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. 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. 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 Pemberton 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 a 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.
“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 Pemberton,” he said with icy politeness. “Lady Pemberton. 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 Pemberton’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 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 Wolf appeared at their side.
“Lord Wolfarth,” the duke said without preamble, “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, sothunderous. 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.
