Lucy took a breath, smoothing the front of her skirts. “I was ensuring the safety of this house, Your Grace. I can explain.”
“Safety?” He let out a sharp, jagged bark of a laugh. “You have just chased off a woman of high standing, a woman I intended to marry, by staging a cheap theatrical haunting in my own drawing room. You have made a mockery of my home and used my sons as your accomplices. You have sabotaged the very deal I hired you to facilitate.”
“I used the tools at my disposal,” Lucy countered, forcing herself not to flinch as he stopped only a foot away from her. “It is common knowledge among the Ton that Lady Judith is pathologically superstitious. She believes in omens, signs, and spirits. I simply provided her with a reason to believe that this estate, and this family, would not be a hospitable environment for her.”
“You had no right!” Rowan roared, the sound echoing off the high ceilings. “Your job was to find me a match, not to play judge, jury, and executioner on the woman I chose. Do you have any idea what you’ve done? You’ve left me back at the beginning with a household in chaos and a reputation that will be the laughingstock of London by nightfall.”
“Have you forgotten the terms of our arrangement so completely?” Rowan continued. “You were hired to find me a duchess, or you take that position. To find a woman who could sit at the head of this table and bring order to this house. Instead, you have sent my bride-to-be running for the hills in a state of hysterics! Why would you intentionally destroy the very thing you spent so much time building? It’s been well over two weeks.”
Before Lucy could answer, a sharp, delighted gasp cut through the tension.
“She takes the position?” Selina stepped fully into the room, her eyes wide and sparkling with a sudden, voracious interest. The shock on her face had vanished, replaced by the look of a womanwho had just found a hidden treasure map. “Wait, do you mean to say that you struck a deal?”
“Aunt, please, this is not the time,” Lucy groaned, but Selina was already moving toward them.
“On the contrary, this is the perfect time!” Selina chirped, looking between Rowan’s thunderous expression and Lucy’s defiant one. “I knew there was something more to this than just matchmaking. This might actually be a good thing.”
Rowan turned a searing look on Selina. “Lady Selina, I fail to see how the systematic destruction of my engagement is a good thing.”
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic, Your Grace,” Selina said, waving a hand airily. “If the woman is so dim-witted and jumpy that a small boy in a bedsheet and a sliding teacup can send her into a permanent exile, she was never fit to be a duchess anyway. You need a woman with steel in her spine, not one who faints at the sound of a settling floorboard. Lucy has actually done you a massive favor. She’s tested the woman’s mettle and found it lacking.”
She turned to Lucy, a sharp, knowing smile on her lips. “But I am curious, darling... if you were so successful in finding her, why were you so eager to see her bolt? Did you change your mind?”
Lucy felt the blood rush to her face. “It had nothing to do with me, Aunt! It had to do with the fact that she was a threat to this family.”
“A threat?” Rowan stepped back into Lucy’s line of sight, his eyes narrowing. “Explain yourself before I decide that you have simply lost your mind.”
“She hurt your son!”
Her words hit the room like an axe. The air seemed to leave the space, and even Selina’s excited chatter died instantly.
Lucy took a step toward Rowan, her face flushed with an offense so deep it burned. “You did not even inquire as to why I did it. You stand here accusing me of sabotage and ‘theatricals’ as if I am some bored socialite playing a game. You speak of her accomplishments as if they make her cruelty acceptable. But while you were focused on the ‘deal’ and the ‘suitability’ of the match, she was showing your son exactly what kind of mother she intended to be.”
Rowan’s posture didn’t change, but his eyes flickered, a momentary confusion breaking through the wall of his fury. “What are you talking about?”
“The day she arrived for dinner,” Lucy said, her voice trembling. “She was already mentally redecorating your home, speaking as if your late wife’s memory was nothing more than ‘drab’ furniture to be hauled away. When Brook told her she was getting ahead of herself, when he tried to defend his mother’s home, she slapped him, Rowan. Right across the face.”
Rowan went deathly still. The hand he had been using to gesture at the door dropped to his side.
“She didn’t stop there,” Lucy continued, her eyes locked on his. “She looked that child in the eye and promised him that once she was the Duchess, she would ‘discipline’ him properly. She threatened him, Rowan. She told him he would learn his place, or he would regret it. That is why he was rude. That is why he was acting out. He was terrified, and he didn’t tell you because he thought you needed her. He was willing to be hit and threatened just to buy you a little bit of peace.”
The silence that followed was absolute.
Rowan looked as though he had been turned to stone. The thunderous anger that had filled his lungs moments ago seemed to evaporate, leaving him hollow. He turned his gaze toward the door where his sons had just exited, his expression shifting from fury to a raw, staggering realization. He looked at the shattered glass on the floor before turning to her.
He let out a long, heavy sigh that sounded like a groan of physical pain. He sank into a nearby armchair, his head dropping into his hands, his fingers tangling in his dark hair.
“Why keep this from me, Lucy?”
Lucy braced herself. She watched the way his shoulders hunched, waiting for the secondary explosion, the moment he would turn his anger on her for withholding such vital, painful information. She expected him to accuse her of being as manipulative as Judith or perhaps to roar that a duke should never be the last to know of an assault in his own household.
Instead, the room went eerily quiet. Rowan didn’t stay seated for long. He stood up slowly, the exhaustion in his movements making him look far older than his years. He walked toward her, but the predatory edge was gone. When he stopped in front of her, his voice was thick with a different kind of hurt.
“Did you truly not trust me enough to tell me?” he asked, his eyes searching hers with a desperate intensity. “Did you think so little of me that you believed I would proceed with a proposal if I knew the woman had laid a hand on my son? Lucy, if you had told me even a moment before that carriage arrived, I would never have gone forward. I would have sent her away myself.”
Lucy looked up at him, her heart softening at the genuine pained look in his eyes. “I only found out late last night,” she explained, her voice softening. “Brook finally broke down in the library. It was all such a rush, and honestly, Rowan... I saw the way his spirit was flagging. He was sad.”
She took a small step closer, her hand instinctively reaching out toward his arm before she caught herself. “I knew if I told you immediately, you would have handled it. You would have been the Duke, you would have had a stern talk, cancelled the arrangement, and sent her packing. It would have been efficient, and it would have been over.”
