“I’ll Marry the First Woman Who Enters,” the Duke Declared— Then She Burst In Chasing a Bird With…

Chapter 1

Clara Hale had one thing left in the world that mattered, and a white bird had just carried it through a window that did not belong to her. She did not stop to think about the mud up her hems, or the second slipper she had lost somewhere between the rose walk and the terrace steps. She thought about the chain in the bird’s beak — her mother’s, the only object her mother had ever owned that nobody could take from her. Then she ran straight into a room full of aristocrats, and the room went quiet in the particular way that means a person has done something unforgivable. The chain dropped. It landed on a man’s head. And that man, she would learn much later, had sworn one hour earlier that he would marry the first unmarried woman who walked through that door.

Adrian Sinclair, Duke of Ashbourne, had spent the entire evening being told what he required, and by ten o’clock he had concluded that civilization had overreached itself.

“Your Grace.” Lady Beatrice Sinclair said it the way a physician says a diagnosis. “A man in your position cannot remain unmarried forever.”

Adrian regarded her across the candlelight. His aunt had chosen the seat with the best view of him and the worst view of the door, which meant she intended to keep him cornered until he surrendered. He had known her long enough to admire the strategy.

“Apparently I can remain unmarried for at least one more evening.”

Lady Beatrice closed her eyes. Beside her, Theo Sinclair coughed into his wine and made no effort whatsoever to hide the smile forming behind his glass.

“You require an heir,” she continued. “I am aware. You require a duchess. Also aware. And yet you have refused every respectable woman presented to you.”

“I refused four because they wanted the title. Two because they wanted the money.” Adrian turned his glass by the stem, watching the wine climb the crystal. “And one because she informed me, within a quarter hour of our introduction, that she intended to repaint the entire house. She had excellent taste. She wanted the library pink.”

“That would have been memorable,” Theo offered.

“It would have been a felony.”

“Adrian.” His aunt’s voice sharpened. “You cannot hide behind wit forever.”

“I am not hiding. I am declining.”

“You have been a duke for eight years and a bachelor for eight years.”

“Those two facts are unrelated.”

“They are entirely related. To the succession.”

He looked toward the tall windows instead of answering. Beyond the glass, the park rolled away silver under the moon, hedges cut into geometry, the lake holding a flat coin of light. Inside, the drawing room had been arranged with the precision of a battlefield: relatives along the west wall, friends along the east, and three unmarried women distributed among the furniture as deliberately as chess pieces. One of them kept glancing at him and then away, rehearsing an expression she clearly believed to be modest.

He was tired. Not of the evening — of the whole performance. Eight years of being inspected by mothers and appraised by daughters, of conversations that were really transactions wearing gloves.

He set the glass down harder than he meant to.

“Fine.”

His aunt’s head came up.

“I shall marry the first unmarried woman who enters this room.”

Silence. Theo’s glass stopped halfway to his mouth.

“Take that back,” Lady Beatrice said.

“No.”

“You cannot possibly mean it.”

“I do.”

“You have not even seen who it might be.”

“That,” Adrian said, “is the beauty of it.”

“It is madness.”

“Madness would be continuing with a method that has produced nothing in eight years.” He stood, buttoning his coat with the calm of a man who had just solved a problem. “I am done negotiating.”

His aunt opened her mouth to reply.

She never got the chance.

Somewhere down the corridor came a crash — not a small one, but the sound of something ceramic meeting stone with intent. Every head in the room turned toward the doors. A second crash. Then a woman’s voice, breathless and furious.

“Come back here—”

Theo half-rose. “What on earth—”

Something struck the wall in the passage. A servant shouted. And then the drawing room doors burst open.

The woman did not walk in. She flew.

She came through with her pale blue skirts gathered in both fists, moving fast enough that the doors swung back and slammed against the panelling. Her bonnet had slid off her head and now hung down her back on its ribbons, letting loose a coil of dark hair across her face. One foot was bare.

Behind her came a white bird.

It was enormous — a magpie crossed with something insolent, wings spread wide enough to shadow the candlelight as it passed. In its beak, bright as a coal, hung a gold chain with a single pendant.

“Stop—” The woman lunged. The bird climbed.

She jumped. Twenty pairs of aristocratic eyes watched a stranger in muddy hems leap straight up after a bird over the tea table. She landed badly, caught herself on the edge of a side table, sent a dish of sweets skittering, and only then seemed to register that she was the center of a room containing half the county.

Her face went scarlet all the way to the roots of her hair.

“Oh,” Theo whispered into his wine. “This is excellent.”

She ignored him entirely. She pointed at the bird, which had settled on the chandelier and was watching her with the calm of an artist admiring his own work. “It stole my necklace.”

“It often does that?” Adrian asked.

“Only when it sees me.”

“That seems personal.”

“It is personal.”

The bird opened its beak.

The chain fell.

Adrian felt something land on his head — light, cold, and unmistakably deliberate. The chandelier light swayed above him. Nobody spoke. Theo made a strangled noise, clapped a hand over his mouth, and failed. Lady Beatrice pressed her fingers to her lips.

The stranger stared at him.

And then, despite everything, she laughed — a bright, helpless sound that cut straight through the gilded silence of his drawing room like a dropped glass.

Adrian reached up and removed the necklace from his hair.

“You appear to have found your thief,” he said.

She came toward him, still flushed, still half undone. Up close she was younger than he’d expected, and there was a freckle beside her left cheek and a look in her eyes that was equal parts mortification and a willingness to fight the entire room if required.

“I am sorry about the bird,” she said. “And the table. And—” She gestured vaguely at the whole of his life.

He held out the chain. She took it, and their fingers touched, and for one absurd second the room simply stopped existing. Clear gray-blue eyes. A small, stubborn jaw. Then she glanced past him at his aunt, at the three unmarried women arranged along the wall like exhibits, and back at him, and understanding arrived on her face like weather.

“You’re the Duke.”

“Yes.”

“Oh no.”

Adrian nearly smiled. “You have heard of me.”

“I have heard enough to know I should probably leave.”

“You may be right.”

She took one step toward the door. He spoke before he had decided to.

“Miss.” She turned. “What is your name?”

“Clara Hale.”

“Miss Hale.” He heard his own voice go steady in a way that ought to have frightened him. “Are you unmarried?”

She stared at him. “That is an extraordinarily rude question.”

“Under ordinary circumstances, I would agree.”

“And these are not ordinary circumstances.”

“Not remotely.”

She looked at the bird, then at the chain in her hand, then — with obvious reluctance — back at him. “No. I am unmarried.”

Adrian glanced at his aunt.

Lady Beatrice looked like a woman watching the British Empire kneel down in the middle of her carpet.

“Why,” Clara demanded, “are you looking at me like that?”

And Adrian Sinclair, Duke of Ashbourne, eight years a bachelor, four hours past patience, said it out loud.

“Because you are the first unmarried woman to enter this room.”

Her mouth fell open.

Theo, from behind his wine, said helpfully: “I would like to point out that the bird entered first.”