Chapter 1
Dorian Blackthorn Ravenshade, Duke of Hawksmoor, knew with a bone-deep certainty that the universe conspired against him. Not in any metaphorical sense—no, this was a systematic, meticulously planned assault on his very sanity, choreographed by some divine entity with a particularly cruel sense of humor.
The ballroom stretched before him like a battlefield, its gilt-edged mirrors and crystal chandeliers bearing silent witness to his impending doom. His muscles—each one a testament to generations of noble breeding and countless hours of calculated physical perfection—tensed beneath the impeccable cut of his evening coat. The wool, imported from the finest mills in England, seemed to whisper of restraint and barely contained masculine power with every subtle movement.
And there she was.
Lady Seraphina Fawnwhisper.
She was not merely suspended from the chandelier. No. She had become one with the crystalline monstrosity, her gossamer gown tangled in its intricate framework as though she had been purposefully designed by some mad artist to create maximum social catastrophe.
Why me? The thought thundered through his mind with the force of a thousand rebellious cavalry charges. Of all the ballrooms in London. Of all the women in society. Why must it always be her?
His internal monologue was a tempest of frustration, a cyclone of aristocratic suffering that would have made even the most dramatic of poets weep with its intensity.
A single bead of sweat—hidden from the assembled guests by an iron will honed through years of ducal training—threatened to betray his inner turmoil.
Her golden ringlets cascaded downward, each curl a weapon more dangerous than any blade, more devastating than any cannon. They caught the candlelight like spun sunlight, creating a halo that suggested divine innocence while concealing a capacity for chaos that would make the most hardened military strategist weep.
And she was looking at him.
Not with the terror one might expect when dangling six feet above a marble floor. Not with the desperation of someone in genuine peril.
No.
She was looking at him as though they were sharing a pleasant afternoon tea.
Good God, his mind roared, she is smiling.
“Ah, good evening, Your Grace,” she called down, her voice a melodious symphony of absolute unconcern.
Around him, the ballroom hummed with the collective intake of horrified breath. Lorgnettes snapped to attention like military rifles. Fans fluttered with the synchronized precision of a naval fleet’s signal flags.
Hawksmoor moved forward, each step calculated to express both reluctance and nobility. His boot heels struck the marble floor with the finality of cemetery dirt hitting a coffin.
“Lady Seraphina,” he said, the words emerging from somewhere deep within the well of aristocratic composure that had sustained his bloodline through countless wars, famines, and social disasters. “Why are you in the chandelier?”
She shifted slightly, sending a cascade of crystal droplets tinkling in musical protest. “The most extraordinary sequence of events, really.” Her explanation flowed with the casual certainty of someone recounting a mundane shopping expedition. “I reached for a canapé—”
“As one does,” he interjected, his voice as dry as ancient parchment.
“—and then the most peculiar breeze caught my skirts—”
“Naturally.”
“—and before I could gather my wits, here I was!”
Hawksmoor inhaled with the careful control of a man who knew his next breath might be his last grasp at sanity. A tremor of something dangerously close to amusement threatened to crack his impassive façade. Not amusing. Absolutely not amusing.
He cast his gaze around the room, noting Lord Waldermere’s expanding chest with the weary recognition of a general spotting enemy reinforcements on the horizon.
“Do not trouble yourself, Waldermere,” he commanded without deigning to look at the man directly.
In one fluid movement that contained generations of aristocratic grace, he removed his coat. The garment slid from his shoulders with such sublime masculine poetry that a nearby debutante’s eyes rolled back, her limbs surrendering to gravity.
The assembled crowd gasped as one, the sound a chorus of aristocratic appreciation for the ducal physique now on display. His shirtsleeves, though still properly buttoned at the wrists, hinted at the controlled power beneath. Someone moaned his name with religious fervor.
Seraphina clapped her hands with childlike delight. “Oh! You’re rather magnificent at this, aren’t you?”
