My Employer Asked Me To Be His Fake Fiancée — Then His Ex Tried To Ruin Me
Part 2
And then she reached into her reticule, withdrew a thick envelope, and laid fifty pounds on the desk between us.
“I will give you fifty pounds to walk away tonight,” she said, her voice perfectly even.
She offered me the money to disappear, to tell Gregory I had changed my mind.
She wanted me to abandon him so she could step in and claim her prize.
Fifty pounds would have changed my life.
It was more money than I had ever held, enough to keep me safe for years.
I looked at her beautiful, desperate face.
I saw a woman who had gambled her entire future on her fading youth.
I pushed the envelope back across the polished wood.
I refused the money.
I told her I would rather scrub steps in the rain for the rest of my life than help her break him a second time.
I told her she could expose me whenever she liked, but she would do it knowing I had refused her bribe.
She stormed out, the facade completely shattered.
I sat in the quiet room, my hands shaking against my skirt.
I went to the library that night to find Gregory.
He was standing by the window, staring out into the dark.
I told him the truth was out.
I offered to take the blame, to pretend I was an adventuress who had deceived him.
I offered to ruin myself so he could keep his dignity.
Tears blurred my vision, a rare weakness I could not control.
He crossed the room and looked down at me.
He refused to let me go.
He told me he had spent ten years hiding from laughter, and it had bought him nothing but an empty life.
He asked me to marry him, not to spite Victoria, but because I was the first true thing he had found in a decade.
My heart hammered against my ribs, the weight of his gaze pinning me in place.
Would I accept his proposal and risk destroying his reputation forever?
Part 3
Brenda did not run.
She stood in the vast, shadowed library of Westridge and looked into Gregory’s guarded green eyes.
She chose to stay.
She chose to risk his reputation, and her own heart, because he was the first true thing she had found in a decade.
But to understand how a housemaid came to stand in a Duke’s library at midnight, holding his hand and his future, you must go back to the beginning.
Brenda had not been born to service.
Her father was a clergyman, the rector of a small but respectable living in a green valley.
He was a learned gentleman who loved his books and his daughter with equal devotion.
He was, unfortunately, entirely unfit for the management of money.
When he died quietly in his chair with a volume of sermons open on his knee, Brenda discovered the true size of his ruin.
He had lent where he should have kept.
He had given where he could not afford to give.
He had signed his name to secure the debts of men who called themselves his friends.
Those men did not come to his funeral.
By the time the bills were settled, there was absolutely nothing left.
The creditors took the books, the furniture, and the small income she had thought would keep her safe.
She was twenty-five years old.
She had a good hand, a quick mind, and a face the world had never troubled to call beautiful.
She faced the cold arithmetic of what a woman in her position must do to keep from starving.
She might have become a governess.
She had tried.
But a governess required glowing references and a certain hard brightness.
She needed a willingness to be charming to mothers and completely invisible to fathers.
Brenda discovered in herself a stubbornness that simply would not bend that far.
She might have married a respectable man who wanted a sensible wife.
But the respectable men she met wanted dowries she did not possess.
She decided in the worst of that first winter that she would rather scrub a floor she had chosen than share a bed she had been sold into.
So she became a housemaid.
She folded her father’s name away with her mother’s wedding ring, the one thing the creditors had not taken.
She took a place in service under her real name, Brenda Felbridge.
She refused to add a lie to the long list of things the world had stripped from her.
And in a great house, no one ever asks a maid her history.
A maid is merely hands.
A maid is a gray shape that carries the coals and blacks the grates.
She turns her face to the wall when her betters pass in the corridors.
No one had asked Brenda Felbridge who she used to be.
When she climbed down from the carrier’s cart at the servants’ entrance of Westridge with her box on her shoulder, she considered that a mercy.
To be no one was, at the very least, to be safe.
Westridge itself took her breath away the first time she saw it.
She was deeply ashamed of that feeling.
A maid is not supposed to be moved by the beauty of the house she cleans.
It was an ancient place, gray stone gone gold in patches with three hundred years of weather.
It sat in a fold of low green hills, approached by a long avenue of magnificent limes.
A vast lake lay below it, holding the whole sky on still mornings.
It had not been built so much as it had grown over centuries.
