My Carriage Ruined A Stranger’s Dress — And Her Fury Completely Changed My Cold Life

Part 1

I sat entirely still in the shadows of my black carriage.

A young woman stood mere inches from the dark glass.

She had absolutely no idea I was inside.

She was using my polished window as a private mirror.

I forgot whatever instruction I had been about to give my driver.

She tucked a stray, windblown curl behind her ear.

Fingers adjusted the brim of a worn bonnet that had survived three harsh seasons.

Teeth worried her lower lip sharply to bring up the color.

Her chin tipped slightly, revealing a small, private smile.

Something strange and sudden shifted inside my chest.

It was a sensation that had not stirred in my thirty-nine years of life.

I was Thomas, Duke of Wrenford.

I was a man other men went out of their way to avoid crossing.

Mothers steered their daughters away from me with hushed warnings.

My wealth was vast, calculated beyond simple arithmetic.

My demeanor was notoriously cold and ruthlessly precise.

I had never watched a woman fix her hair and felt the ground beneath me tilt.

I simply could not look away.

She finished her small adjustments and turned to step onto the curb.

My coachman, Craig, judged the street clear and snapped the reins.

The heavy carriage lurched forward violently over the stones.

The woman startled backward in a chaotic flurry of skirts and paper parcels.

She went down hard into a muddy gutter left brimming by the recent rain.

A small, indignant shriek pierced the quiet of the market street.

The carriage door swung open before I had even formed the conscious thought to move.

A sharp command halted the horses in their tracks.

My knees hit the wet cobblestones without a second thought for my pristine coat.

A gloved hand extended firmly toward her.

She sat in the puddle with her worn bonnet askew.

Her parcels were scattered, and a packet of pins had burst across the stones.

I expected to see fear or deference in her eyes.

Most people looked at me with varying degrees of calculated terror.

Instead, she glared up at me with pure, blazing exasperation.

She informed me with immense dignity that she had been perfectly fine until my carriage tried to murder her.

Absolutely no one had spoken to me like that in twenty years.

A rusted, unfamiliar sound broke free from my throat.

I was laughing.

It astonished the entire high street, but it astonished me even more.

I pulled her up and steadied her as she swayed on her feet.

She accused me fiercely of laughing at her misery.

I confessed I was laughing at the ruin my carriage made of her careful reflection.

I told her I had been watching through the window the entire time.

A furious, brilliant blush spread rapidly across her cheeks.

She pressed the back of a wet glove to her mouth in mortification.

I immediately offered my carriage to take her safely home.

She recovered her fire instantly and flatly refused.

She introduced herself as Megan, the local vicar’s daughter.

She gathered her ruined parcels and marched up the street with her chin held high.

Her sodden skirts left a dark, wet trail on the cobbles.

I stood by my splendid carriage and watched her go for a very long time.

She glanced back once, as if to check if I was still standing there like a fool.

I was.

She turned away quickly, hiding a smile she did not want me to see.

I did not present myself at the vicarage that day.

A duke calling upon a soaked vicar’s daughter would ruin her reputation instantly.

Instead, I made quiet, thorough inquiries.

She was twenty-three and ran her father’s modest, chaotic household.

She had turned down three respectable suitors simply because they bored her.

I paced my echoing library until dawn, discarding a dozen traditional introductions as painfully dull.

My vast resources were quickly mobilized for a much more sideways method of courtship.

I anonymously arranged for her father’s crumbling church roof to be repaired.

I required the vicar’s daughter to submit a full account of the parish’s needs to my estate.

Megan wrote a crisp, formal letter of thanks directed to my agent.

I intercepted the letter and answered it myself.

I signed my agent’s name to preserve the delicate fiction.

She replied immediately, noting my surprisingly prompt and well-informed response.

Thus began an illicit, consuming summer of letters.

We argued passionately over literature, the sea, and the hills.

She declared that the hills held you, while the sea only made you feel small.

I looked out my window at my massive ocean view and silently agreed with her.

We wrote of local gossip and the heavy quiet of empty rooms.

I confessed things to her I had never dared tell another living soul.

I wrote about the suffocating gray autumn light in my massive, empty galleries.

She wrote back about the profound grief of losing her mother in that same gray light.

She hoped I would not sit alone in the gray light this year.

I carried that letter in my breast pocket until the paper began to wear thin.

My aunt Brenda noticed my constant, unprompted smiling.

She cornered me and demanded to know who had finally thawed my frozen heart.

I surrendered and told her everything about the puddle and the letters.

She told me to marry the vicar’s daughter and stop dithering like a coward.

I knew my borrowed identity could not last forever.

I had built our profound connection on a coward’s elaborate lie.

September arrived with a grand harvest fair in the market town.

I knew Megan would be running the charity stall in the center of the green.

I rode into town in a plain coat, leaving my crest and title behind.

I only meant to watch her from a distance for one last, sweet afternoon.

I found her laughing in the September sun with flour smudged on her cheek.

Every ounce of my notorious self-control vanished into thin air.

My feet carried me directly to her stall without my permission.

She gave me a bright, polite smile, completely failing to recognize my face.

She offered me jam and lace for a good cause.

I opened my mouth and spoke for the first time.

I told her the mysterious benefactor was not so mysterious after all.

The low timbre of my voice hung in the air between us.

Her polite smile vanished instantly.

She set down a jar of jam with trembling, uncertain hands.

I saw the devastating recognition dawn in her wide eyes.

She had never seen my face, but she had been reading my voice all summer.