Hawksmoor paused, one eyebrow arching toward his hairline. “I beg your pardon?”
“Rescuing me,” she clarified, as if explaining a simple concept to a particularly dense child. “You’ve had quite a lot of practice lately.”
The muscle in his jaw clenched with such force it threatened to crack a tooth. The past three months unspooled in his mind like a particularly absurd theatrical production: the stationary “runaway” phaeton, the ankle-deep “treacherous” fountain, and—most infamously—the geese. Those goddamned geese who had pursued Lady Seraphina through Hyde Park with a vengeance so personal, so calculated, that Hawksmoor remained convinced she had committed some terrible waterfowl atrocity in this or a previous life.
Stepping onto a chair with the care of a man approaching a guillotine, he reached upward. His fingertips brushed the silk of her gown, and the chandelier emitted a sound of metallic distress that echoed through his soul.
A crystal droplet detached itself from the fixture, plummeting toward the floor with fatalistic determination. It shattered upon impact, the sound a portent of impending catastrophe.
“Oh dear,” Seraphina observed, tilting her head like a curious bird.
Hawksmoor did not sigh. Sighing would be too obvious. Instead, he stretched higher, his hand finding purchase on the curve of her waist. The moment his fingers closed around her, a strange electrical current seemed to pulse through the room.
The air stilled.
The chandelier groaned.
Somewhere, buried deep within the ancestral wing of Ravenshade Manor, a portrait of his great-grandfather slid from its hook and crashed to the ground, as if the very spirits of his lineage were protesting this contact.
“Oh, Your Grace,” Seraphina exclaimed, her voice breathless with admiration rather than fear, “how strong you are!”
The chandelier issued one final, catastrophic protest—a deathbed confession of metal surrendering to fate—and then, God help them both, it happened.
They fell.
Not with the choreographed grace of romantic literature. Not with the poetic symmetry of star-crossed lovers. They plunged like two sacks of aristocratic potatoes, limbs entangled, dignity abandoned, while crystals rained around them like the tears of mocking deities.
They crashed onto the marble floor in a tangle of expensive fabric and dishonored limbs. Hawksmoor, by some instinct he would later curse, had twisted during their descent, ensuring his body cushioned her fall. The impact knocked the breath from his lungs, leaving him sprawled beneath her like a defeated warrior.
A dozen ladies succumbed to overwhelmed sensibilities.
The orchestra conductor, seized by the raw emotion of the moment, collapsed across his harpsichord in a cascade of discordant notes.
And Hawksmoor, whose existence had become a prolonged exercise in dignified suffering, found himself pinned beneath the most catastrophic woman in all of England.
Her body pressed against him with warm, undeniable femininity. His arms—treasonous appendages that they were—had instinctively wrapped around her to protect her from harm. He could feel her breath against his neck, rapid and warm.
She smelled of jasmine and impending social ruin.
His cravat, once a fortress of propriety, now hung loosened and debauched, as if even his clothing had surrendered to Lady Seraphina’s chaos.
In the distance, beyond the terrace doors, a goose honked.
Lady Seraphina, flushed, tousled, and utterly unrepentant, gazed down at him with eyes that contained the destructive power of a thousand naval bombardments.
“Oh, Your Grace!” Her voice emerged breathless, intoxicated with the thrill of near-death. “You’ve saved me. Again!”
Hawksmoor remained motionless, his arms still full of her, his reputation balanced on the knife-edge of scandal. And somewhere deep within him, beneath layers of aristocratic restraint and genuine annoyance, lurked the disturbing certainty that this would not be the last time.
The whispers erupted like wildfire, spreading through the ballroom with unstoppable force.
“He’s holding her!” “Did you witness his heroic catch?” “Such raw masculinity!” “Is that—good heavens—is that a goose at the terrace door?”
Hawksmoor closed his eyes and prayed for swift death. This was going to be a very, very long night.