It was breathtakingly beautiful, and it was entirely cold.
She learned quickly that the cold was not in the stone itself.
The cold resided in the master.
Gregory, the Duke of Dunwood, was spoken of in the servants’ hall the way one speaks of weather that cannot be helped.
He was not a cruel man.
He did not rage, he did not strike, and he did not turn girls out without their wages.
He was simply absent, even when he was physically present in a room.
He was a tall, impeccably courteous man who moved through his own house as though it belonged to someone else.
He was thirty-four and unmarried.
Mrs. Higgins, the housekeeper, considered this a scandal and a terrible waste.
He showed no interest in remedying his solitary state.
He rode out alone across the estate.
He dined alone at the end of a long, polished table.
He sat alone in his study with his accounts, encased in perfect, unbroken solitude.
The house held its breath around him year upon year, waiting for something that never came.
Brenda saw him for the first time three days after her arrival.
What she noticed was not his legendary coldness.
It was his eyes.
The other maids had told her to expect gray, like the lake in November.
They said he could freeze a footman at twenty paces with a single look.
But when he passed her in the long gallery, she made the small mistake of glancing up from the wall.
His eyes met hers for the briefest fraction of a second.
They were not gray at all.
They were a deep, clear, surprising green.
They were the vivid green of deep water flowing over moss.
They were not cruel so much as they were completely guarded.
They were the eyes of a man who had decided it was safer to want nothing than to want and lose.
He looked at her without truly seeing her, the same way he looked at everything else.
He went on down the gallery without breaking his stride.
She stood with her face to the wall, her heart doing something completely foolish.
She told herself it was only because she had not expected the green.
She was wrong about that, though she did not know it yet.
The grand library became her sanctuary by accident, and then by deep habit.
It was a vast, two-story room, galleried and served by rolling wooden ladders.
It held more books than she had known existed in the entire world.
And absolutely no one ever went there.
The Duke kept his daily reading in his private study.
The guests, when there were guests, preferred the drawing room and the card tables.
The library was dusted once a fortnight and otherwise completely forgotten.
Mrs. Higgins discovered that Brenda was tidy, quiet, and disinclined to chatter.
She gave the new maid the care of the library, viewing it as a corner where a useless girl could do no harm.
She had no idea what she was truly giving her.
Brenda had been a clergyman’s daughter, raised among towering shelves of theology and poetry.
She had read her way through her father’s entire small library twice over before she was sixteen.
She had argued Latin translations with him across the supper table.
She had wept over poetry she was far too young to truly understand.
And then the world had taken the books along with everything else she loved.
She had told herself she did not miss them.
She lied to herself the way one lies about missing a person who is never coming back.
And now here was a room with ten thousand volumes.
She had an hour each day in which she was completely alone with them.
No one would tell a maid she had no business reading the master’s books, so long as the dusting was done.
So she dusted.
And she read.
The two actions became the same seamless act.
She held the dusting cloth in one hand and a volume of Greek poetry in the other.
For one stolen hour each evening, Brenda Felbridge was not a housemaid at all.
She was simply a mind in a room full of other minds.
She was equal to all of them, and smaller than none.
It was the only place in England where she was still herself.
She guarded it like a desperate secret.
The autumn house party changed everything, as such gatherings always did.
She had heard of them in the servants’ hall long before she ever saw one.
Twice a year, the Dowager Duchess descended from her private wing like a general taking the field.
She filled the great house with eligible young ladies and their fiercely ambitious mothers.
She set siege to her grandson’s solitude in the desperate hope of marrying him off before she died.
Twice a year, she failed completely.
The Duke endured the invasions the way a rock endures the tide.
He was courteous, present, and utterly immovable.
The young ladies played the pianoforte, sang badly, and angled for his attention.
They invariably went home unbetrothed.
The Dowager would retire to her wing to plot her next grand campaign.
This autumn’s party arrived on a wet Thursday in an endless procession of carriages.
Westridge let out its breath in a great gust of noise and arrival.
There were six young ladies, their mothers, and a scattering of gentlemen to make up the required numbers.
For a fortnight, there would be lavish dinners, loud music, and a massive ball at the end.
The maids would be run off their feet carrying hot water and coals.
