Prologue
Eton College, England
Summer 1819
The first fewsteps Delilah took onto the stage stuttered with hesitation. A surprise, that. After all, this moment was all she’d ever wanted.
Then one step gained momentum after another and she was standing in the center, lights bright upon her, awareness of the audience’s rapt attention skittering across her skin, fizzing through every last nerve ending.
Alive.
That was how she felt in this moment.
Utterly and entirely alive with a joy she’d never before experienced.
She was here, upon a real stage, acting in front of a real audience.
She opened her mouth to speak her first line.
“Lady Delilah?” rang out into the silence.
Delilah blinked and immediately shook off the notion that the question had been intended for her. There could be any number of Lady Delilah’s in the audience.
Ignoring it, she opened her mouth again.
“Why,” came the voice again—louder, clearer…certain.
Delilah’s ear picked up a note in that voice, too.Familiar.
“I do believe it truly is Lady Delilah Windermere.”
All eyes widened on her—and something happened within those eyes. They sawher—Lady Delilah Windermere. A lady who had no business being on this stage or anywhere near it.
In an instant, three available options came to her.
She could collapse to the stage boards in tears, a sniveling cowardly mess.
She could laugh it off and say the joke was on them.
She could sink to her knees in shame and offer her most abject apologies.
So many options…
None of them tolerable.
Instead, she squared up to the audience, who were growing unsettled in their seats and louder in their murmurings, and pulled herself up to her full five-foot, ten-inch height before lowering into a deep curtsey. When she rose, she wore the broadest—and falsest—smile of her life. She even received a thin, uncertain scattering of applause.
But she didn’t budge from her patch of stage. Instead, she stood there, immovable, silent, her eyes slowly, carefully raking across the crowd until…
They landed on the owner of that voice—a voice she’d known since her brother Archie had brought him home on school break years ago—with his tousled dark blond hair and golden eyes that held the power to mesmerize. Not her, of course, but she’d overheard more than a few young ladies rhapsodize about those eyes.
His Grace Sebastian Crewe, the Duke of Ravensworth.
His usual air of sardonic gravity hung about him like a dense cloak, vibrating with the energy specific to him. For a mad moment, she entertained the possibility that Archie had sent this duke to cheat her out of her triumph—for it was clear she’d been on the verge of winning their bet. He’d posited she couldn’t make it through the short summer term at Eton as a boy. Delilah had posited that she could. A bet had been made.
She shook off the idea. Archie was a lot of things, but he was no cheat. No, this was all Ravensworth with his cool, assessing gaze that didn’t flinch or shift away from her unrelenting glare.
Delilah had never had an enemy—not before this moment.