Hawksmoor did not move.
He dared not move.
The ballroom had transformed into a theater, and he—pinned beneath Lady Seraphina’s disastrous femininity—had become the unwilling centerpiece of tonight’s performance. Every eye watched. Every ear strained to catch the slightest whisper.
It was not her physical weight that paralyzed him. That was negligible—a feather’s touch compared to the crushing pressure of social expectation descending upon him.
“The way he cradles her—”
“He hasn’t released her!”
“I daresay he can’t bear to—passion has consumed him entirely!”
“Someone fetch my vinaigrette—no, that’s not—my vinaigrette—”
“Vinegar, Lady Wetherby.”
“Yes! Quickly! I shall faint directly!”
A long-suffering breath escaped through his nostrils, carrying with it the collective restraint of eight generations of dukes.
“Seraphina.” His voice emerged with clipped precision. “Remove yourself. Now.”
She blinked down at him, her lips slightly parted, cheeks flushed pink with exertion or excitement—he refused to contemplate which.
She didn’t move.
It dawned on him with horrifying clarity that she might have forgotten how to extricate herself from this position. Her brow furrowed slightly, as if she were attempting to recall some complex mathematical equation rather than the simple mechanics of standing upright.
“Seraphina.” He repeated her name with the measured patience one might use when addressing a particularly willful child.
Revelation dawned across her features. She shifted her weight, rising slightly onto her elbows, bringing their faces to a proximity that threatened what remained of his composure. Her breath, scented with champagne and social catastrophe, caressed his face like the warm winds of his impending doom. His traitorous heart—that muscular clock of manly fortitude—thundered with such violence that he feared his waistcoat buttons might fly off as deadly projectiles. Every square inch of his chiseled torso, sculpted by generations of noble breeding and occasional fencing, tensed with the primal awareness of her closeness.
The place where her thigh pressed against his—separated by layers of silk and wool that suddenly seemed as insubstantial as morning mist—burned hotter than the great fire of London. His blood rushed southward with such alarming enthusiasm that he briefly wondered if his extremities might suffer permanent damage from the sudden diversion.
Worse. Infinitely, catastrophically worse.
The assembled aristocracy erupted in fresh gasps.
His jaw clenched. If she didn’t remove herself immediately, they would find themselves wed before the supper course was served.
A shadow fell across his face.
“May I be of assistance, Your Grace?”
Hawksmoor tilted his head just enough to see Lord Waldermere hovering above them, hand extended toward Seraphina like a shopkeeper reaching for merchandise.
A list of things Hawksmoor detested scrolled through his mind: morning callers, social obligations, the lingering memory of that fateful duel in Vienna that had somehow resulted in his acquisition of a particularly judgmental lapdog.
But Lord Waldermere occupied a special place in his catalog of contempt.
“Touch her, Waldermere, and I shall meet you with pistols at dawn.”
Waldermere blanched. The ladies sighed in collective ecstasy.
And Seraphina—goddamn her—beamed with undisguised delight.
“What a gallant defender you are!” Her voice rang with pleasure. “I would be utterly ruined without your intervention!”
A sound escaped him—not quite a groan, not quite a whimper, but the audio manifestation of his soul attempting to flee his body.
“Get. Up.”
Finally, mercifully, Seraphina moved. With a rustle of expensive silk and far more physical contact than propriety allowed, she shifted her weight, attempted to stand, immediately stepped on the hem of his discarded coat, and teetered on the precipice of a fresh disaster.
Hawksmoor’s hand shot out, steadying her waist with reflexive precision.
The ballroom audience responded with a symphony of scandalized sighs.
A champagne glass shattered somewhere in the distance.
And then, as if summoned by malevolent fate, a sound echoed through the sudden silence.
Honk.
Hawksmoor froze, a muscle twitching beneath his eye.
No.
Not now.
Not here.
The crowd parted like waters before Moses, heads turning in unified horror. Someone yelped.
