"Your stepmother," Rhys said, "has considerably less power over your circumstances than she once did. I've already spoken to my solicitor about the matter of your father's estate: what remains of it, and what was owed to you directly rather than to the household that's kept it from you these past three years."
Avalene stared at him. "You looked into my father's estate?"
"I looked into everything," Rhys admitted, not the least bit ashamed. "I told you, Lady Avalene, I make it my business to know who deserves my attention. It seemed only fair that I understand the full shape of what you've endured, so that I might do what I could to see it corrected."
Tears pricked unexpectedly at the corners of her eyes, and she pressed the back of her hand briefly against them, embarrassed by how easily this man's plain, steady kindness could undo her. "No one has ever gone to such trouble for me before."
"Then it's long overdue," Rhys said simply, and reached across the small distance between them to take her hand in his.
The weeks that followed unfolded like the slow thaw after a long winter. Rhys called every Thursday, exactly as promised, and often on other days besides, when some excuse could be found to justify it. Her stepmother's hostility, robbed of its usual leverage by the Duke's evident and unwavering regard, curdled first into resentful silence, and eventually, as the reality of Avalene's changing circumstances became impossible to ignore, into a grudging and carefully rationed civility.
The matter of her father's estate resolved more swiftly than Avalene had dared hope: the funds and modest property that had been quietly absorbed into her stepmother's management finally restored to her rightful name, granting her, for the first time in three years, a measure of independence that made every remaining unkindness in that house considerably easier to bear, simply because she now knew she didn't have to bear it forever.
But the ease of those weeks was not without its own quiet tests, and the first of them arrived on a bright September afternoon in the form of Lord Edmund Harcourt, a childhood friend of Rhys's who had returned from the continent that summer, and who seemed from the very first moment he was introduced to Avalene at a garden luncheon hosted by the Duke's aunt determined to make his disapproval of the match known through every polite and impolite means available to him.
"Forgive me," he said, settling into the chair beside her with the easy confidence of a man accustomed to being welcomed everywhere. "But I confess myself curious. Ashcombe has spent a decade fending off the finest families in the country, and now he's to marry a woman no one had heard of a season ago. You'll understand if the story seems to some of us a touch too convenient."
"I understand a great many people find it easier to question good fortune than to simply accept it exists," Avalene said evenly, refusing to let the barb land the way he'd clearly intended.
Lord Harcourt's smile thinned. "A clever answer, though it doesn't quite address the question."