But somewhere along the way, respect had turned into something he couldn’t quite say out loud. Something that made his chest tighten when she smiled without thinking, or when she stood her ground, her chin lifted just so.
He liked her. More than he meant to. More than he should.
Then clarity struck, cold and abrupt.
This was Beatrice. The woman who had once dissected him in newsprint with surgical precision, whose quill had flayed half the House of Lords and him along with them.
Miss Verity, sitting at his breakfast table, eating toast as though she had never brought the country to fits over her opinions.
The realization jarred him.Hard.
Edward blinked, straightened, and wrapped a hand around his cup as though anchoring himself with the china. He focused on the steam rising from the tea, on anything that wasn’t the shape of her mouth or the very real possibility that he was beginning to lose his composure over a woman who had once called himunimaginativeand worse in published essays.
He took a long, deliberate sip. But it did nothing to steady his racing heart.
The next afternoon found Edward in a mood that could only be described by those who valued understatement as sour.
It had begun the moment he stepped out of his study and found yet another note from Beatrice on the silver tray in the hall. Her handwriting was neat, decisive, and impossible to argue with.
The tailor will arrive at two.
Please make yourself available.
B.
He had stared at it for a full minute before muttering something unprintable. It felt suspiciously like being managed. By his own wife.
The worst part was that she did it rather well.
The morning did nothing to lift his spirits. The steward arrived with a ledger large enough to stun an ox, the solicitor sent a packet of documents that required his signature on every page, and one of the footmen managed to drop an entire tray of polishing cloths at his feet in a tangle of mortified apologies.
By noon, Edward had begun to suspect the universe was conspiring to remind him that his life had become far too orderly for his liking.
Three hours after, he was ready to face anything other than an afternoon of fabric and needles. Anything except that.
But fate and Beatrice’s determination were aligned against him.
Edward had endured societal battlefields, the House of Lords, and—God help him—Sebastian in a sentimental mood. But nothing, absolutely nothing, prepared him for an afternoon with a tailor and a duchess who refused to yield.
He had even survived a decade of wearing coats that suited him perfectly well—even admirably, depending on which hostess one asked—and the idea that marriage somehow required a sudden transformation into a walking mannequin struck him as profoundly unreasonable.
Unfortunately, Beatrice did not share this view.
Worse, she had armed herself with the most unforgiving of weapons: calm determination.
The tailor was announced right after luncheon with an expression suggesting he intended to rebuild Edward entirely from the shoulders down, followed by the clatter of a small army of assistants carrying long rectangular boxes and rolls of fabric draped over their arms.
They marched into the drawing room like pallbearers at some elaborate ceremony. Edward watched the procession with mounting dread.
“For God’s sake,” he muttered. “I’m only attending a ball.”
Beatrice didn’t look up from the letter she was reviewing. “You are attendingseveralballs, Your Grace. And charity dinners. And luncheons. And Lady Ashcombe’s musicale next Thursday.”
Edward’s entire soul recoiled. “I am?”
“You are,” she said gently, signing her name at the bottom of a page. “It’s what people do.”
“I’ve avoided musicales for years.”
