“He knocked over his wine glass last week and seemed annoyed at himself.” Ashley allowed herself a small private smile. “I chose to take that as encouraging.”

Farah laughed, a genuine one, bright and delighted. “Oh, he’s suffering. Good. That’s exactly where you want him. What’s step three?”

Ashley was quiet.

Farah waited.

“I haven’t finished working out step three,” Ashley admitted. “It requires more information than I currently possess. About the mechanics of—” She gestured, a gesture that encompassed a significant amount of ground without naming any of it specifically. “You know.”

Farah blinked. “You want to learn how to—” She also gestured.

“I want to learn what works. I want to learn what makes a man who is determined to resist, stop resisting. I want—” Ashley stopped. Started again. “I was raised to be an ornament, Farah. I know how to pour tea and how to play the pianoforte and how to decline an improper invitation, which is a great deal of preparation for a life I am apparently not going to have, and no preparation at all for the one I am actually living.”

The room was quiet. Farah was watching her with an expression that had gone from delighted to soft, which Ashley found considerably harder to manage.

“I know,” Farah said. She reached over and touched Ashley’s hand briefly. Then, because she was Farah and softness was always followed by something bracing, “You know, Rockwell’s bachelor days club isn’t the only such establishment in London.”

Ashley’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“I mean there is a house on the edge of Sloane Square with a red door,” Farah said, with perfect casualness, smoothing the fringe of her shawl. “Very respectable, from the outside. Very well-regarded, on the inside, by men who know what well-regarded means in that context. They call the woman who runs it Madam Chloé. I’ve heard she’s extraordinarily clever and rather particular about her clientele.”

The silence that followed was complete.

Ashley spluttered. “How on earth do you know—”

—“Valora followed Fane there one night just to see where he went.”

“Farah,” Ashley said carefully, “are you suggesting I go to a brothel?”

“Gentlemen’s club. Fane uses it I believe, or so Valora says and where Fane is concerned Valora knows all,” Farah corrected, with perfect gravity. “It’s an important distinction, apparently. And I’m not suggesting you participate. I’m suggesting—” she tilted her head, eyes bright — “that a woman of imagination and determination, who needs a particular kind of information, might find it rather more forthcoming from someone whose whole profession is the application of it.”

Ashley stared at her. “You have thought about this,” she said.

“Not at all,” Farah said. “But I have thought that I could come with you.”

“Come with me?”

“In disguise, obviously. Rockwell would never know.” The smile that curved Farah’s mouth was the same smile she’d had at sixteen when she had suggested they climb out of the bedchamber window to watch the village bonfire. “I know where he keeps his old, caped greatcoat. I’d have to wear heels. We could be two gentlemen calling on Madam Chloé to inquire about membership.”

Ashley looked at her, at this woman who had been her friend since they were both in the schoolroom, who had a genuine talent for chaos, who was deeply, irrationally, completely loved by her enormous bear of a husband, and who had never in all the years Ashley had known her suggested something that wasn’t, in the end, the right thing to do.

She thought about it. She genuinely thought about it. The red door, the woman who ran the most discreet house in London, the particular kind of education available inside, and felt, to her own surprise, not fear but a low bright spark of something she had almost forgotten lived in her chest.

She was still alive, under all this propriety. She was still here.

“Absolutely not,” she said.

“Ashley—”

“You will not fit into Rockwell’s greatcoat, you are not as tall as you think, and if we are discovered together outside a Sloane Square brothel in disguise, it will be the most spectacular scandal in a generation and Tiffany will never forgive us.” She met Farah’s eyes. “However. I could go. Alone. In a very thorough disguise, with a completely watertight reason for being out of the house. Then it might be worth considering.”

Farah’s expression transfigured into pure delight. She did not say I knew it. She was too much of a friend for that. She simply smiled, and Ashley felt the spark in her chest glow a little brighter.

“I’d go in the daytime,” Ashley said, thinking aloud now, the plan beginning to arrange itself with the pleasant click of things falling into place. “Not at night. I’ll write a note — not in my name — and request a meeting to discuss the membership of a friend. Something that requires delicacy. Something that gives her reason to see me and gives me reason to ask questions.” She paused. “I will need to find the place first. I cannot very well hail a street hackney from my own front door.”

“Send one of the grooms to find it first,” Farah suggested. “A perfectly ordinary errand.”

“Yes. And I’ll need a veil. A proper one, not the sort that merely suggests privacy but actually guarantees it. I believe Tiffany used one when she visited the stock exchange. I’ll use that.” She looked at the window. “I told Raven I was walking around the corner to visit Tiffany last Thursday and he never questioned it. His hours are not regular.”

“There’s your alibi,” Farah said.

