She was developing an attachment.
An ill-advised, impractical, wholly impossible attachment to a man who had spent his life fortifying himself against precisely such entanglements.
She must remember this was temporary. That she would depart once the roads cleared. That she was meant to be assisting Adelaide in securing a respectable match—not mooning over a reclusive duke with sad eyes and enormous hands.
She needed, desperately, to think of something other than rivers and moonlight and unfastened collars.
***
The castle proved far more extensive than she had imagined.
Beyond the familiar corridors lay a maze of galleries and chambers, staircases spiralling upward into towers and downward into shadowed depths that suggested ancient cellars. She walked slowly, cane tapping lightly against stone, curiosity guiding her steps.
She passed a gallery of ancestral portraits—Hales stretching back generations, stern and dark-haired, though none possessed Christian’s particular intensity. A music room stood silent beneath dust covers. A small private chapel glowed faintly with coloured light from stained glass windows.
It was in the eastern corridor, distant from the inhabited rooms, that she heard it.
A steady thud. The sharp clash of steel. A breath drawn and expelled with force.
She slowed.
She ought to turn back. Whatever lay beyond the heavy oak door ahead was not her concern.
But curiosity had never been her only weakness.
There was something else now—something that had been growing quietly these past days. A restless awareness. A tightening low in her chest whenever he entered a room. A heat she had not permitted herself to examine too closely.
The door stood slightly ajar. She moved closer and looked within.
The room was vast and high-ceilinged—a training hall. Racks of weapons lined the walls. The floor bore the scuffs of long use.
And at its centre stood the Duke.
He moved with controlled precision, fencing against a practice dummy, blade flashing in swift arcs. But it was not the sword that stilled her breath.
He had removed his coat. His waistcoat. His cravat.
His shirt hung open at the throat.
The birthmark.
Wine-dark, exactly as described. Beginning just beneath his jaw, sweeping across his collarbone, disappearing beneath linen. Its edges softened into his skin like pigment absorbed by marble.
It was not monstrous.
It was not even dramatic.
It was simply…him.
And the rest of him—
She had known he was large. She had felt his strength when he carried her. But she had not understood the full measure of it. His shoulders were impossibly wide, his arms roped with muscle that flexed and shifted as he moved through the sword forms. His shirt, damp with exertion, clung to his back, outlining the planes and hollows of a body built for power.
His hair had come loose from its queue, spilling around his face in wild dark waves. A strand clung to his throat, just above the birthmark, and Fiona found herself transfixed by that single detail—the contrast of dark hair against wine-stained skin, the vulnerable hollow at the base of his throat where his pulse must be beating.
She should look away.
She did not.