The Duke would be hunted through his own magnificent rooms by women determined to become a Duchess.
Brenda watched it all from the edges, invisible and safe.
She would have been content to go on watching, if not for the woman who arrived last.
She came in her own carriage, a full day after the others.
She was not on any list the Dowager Duchess had carefully drawn up.
Her name was Victoria, the Countess of Ashmore.
She had once been promised to Gregory.
She had thrown him over in front of all of London society to marry a much richer man.
Brenda learned the story below stairs, pieced together from Mrs. Higgins and the older footmen.
Years before, Gregory had been a different man entirely.
He had been warm, laughing, and open as a window in the spring.
He had loved Victoria with his whole, undefended heart.
The entire county had expected their imminent engagement.
And then the old Earl of Ashmore had come courting with his great title and massive fortune.
Victoria had weighed the warm young man against the cold old Earl.
She had chosen the Earl.
She had not done it quietly or kindly.
She had done it at a highly public ball, with a laugh that carried across the room.
She let it be known that she had never seriously considered a man whose Dukedom was mostly land and so little ready money.
She humiliated him before everyone he knew and respected.
The warm, laughing young man had retreated into his great cold house and shut the door.
The man who emerged by degrees over the years was the guarded master Brenda now served.
And now the old Earl of Ashmore was dead.
Victoria, the widowed Countess, was back.
She arrived in black silk that was not quite mourning attire.
It was black cut by a brilliant London modiste to flatter rather than to grieve.
She swept up the great staircase as though she had never abandoned it.
Brenda was carrying a heavy tray of tea into the gallery as she was announced.
She was, without question, the most beautiful woman Brenda had ever seen.
It was a beauty like a freshly sharpened blade.
It was a beauty that knew exactly what it was worth and fully meant to spend it.
She paused at the top of the stairs, looking about the hall she had once expected to rule.
She smiled, and the warmth did not reach her eyes.
In the space of that single smile, Brenda understood exactly what she was doing.
She had come back to claim the man she had callously thrown away.
She did not doubt for a single moment that she would succeed.
Beneath the stunning confidence, Brenda saw a great and frightened hunger.
It was the desperate hunger of a woman who had gambled everything on her looks.
She was beginning, for the very first time, to feel the cold breath of the years at her back.
Brenda carried her tray on into the gallery, remaining completely invisible.
Dukes and Countesses played their cruel games upstairs, and maids carried the tea.
Brenda told herself their world had absolutely nothing to do with hers.
She was entirely wrong.
Victoria went to work at once.
She operated with the patience of a great general, showing absolutely no mercy.
Brenda watched it all unfold from the edges of every room.
She was perhaps the only person at Westridge who understood exactly what she was watching.
She had nothing to gain by misunderstanding the situation.
She watched her take possession of Gregory by agonizing inches.
She would lay a hand on his sleeve in front of the other guests just a moment too long.
She would laugh, recalling some old shared intimacy, pitched perfectly to be overheard.
She called him by his given name in a low voice that drew every eye.
The young marriageable ladies and their mothers fell back in total confusion.
They could not compete with a woman who had a profound history with him.
Gregory could not fight her public siege.
That was the specific, calculated cruelty of the thing.
His entire armor consisted of his coldness and his perfect, unbreachable courtesy.
Victoria had found the one weapon that his coldness could not deflect.
She did not attack him directly.
She simply claimed him.
She behaved as though their profound understanding had never been broken.
She treated the years, the Earl, and the public humiliation as a brief interlude.
To contradict her in public would mean reopening the terrible old wound.
It would mean becoming the jilted, pathetic boy all over again.
It would give the gossiping county a second scene to laugh over.
So he said nothing at all.
And Victoria wore his silence like an engagement ring.
Brenda watched the trap close on him over four agonizing days.
She found to her own profound surprise that she could not look away.
What she felt was not the distant, detached interest of a servant.
It was something much nearer to genuine anger.
She knew exactly what it meant to be cornered by the world.
She knew what it felt like to have one’s silence taken as consent.
She watched a cold, proud man be slowly stripped of his only remaining protection.
He was being ruined in his own house by the woman who had broken him once.
She meant to break him again, simply for his rents.
