The Debt Collector I Saved From A Crash Turned Out To Be The Woman Destroying My Life

Part 1

Rain lashed against the leaded glass of my bedchamber, a relentless drumming sound that felt exactly like the pounding behind my left eye.

I did not wake gracefully.

There was no slow, cinematic fluttering of eyelids or polite stretching of limbs.

I dragged myself into consciousness with a sharp, involuntary intake of breath, choking on the dry, stale air.

My mouth tasted of rust and unbrushed teeth.

A deep, radiating ache bloomed in my right shoulder, anchoring me to the mattress.

For a long minute, I merely stared at the canopy above me.

The velvet was faded, moth-eaten in the corner where the roof had been leaking since October.

I cataloged my injuries with the dull pragmatism of a man who had survived worse.

Bruised ribs, a knot at the base of my skull, and the phantom chill of freezing mud still clinging to my calves.

The memory of the previous night hit me in jagged, disjointed fragments.

The carriage road washed out by the storm.

The sickening lurch of the coach slipping off the embankment.

The screaming of the horses, a high, frantic pitch that always set my teeth on edge.

I remembered wading into the freezing muck, the rain blinding me.

I pulled a deadweight figure from the splintered remains of a hired hackney that had collided with my own.

I had carried her miles in the dark.

I remembered dropping her on the rug in the foyer, shouting for Brian, my ancient, half-dead butler, to fetch blankets and brandy.

After that, nothing.

I must have collapsed.

I groaned, rolling onto my good side.

I was clad only in my linen breeches, the fabric stiff with dried rainwater and sweat.

I braced my palm against the mattress to push myself up.

That was when I heard it.

The sharp, deliberate crack of a poker hitting a log.

I froze.

My gaze snapped toward the hearth.

A woman was sitting in my leather armchair.

She was not the ghostly, fragile victim I had pulled from the wreckage.

She sat with one leg tucked under her, the other stretched out toward the fire.

Her bare foot hovered near the flames, the skin of her heel smeared with ash and dried mud.

But it was not her dirty feet that made my pulse stutter.

It was what she was wearing.

She was swallowed whole by my white cambric shirt.

It was my best one.

The one I saved for trips to London when I had to pretend the Hawkherst estate wasn’t drowning in debt.

The collar hung loosely off one pale, slightly bruised shoulder.

The cuffs were rolled up thick and clumsy around her forearms, exposing wrists that were alarmingly thin but corded with tight, defensive muscle.

The hem of the shirt fell to her mid-thigh, leaving her legs bare to the firelight.

She wasn’t posing.

She wasn’t trying to be alluring.

She was shivering, aggressively chewing on her thumbnail while she stared into the flames.

Her wet hair hung in dark, tangled strings down her back.

She looked like a drowned rat that had crawled out of a sewer and decided to claim my wardrobe as a prize.

I cleared my throat, the sound like gravel grinding over glass.

I told her I saw she had found the armoire.

She didn’t flinch.

She didn’t gasp or scramble to cover her legs.

She simply stopped chewing her nail, turned her head slowly, and looked at me.

Her eyes were dark, ringed with exhaustion and bruised purple shadows.

There was a scrape across her left cheekbone, crusted with dried blood.

She didn’t look grateful.

She looked annoyed that I was awake.

She told me my housekeeper was either dead or deaf.

Her voice was surprisingly low, a rasp that matched my own.

She said she knocked on three doors and found a moth-eaten blanket that smelled like wet dog, a broken washbasin, and my shirt.

She assumed I wouldn’t mind, considering she nearly died on my property.

I pointed out that it was my shirt, pushing myself up to a sitting position.

The room spun.

I squeezed my eyes shut until the nausea passed.

She corrected me, saying it was currently her dress, and a poor one at that.

She complained about the draft in my house, asking if I didn’t seal my windows.

I let out a harsh, breathless laugh.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed, my bare feet hitting the cold, splintered floorboards.

I reminded her that I had dragged her out of a ditch.

I carried her three miles through a tempest.

I ruined my favorite coat doing it.

She shot back that I dragged her out of a ditch after my carriage ran her hired coach off the road.

My driver was taking the curve too fast, she claimed.

I conceded my driver was an idiot, running a heavy hand over my face.

But I pointed out that her man was the one who lost the axle.

She muttered that her man bolted into the woods the moment the carriage tipped.

She picked up the iron poker again and jabbed violently at a burning piece of apple wood.

A shower of orange sparks hissed against the stone hearth.

I watched her.

The firelight caught the sharp angle of her jaw, the straight, stubborn line of her nose.

There was no softness to her.

Even wrapped in my oversized clothing, she looked entirely fortified.

She owned the space she was in.

It unsettled me.

Women usually looked at me with either calculating interest or polite pity.

The broke, brooding Duke of Hawkherst.

This woman looked at me like I was an obstacle she hadn’t planned for.

I asked if she was injured.

She replied flatly that she had a headache and scraped knees.

I stood, my bad knee buckling slightly.

I caught myself on the heavy oak bedpost.

She glanced over her shoulder, her eyes dropping to my bracing hand, then down to my bare, scarred chest.

She told me I should sit down, that I looked gray.

I splashed stale, freezing water from the pitcher over my face.

I asked where she was traveling on such a hellish night.

She said she had urgent business.

In Yorkshire, in the middle of November.

I looked at her reflection in the cracked mirror.

She called me “Your Grace,” though I hadn’t introduced myself.

I pointed out that I hadn’t given her my name.

She said she gathered I was the master of the house, given how my butler reacted to the carpets getting bloody.

I crossed the room, stopping a few feet from her chair.

I am a large man, but looming didn’t work on her.

She smelled of rain, sharp ozone, the metallic tang of blood, and cheap ink.

I noted she was very observant for a woman who was unconscious an hour ago.

She said she was only unconscious for the first twenty minutes.

After that, she was merely paralyzed by the cold and the pain of my shoulder digging into her stomach.

I told her I was trying to save her life.

She thanked me, her tone devoid of any actual gratitude.

She said I dumped her on a settee, yelled at an old man, and passed out on the stairs.

She claimed I was drunk.

I dragged a hand through my messy hair, a sigh escaping me.

I had been drinking, trying to drown the reality of the letter I received that morning.

The estate was finished.

The final grace period had ended.

I told her I wanted her out of my shirt.

She stared up at me, her chest rising and falling rapidly.

She said she wasn’t wearing anything underneath.

I told her to find her wet dress.

We stared at each other, the air thick with resentful energy.

Slowly, deliberately, her ink-stained fingers reached up and grasped the top button of the shirt.

She undid the first button.

My chest heaved.

I grabbed her hand, stopping her.

I turned my back, grabbing a thick wool blanket from the wardrobe and throwing it at her.

I asked her name so I knew who I was ordering a carriage for.

She told me I shouldn’t have ignored the letters.

Hearing my first name from her lips was a physical blow.

She said business does not care about the weather.

The blood rushed out of my head.

I asked who she was.

She said she was Megan Carter.

The ruthless financier who had cornered the market on my debt.

I stared at the woman sitting in my favorite shirt, realizing the horrifying truth.

The phantom of Lombard Street was standing in my bedroom.

And she owned everything, including the very floorboards under my feet.