Framed in the moonlit archway of the terrace doors stood a goose.
Not just any goose.
The goose.
Its beady eyes surveyed the assembled aristocracy with cold calculation, its beak slightly open, as if contemplating which noble to destroy first.
Hawksmoor remained perfectly still, a bead of cold sweat tracing a path down his spine.
Seraphina gasped softly. “Oh!”
And Hawksmoor?
Hawksmoor had never before considered the benefits of immediate emigration to the colonies until that moment.
Not a single breath disturbed the ballroom’s hushed terror.
The goose stood silhouetted against the backdrop of the night gardens, its feathers catching the candlelight with an unnatural gleam that suggested otherworldly malevolence. It surveyed the room as a general might assess a battlefield, its gaze calculating, merciless.
Someone whimpered.
A violin string snapped with a sound like a dying scream.
“Dear God,” Lady Wetherby whispered, clutching her throat.
Hawksmoor knew. With bone-deep certainty, he knew.
This was the same goose.
The memories flooded back with traumatic clarity: Hyde Park, three months ago, this very creature pursuing Lady Seraphina with single-minded determination. Her desperate attempt to scale a statue of King George III to escape its wrath. Hawksmoor’s own reluctant intervention, the beating wings against his greatcoat as he’d lifted Seraphina to safety.
The unspoken promise in those soulless eyes: This isn’t over.
And now, here they stood, adversaries reunited.
Panic rippled through the assembled aristocracy. No one dared flee—not in their finest attire, not with so many witnesses, not with reputations hanging by such delicate threads.
Hawksmoor straightened his shoulders, meeting the goose’s gaze with the grim determination of a man who had already endured unprecedented humiliation this evening.
Seraphina tilted her head, seemingly unbothered by the avian harbinger of doom. “Oh,” she said, her voice light and conversational. “It’s you.”
The goose took one deliberate step forward.
The collective intake of breath sounded like wind before a storm.
A church bell tolled in the distance, though it was far too late for evening services.
“I shall perish where I stand,” Lady Beatrice announced, pressing a handkerchief to her brow.
Hawksmoor remained perfectly still.
The goose matched his stillness.
For one eternal moment, they faced each other across the ballroom, locked in silent recognition: only one of them would leave this encounter with dignity intact.
And by all that was holy, Hawksmoor was determined it would not be the goose.
The tense silence stretched to breaking point.
The damaged chandelier creaked ominously.
A teacup clattered against its saucer—a sound that cracked through the silence like gunfire.
And the goose…
…turned.
Without sound, without ceremony, without a single vindictive honk, it simply pivoted and strutted back into the darkness.
The ballroom dissolved into whispered relief.
Lady Wetherby collapsed into her husband’s arms. Lord Pembroke dabbed sweat from his brow with a trembling hand. A footman silently crossed himself.
It was over.
For now.
But as the waterfowl disappeared into the night, Hawksmoor knew—with the certainty of a man marked by fate—that their paths would cross again.
It would return.
And next time…
It would not retreat so easily.
Hawksmoor should have seized the opportunity to escape.
Any rational man would have used the goose’s dramatic exit as a tactical diversion, slipping away into the night before further catastrophe could unfold.
But he hesitated.
Just for one fatal moment.
And in that heartbeat of indecision, his fate was sealed.
The whispers surged like floodwaters breaching a dam once the terror caused by the goose receded.
“Did you observe his protective embrace? Like a man possessed by elemental passion!”
“He held her for an eternity! The implications cannot be denied!”
“They are certainly engaged by now. Possibly even wed. Has anyone seen the Archbishop?”
Hawksmoor’s fingers twitched with suppressed agitation. He needed to leave. Immediately.
He turned sharply toward the exit, but before he could take a single step, delicate fingers wrapped around his forearm like a silken shackle.
“Your Grace!”
He turned, bracing himself for whatever fresh hell awaited.
