“That,” the duke said quietly, turning back to her stunned father, “is not a question I intend to answer tonight.”
He removed his gloves unhurriedly and handed them to a waiting servant. “I understand dinner is being prepared. I won’t be sitting for it, not until Lady Serafina joins the table herself.”
Lady Cordelia’s mouth opened and closed without sound. The Duke of Blackthorn simply stood there, patient as stone, waiting for a girl the family had spent years trying to erase.
Serafina came down because refusing was no longer an option. Not with the Duke of Blackthorn standing in the entrance hall, refusing dinner on her account in front of every servant and neighbor who would talk about it for weeks.
She wore the same plain gray dress. She hadn’t been given time or permission to change. When she entered the dining room, conversation stopped. Marguerite’s eyes narrowed. Isolde looked faintly ill. Her father wouldn’t meet her gaze at all.
The duke rose from his seat. No one had ever risen for her before.
“Lady Serafina,” he said, and pulled out the chair directly beside his own, not down the table where the family had clearly intended to seat her, if they’d intended to seat her at all. “Thank you for joining us.”
She sat carefully, aware of every eye in the room. She expected him to ask the usual things: her age, her accomplishments, perhaps some polite cruelty disguised as small talk. Instead, once the first course was cleared, he asked about the estate’s eastern boundary and whether the drainage repairs from two winters ago had held through the spring floods.
The table went quiet in a different way this time, confused rather than scornful.
“They held,” Serafina said slowly. “I reinforced the channel near the tenant cottages myself after the first repair failed.”
“With Aldous Whitmore’s help, I understand.”
“He mentioned it to one of my men.”
She stared at him. “Your men have spoken to the Whitmore family?”
“I make it a habit to know the estates I intend to visit.”
He said it simply, without apology, though something in his tone suggested it was not habit at all, that this had taken months, not days.
He asked about the library next, how she had sourced replacement bindings for the water-damaged volumes, where she had learned to read old estate ledgers well enough to catch an error the family’s own steward had missed for six years. He asked about the tenant children, about which families still struggled through winter, about a schoolhouse that didn’t yet exist but clearly should.
He was not flirting. He was not performing charm the way suitors did with Marguerite. He was listening, and worse, he already knew half the answers before she gave them.
“You’ve been investigating me,” Serafina said finally, quiet enough that only he could hear.
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“Not you directly at first. I was searching the eastern county records for the girl who helped me at the gamekeeper’s cottage years ago. When I traced your name to Ashford Manor, my men uncovered the local whispers about how you quietly balanced the neglected estate ledgers and taught the tenant children to read. Longer than you’d believe.”
Across the table, Lady Cordelia’s knuckles had gone white around her wine glass. Isolde leaned toward Marguerite, whispering something behind her fan, her eyes darting between Serafina and the duke with open suspicion.
When dinner ended, the duke did not linger over dessert wine with her father as custom demanded. Instead, he turned to Lord Devereux directly.
“I have a request.”
“Anything, Your Grace.” Her father’s voice had the particular strain of a man who suspected he was about to regret his own words.
“I would like Lady Serafina to come to Blackthorn Castle for several weeks.”
The room went utterly still.
“As my personal adviser,” the duke added before anyone could mistake his meaning. “Not as a guest, not as a prospective bride. I need her knowledge of estate records, archival history, and family correspondence. Her skills are considerable.”
Lady Cordelia’s composure cracked at last. “Your Grace, surely one of my own daughters would be better suited to—”
“I have made my request.” His tone did not invite argument. “I trust it will be honored.”
Serafina sat frozen in her chair, heart hammering, as her father, for the first time in years, looked directly at her. Not with warmth, not with an apology, but with something new, something careful, as though he were seeing a stranger sit where his daughter used to be.
She didn’t understand any of it yet. Not why the duke had come, not what he already knew of her, not why her name alone had been enough to bring him three days’ ride from Blackthorn. But she understood one thing clearly. Whatever this was, it had started long before tonight.