It was one thing to discuss the humiliating bargain behind a closed door with a sympathetic solicitor. It was another to face its subject in the flesh. Alone. Unchaperoned. The audacity of it would have seen a lady of the ton exiled from society for a season.
But Annabelle Thornbury was not a lady of the ton. She was, as Henderson had said, trade.
"Give me a moment, Jenkins."
Alaric went to the cracked mirror by the fireplace, smoothed the silver braid of his uniform, set his collar, and forced his face into something impenetrable. He would not let her see his desperation, would not let her see the man who had spent the morning pricing the family silver. He would meet her as the Duke of Velloway or not at all.
"Show me to her."
He walked the corridors of Blackwood Manor with a military step, his boots loud on the stone. The damp chill seeped into his bones. He usually ignored it, a penance for his failure; today he felt it, and he hoped she felt it too. Let the cold drive her back to her father's coal fires.
He entered the drawing room as he would a battlefield, head high, spine straight.
She stood by the fireplace with her back to him, studying a tarnished portrait of his great-grandmother, the formidable Duchess Georgiana. The fire Jenkins had hastily lit sputtered and threw long shadows over the peeling paper.
"Miss Thornbury." It was not a greeting. It was the crack of a whip.
She turned, unhurried.
He had expected a frilly, overdressed doll dripping in new diamonds, desperate to impress. Or a cowering girl, terrified of the title she was being bought to wear. He had not expected this.
Annabelle Thornbury was nothing like the pale debutantes of London. She wore a traveling dress of forest-green velvet, cut severe and modern, without a single ribbon, the fabric so fine it announced her wealth more loudly than any tapestry. Her hair was the color of polished copper, pulled back hard, which only sharpened the elegant bones of her face. Her eyes were a cool green, like moss on a river stone, and entirely unimpressed.
She did not curtsy. She did not blush. She looked him over from boots to face with the detachment of a buyer appraising a horse.
"Your Grace." Her voice was low and even. "Thank you for your time."
"You did not request it," he said, stepping in but keeping his distance. "You invaded my home."
A small dry smile touched her mouth without reaching her eyes. "Waiting for an invitation tends to waste time. My father taught me time is the one thing a person cannot buy."
"Your father seems to believe he can buy everything else."
"He usually can." She moved slowly around the room, ran a gloved finger along an inlaid side table, looked at the dust on it, and wiped it away. "You have a beautiful estate, Duke."
"I do not require your assessment."
"It wasn't an assessment." She glanced up at the water stain spreading across the plaster like a bruise. "It is a fact. It is beautiful. And it is falling apart."
Heat climbed the back of his neck. It was one thing to know his house was crumbling and another to have a stranger say it to his face.
"You overstep, madam," he warned, his voice dropping.
"Is that what you call it?" She swept a hand at the faded chaise, the cobwebs in the high corners, the Persian rug worn through to the weave. "I call it mismanagement. I call it neglect." She faced him fully, chin up. "We are both people of business, Your Grace. Let us not pretend otherwise."
"I am a Duke," he said, drawing to his full height. "I serve the Crown and my people. I am not a person of business. And you are—"
"I am my father's daughter," she finished, with no shame at all, and something close to pride. "I understand ledgers, Duke. Assets and liabilities. And I have no intention of marrying a ruin, however ancient the stone or blue the blood."
He stared at her. She spoke of marriage as if it were the merger of two railway lines, no romance, not even the polite fiction of a social match. Brutal. Honest. Repugnant.
"Then leave," he said. "The door is there. I did not ask for you, or for your father's money."
"Didn't you?" Her gaze did not waver. "His solicitors believe otherwise. They say the bank forecloses on the home farm in two weeks. They say you cannot afford to heat this room." She drew her velvet jacket closer, though her eyes stayed hard. "My father is buying your title. Your bloodline, for his grandchildren. In return you get the money to mend your roof and feed your tenants. It is a transaction. I came to see the merchandise."
"Merchandise." It tore out of him before he could stop it. He stepped forward, fists at his sides. "You dare call me merchandise?"
He loomed over her, using his size, his anger. Men cowered before that.
Annabelle Thornbury did not. She did not even blink. She tipped her head back to hold his eyes.
"Are you not?" she said quietly. "You are selling your name. I am the payment. Or rather, I am the receipt."
For a moment he could not speak. Her words stripped away every justification he had built, that he was sacrificing himself for his people. She made it sound as if he were selling his body.
But under the steel he saw something else, a flicker in the green eyes, a tightness in her jaw. She was attacking him, and she was defending herself.
"And you?" His voice went soft and dangerous. "What are you in this transaction, Miss Thornbury? The buyer? Or the coin your father hands across the table?"
It landed. He saw the flash of it, pain or anger, pulling at her mouth.
"I am the one who has to live here," she said, the business gone out of her voice and something more personal under it. "I am the one who will sleep in this drafty mausoleum and bear children to a man who looks at me as if I were something on his boot. So forgive me if I want to be sure the roof won't come down while I do it."
She crossed past him, her skirts brushing his boots. Her scent caught him, not the rosewater of the court but something sharper. Sandalwood, and vanilla. It unsettled him.
At the door she turned back. The gray light from the window framed her and lit the copper of her hair against the gloom.
"I will leave," she said, smoothing her gloves. "But my father returns tomorrow, and he will bring the contract. Play at offended pride as long as you like, Duke. Storm and shout and look down your nose at us. We both know you will sign."
She paused, her gaze moving over him once more, not with admiration but with a cool, calculating curiosity.
"The only question," she added, "is on whose terms."
"I am the Duke of Velloway." The words felt hollow even as he said them. "This is my land. The terms will be mine."
"We shall see. Until tomorrow, Your Grace."
She opened the door herself, ignoring the bell pull, and swept into the hall.
Alaric stood alone in the cold room. The fire hissed. His great-grandmother looked down at him from her frame as if disappointed.
He went to the window and watched a sleek modern carriage roll down the cracked drive, throwing mud over the stone lions at the gate.
He was humiliated. He was enraged. And for the first time in months he was not merely numb; the numbness had burned off in the heat of Annabelle Thornbury's hair and the ice of her tongue.
Henderson was wrong, he realized. This would not be a compromise, and it would certainly not be a marriage.
It would be a war.