Seraphina stood before him, flushed and radiant, her eyes sparkling with the delight of a woman who had not just suspended herself from a chandelier, fallen into the arms of a duke, and faced down her avian nemesis.
“What an exhilarating evening!” she exclaimed, as if they’d just enjoyed a particularly satisfying quadrille. “I trust you found it as enjoyable as I did!”
Hawksmoor stared at her, watching the destruction of his carefully constructed reputation reflected in her bright, oblivious eyes.
“Enjoyable,” he repeated, the word flat and lifeless. “Yes. Precisely the term I would have chosen.”
She beamed up at him. “Splendid! And to think, this marks only the beginning!”
His stomach plummeted like a stone dropped from a cliff. “The beginning of what, exactly?”
Seraphina linked her arm through his with casual intimacy, utterly unconcerned by the shocked murmurs rippling through the ballroom.
“Why, our courtship, of course!”
A sound escaped him—the death rattle of his dignity.
Lady Beatrice, lingering nearby, collapsed into a nearby chair, overcome by the romantic implications.
Hawksmoor extracted his arm from Seraphina’s grasp with the careful precision of a surgeon removing a bullet.
“Lady Seraphina, I regret to inform you that pressing matters require my immediate—”
“Oh! But you simply must escort me to the gardens first!” she interrupted, eyes wide with innocent expectation.
“I… what?”
“The gardens, Your Grace!” she insisted. “The night is so lovely, and I desperately need a breath of fresh air after our adventure!”
Hawksmoor experienced a sensation similar to his soul departing his physical form.
“I assure you, Lady Seraphina, the air inside is perfectly adequate for respiration.”
“But it isn’t garden air,” she countered, as if this distinction held profound significance.
His jaw tightened to the point of pain. “Lady Seraphina, you mistake me for a man who distinguishes between varieties of air based on their geographic location.”
She laughed—a musical sound entirely unsuited to the gravity of his suffering—and turned toward the terrace doors, effectively ending the conversation.
Hawksmoor watched her go, knowing with grim certainty that if left unattended for even thirty seconds, she would inevitably tumble into an ornamental pond, provoke a decorative peacock, or accidentally ignite a topiary.
With the resigned air of a condemned man approaching the gallows, he knew he had to follow.
The gardens of Ravenshade Manor unfurled before him like a dream spun by a delirious poet—moonlight cascaded across the landscape in silver rivers, bathing each leaf and petal in ethereal luminescence. Rose bushes bloomed with flagrant disregard for the proper season, their velvet petals unfurled in shameless invitation, their perfume hanging in the air like the sighs of a hundred lovesick maidens. Ancient oaks stood sentinel, their gnarled limbs reaching toward the star-strewn heavens like supplicants begging for divine intervention. Fountains bubbled and whispered secret promises, their waters catching starlight and transforming it into liquid diamonds that danced and shimmered in the gentle evening breeze. Nightingales—surely imported at ruinous expense—trilled melodies so achingly beautiful that grown men had been known to weep upon hearing them, their tiny avian hearts somehow capturing the very essence of romantic yearning and distilling it into song.
The gardens of Ravenshade Manor were not mere horticultural arrangements.
They were tactical nightmares: a labyrinthine expanse of precisely trimmed hedges, imported marble statues with too many exposed limbs, and narrow, winding paths explicitly designed to facilitate scandalous encounters away from chaperones’ watchful eyes.
In short, they were a disaster waiting to happen.
Hawksmoor expected to find Seraphina admiring the rose trellises like a normal human being.
She was nowhere in sight.
He froze, panic seizing his chest. No. No, no, no—
A distant rustling sound reached his ears, followed by a startled yelp.
Then: “Oh! Oh dear!”
Hawksmoor closed his eyes, sending a silent prayer to whatever deity might be laughing at his expense.
“Of course.”
He found her in the hedge maze, because where else would she be?
