Hazel stood outside the carriage, watching her sisters climb in, settle themselves, and tug blankets over their laps. They looked small in the dim lantern light. They looked like little girls, still innocent enough to sleep soundly after a disaster.
If onlyshecould.
She reached for the carriage step, determined to put this cursed night behind her, but then a deep voice made her halt.
“You are not going anywhere.”
She closed her eyes for half a heartbeat before turning. Greyson Thornhill, the Duke of Callbury, stood several paces away, tall and dark as the night behind him. His silver eyes fixed on her with irritating certainty, as though he had all the right in the world to interfere.
She drew herself up. “We should not be seen together,” she whispered fiercely. “Ever again. Or do you want evenmorerumors?”
He didn’t flinch. “There is a different option,” he said calmly, “to killing the rumors besides you fleeing the city.”
Hazel let out a breathless, humorless snort. “What? And what option is that, me changing my name and becoming someone else?”
Greyson tilted his head, studying her with that maddening, unreadable gaze. “Well, yes… in a way.”
Hazel frowned. “What do you mean?”
His answer was astoundingly casual for a statement that cleaved her world clean in two.
“Youmarry me.”
Hazel stared at him. The words hung between them, shimmering with absurdity. Her lips parted, but nothing emerged. She was too stunned to breathe, let alone move.
When she finally blurted her response, it was resounding. “That is the last thing I want to do!”
“Why?” he asked, as though she were refusing an extra biscuit with her tea rather than a proposal that could ruin both their lives.
Hazel’s heart careened about her chest like a loose carriage wheel. She could not tell him the real reasons, the vulnerable ones. So she grasped for anything else.
“Well, for one,” she began, hands fluttering before she caught them, “my aunt once told me that marriage gives a woman wrinkles. Immediate wrinkles… overnight.”
He blinked. “Wrinkles.”
“Yes,” Hazel said firmly. “Deep ones, across the forehead. Very tragic.”
He stared at her, his silver eyes narrowing as though trying to determine whether she was suffering from heatstroke.
“And,” she hurried on, “I have it on excellent authority that dukes snore.”
Greyson’s lips parted. “I do not?—”
She cut him off with a raised finger. “I will take no chances.”
His expression was priceless.
“And furthermore,” she pressed, warming to her own nonsense, “I have recently developed an aversion to… large houses.”
His jaw tightened. “An aversion.”
“Yes. The bigger the house, the more I…sneeze.” She nodded sagely. “It’s a medical condition.”
“A medical?—”
“And then,” Hazel added, voice rising, “there is the matter of your horses.”
“My horses.”
