Forty guests watched from the line of carriages. No one laughed. No one dared.The dog was called Sovereign. He stood nearly as tall as a pony, gray as a storm cloud, with a scarred muzzle and eyes the color of old amber. In three years, he had driven 11 women from Ravenhurst Park: he had torn the hem from a countess's gown; he had backed an earl's daughter into a fountain, and she had not stopped screaming until she reached London.Society, which can never resist a wager, had begun to say that no woman living would ever become Duchess of Ravenhurst because the Duke's hound would not allow it. The Duke had never corrected them. He called it a harmless eccentricity and let the whispers circle him like smoke. He was a man who believed that to explain oneself was to admit weakness. So, he had let a dog pass judgment on every lady who came up his drive, and he had never once asked himself why he preferred it that way.Today, the twelfth sat in the first carriage. Lady Mary Vance—golden-haired, perfectly bred, and perfectly certain of her welcome—pressed a scented handkerchief to her lips and refused to step down while the beast snarled at her through the wheels. Her mother demanded that the creature be chained. A footman suggested, nervously, that it be shot.The Duke answered neither of them, because he alone had noticed something he had told no one in three years: Sovereign's growl did not sound like hatred. It sounded like waiting.Then the voice of a stranger cut across the drive:"Forgive me. Is this the way to the house?"Every head turned.A young woman stood at the open gate, her gray cloak patched at the hem, her boots caked to the ankle with road mud. A bundle was clutched against her chest as though someone might try to take it from her. She could not have been more than 24. Her dark hair had come loose in the wind, and her face was pale with cold and exhaustion. Yet she held her chin high with the stubborn grace of a woman who had once been taught how to enter a room and had not forgotten.Her name was Isolde.