Ashley nodded slowly. “And once I have the information, once I actually understand what I am doing—” The plan continued unspooling, each step finding the next with the particular satisfaction she had always felt when a problem became solvable. “I shall need to change my approach entirely. No subtle dinners. No strategic necklines. Something that forces the issue.” She tapped her finger against her knee. “He responds to warmth. That night in the garden that started all of this, he needed my touch, my warmth. Which means he is the sort of man who has needs himself. He wants a connection.”

Farah was watching her with a particular expression. “You have been thinking about this for a long time,” she said.

“Three months,” Ashley agreed. “I have had excellent thinking time.” She looked at the fire. “I’m not going to be passive about this, Farah. I decided that in the first week. I may have made a bad start, but I’m going to work out a better one.”

“I know.” Farah was quiet for a moment. Then, more gently: “Does he know? About the scandal? About Carstairs?”

The name still landed with a small, cold shock, even now. Ashley kept her face even.

“He knows there was a scandal. He knows I was found in a carriage. He knows society chose to believe the worst.” She was quiet. “He doesn’t know why. You’re the only one I told because I know you’d never gossip. Even the other ladies don’t know because I can’t have Ivy finding out.” She had to protect her sister at all costs.

And the reason for it was the thing that lived in the back of her chest like a stone she’d learned to breathe around. She had never told anyone the whole of it—not even Farah, not the full truth.

Ivy had been seventeen. Just seventeen, and grief-mad from losing their father, and so hungry for someone to think she was wonderful that when Carstairs had turned that particular smile on her, she had written him letters. Foolish, adoring, utterly ruinous letters, full of things a young girl believed when she thought herself in love with a man who was only ever interested in her dowry.

When Ashley had found them, well found one, actually, an unopened letter from Carstairs, that she spied on Ivy’s writing desk and which of course she opened and read, her world changed. It detailed an elopement, she had done the only thing that made sense. She had gone to the rendezvous and confronted him. She had told him he would return the letters and leave Ivy alone or she would go to her brothers. And he had listened to her very pleasantly and then demonstrated, with a carriage and a bruising grip on her arm and thirty miles of night road, exactly how little he feared her brothers.

Lady Featherington had seen Ashley get into that carriage. That had been enough.

And Carstairs had made it very clear, on that dark road before he pushed her out, that if Ashley said a single word—if she named him, he would let society see Ivy’s letters. If Ivy’s letters ever became public, her sister’s prospects would be destroyed entirely. A girl who wrote those things to a man she is wasn’t married to. He had smiled. What would that make her?

So Ashley had kept her mouth shut, and had endured three years of cut directs and whispered speculation, had watched her dreams of a different life fold away one by one. She had managed it. She had gotten through it. She was still here.

“He was protecting himself,” she said now to Farah. “He knew I had nothing to gain from naming him because naming him named Ivy, too.” She looked at her hands. “Ivy doesn’t know. She was hurt that Carstairs suddenly disappeared but she had never learned of his suggested elopement and so she didn’t connect the dots to Ashley’s disgrace. Ivy has no idea what he threatened, what she cost me. She was very young, and she loved our father, and she needed someone to be kind to her. I’m not sorry.”

“Of course you’re not,” Farah said softly.

“I would do it again.” And she meant that—she knew it, the way she knew her own name. There had been no choice she could have made that would have let Ivy be hurt. There never would be. “That’s simply who I am. I’m very good at appearing sensible, Farah, but I am actually a complete disaster when it matters.”

Farah’s smile was warm and certain. “No,” she said. “You are someone who is very good at making sure the important things are protected. Which is not a disaster. Which is, in fact, exactly what your husband needs, even if he doesn’t know it yet. There must be some reason he hasn’t come to your bed? If his heart is still too full of Kitty, then he needs someone to remind him our hearts are big. They have room for others.”

Ashley looked at her for a moment. Then she reached for the last biscuit on the plate, a decision she had been approaching with strategic patience for the last several minutes, and ate it with great satisfaction.

“Right,” she said. “Help me plan the disguise.”

As they sat talking, Ashley started to get excited. But it seemed so easy.

Too easy. No, she would not let doubt creep in.

But lordy, lordy if Raven found out… She wasn’t afraid of her husband. He wasn’t the wife beating kind, but for some reason that annoyed her no end, she wanted him to like her, to respect her. She’d already been involved in two scandals; another one would make her an outcast duchess. She already knew people called her the lady who never behaves.

What she was planning was totally scandalous, but she would soak in Farah’s courage and joy of life. She could do this.

Once Farah had left, she poured herself a glass of sherry. Not a cup of tea. She needed something stronger.

She wanted a child and that meant Raven must come to her bed.

She wondered what questions she’d ask the women of the brothel and what they would teach her? Soon the alcohol, warmth and stuffiness of the room saw her eyes close, and she dreamed of a tall, athletic man taking her in his arms and kissing her….

 

 

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