She sat on the ground, skirts entangled in a sprawling mass of ivy, looking genuinely perplexed by her predicament, as if the laws of physics had suddenly changed without proper notification.
She glanced up at his approach, her expression brightening. “Your Grace! I was merely—”
“I have no interest in what you were ‘merely’ doing.”
“—admiring the extraordinary symmetry of the hedges, when suddenly—”
“I refuse to hear this.”
“—I must have taken a slight misstep—”
“Not another word.”
“—and then, quite unexpectedly, I found myself here!”
“Because naturally, that is how sitting works.”
A moment of silence stretched between them.
Seraphina blinked up at him. “Are you planning to assist me, or shall I remain here as a garden ornament?”
Hawksmoor dragged a hand down his face, inhaled deeply through his nose, and knelt to untangle her skirts from the vegetation.
The moment his fingers brushed against the gossamer fabric, he recognized his mistake.
A terrible, irreversible mistake.
Because Seraphina smelled of temptation incarnate—jasmine, honey, and something indefinably feminine that bypassed his brain entirely and spoke directly to more primitive parts of his anatomy.
His hands froze. He was too close. He needed to retreat.
He did not retreat.
She exhaled softly, seemingly unaware of the internal war raging within him.
It was intolerable.
The heat between them scorched the very air, transforming the oxygen into a thick, heady elixir of forbidden desire. His fingertips, mere inches from the gossamer fabric of her gown, trembled with the restraint of a thousand stoic ancestors. The moonlight, conspiring against him, bathed her skin in alabaster perfection, turning each pore into a sublime poem of feminine allure. Her scent—sweet heaven above!—invaded his nostrils like a conquering army, dispatching his rational thoughts and leaving only primitive, masculine hunger in its devastating wake.
His body betrayed him most treacherously. His loins—those traitorous architects of ducal downfall—stirred with such vigor that he feared the buttons of his falls might launch themselves into the night like cannonballs. Heat surged through his magnificent form, liquefying his spine and forcing his majestic heart to pound with such force that nearby flowers trembled in rhythm with its thunderous beat. His breath caught in his throat, trapped by desire so potent it could be bottled and sold as smelling salts to revive unconscious debutantes across London.
Every fiber of his being cried out to claim her lips—those plump, rose-petal orbs of scandalous temptation—and brand them with the scorching seal of aristocratic passion. To crush her delicate form against his marble-hewn chest and allow his hands—large, commanding ducal hands that could span her tiny waist with insulting ease—to wander the dangerous cartography of her curves.
It had to end.
With swift, decisive motion, Hawksmoor grasped her hand and pulled her upright—
Only for Seraphina to immediately step on her own hem and lose her balance.
And so she fell.
Again.
Directly against his chest.
Again.
With enough force to send them both crashing into the nearest hedge.
Branches snapped. Leaves exploded into the air. Somewhere, a night bird fled in terror.
Hawksmoor found himself flat on his back in the dirt, staring up at the indifferent stars.
A man could only endure so much.
A long, painful silence descended.
Seraphina, positioned atop him once more, propped herself on her elbows and peered down at his face with genuine concern.
“Are you quite well, Your Grace?”
Hawksmoor, whose patience had disintegrated beyond any hope of recovery, took a slow, measured breath.
“You must understand, Lady Seraphina,” he said, addressing the night sky rather than her face, “I cannot allow myself to care. My past is too dark. My family perished in a terrible fire—”
He paused, noticing her frown.
“A fire? But I distinctly recall you mentioning they were lost in a devastating earthquake.”
Hawksmoor’s expression remained perfectly neutral.
“The earthquake caused the fire.”
Seraphina’s eyes narrowed with suspicion.
Hawksmoor offered no further explanation.
He simply continued contemplating the stars as if they might deliver him from this nightmare.
A fallen leaf drifted onto his forehead, settling there like nature’s final mockery.
This, he concluded with grim resignation, was his life now.