Something inside Brenda woke up and adamantly refused to lie down.
She told herself sternly on the back stairs that his ruin was nothing to her.
She was a maid, and a poorer master would be no worse than a cold one.
But she had seen his guarded green eyes that first day.
They had not been cruel, and she could not unsee them.
On the fourth night, the situation came to a breaking point.
Brenda was in the grand library when it happened.
She had come down much later than usual because the great dinner had dragged on.
She thought she was entirely safe.
The rest of the party was occupied above with cards, music, and Victoria’s relentless siege.
She had a single candle and perhaps an hour before she must climb to her freezing attic to sleep.
She had drawn down a volume of Greek poetry.
She was standing in the small pool of light, reading quietly.
The heavy oak door opened abruptly.
Gregory came in, pressing his back to the door as though shutting out a monster.
His face was completely undone.
He crossed the vast room in four long strides.
Brenda had no time to curtsy, no time to make herself small, no time to retreat.
He took her rough, reddened hand in both of his.
He bent his head close to hers.
He spoke low and rough and desperate.
He asked her to pretend to be his fiancée for just one night.
Brenda looked up into his face and saw that he was not truly seeing her.
He was seeing a way out, any way out.
She happened to be the object fate had placed in his path.
He had not chosen her; he had simply reached out while drowning.
A proper maid would have stammered an apology and fled the room.
A proper maid does not answer such a question at all.
Brenda asked him why she should do such a thing.
Her voice came out much steadier than she had any right to expect.
He blinked, as though waking from a trance.
It was the first time in four days anyone had asked him a genuine question.
He let go of her hand and stepped back.
He looked at her, truly looked at her, for the very first time.
He saw the maid in the gray gown holding a candle and a book of Greek poetry.
He told her that Victoria had just informed the drawing room they were to be married.
He said the room believed her because he could not bear to contradict her.
He said she meant to have the engagement formally announced at the ball the next night.
He had fled to the library because it was the only room she never entered.
He believed the only way to stop her was to be already engaged to someone else.
Brenda told him she was a housemaid.
She reminded him she was the girl who dusted this very room.
She pointed out she was the last woman in England he could pass off as his intended.
She warned him that Victoria would look at her hands and expose the lie immediately.
She gently set the book down on the table.
She told him he did not want a fiancée; he merely wanted a wall to stand behind.
She told him she pitied him, but she would not be torn down for his convenience.
She refused to be turned out without a character when Victoria exposed the fraud.
She meant to curtsy and leave the room forever.
But Gregory did the one thing she had not braced for.
He laughed.
It was a startled, broken, completely astonished sound.
It was the laugh of a man who had not laughed in years and suddenly remembered how.
It completely transformed his cold face.
Her heart did the foolish thing in her chest again, much harder this time.
He agreed with every word she had said.
He apologized for insulting her and told her to go to bed.
He bowed to her, a real, deeply respectful bow.
A Duke was bowing to a housemaid in a cold library at midnight.
It was the bow that finally undid her resolve.
It was the laugh, the green eyes, and the four days of watching a cruel woman break him.
She knew exactly in her bones what it was to be cornered.
Walking away from a cornered person was the one thing she could not do.
She stopped him before he reached the door.
She offered him one single night.
She would stand by his side at the ball and let it be understood they had an arrangement.
She would stop Victoria from making her grand announcement.
Then she would invent a story about a new position near her home and leave Westridge quietly.
The engagement would dissolve naturally without scandal.
He would be a bachelor again, with his dignity intact.
She demanded a gown that did not come from a servant’s box.
She demanded someone to teach her which fork to use at dinner.
She made it clear she was only doing this because she could not abide watching Victoria win.
He asked her name.
She told him it was Brenda Felbridge.
He told her she would be the daughter of a gentleman, an old connection of his grandmother.
He thanked her, his eyes solemn and intense.
She went up the back stairs to her freezing attic with her heart hammering in her throat.
The Dowager Duchess knew the truth before breakfast the next morning.
Brenda had expected the fierce old woman to be the greatest danger to their lie.
She thought she would immediately denounce a housemaid playing the Duchess.
She had not understood the Dowager.
She was eighty years old, had buried two husbands, and loathed Victoria with a clean, clear hatred.
She sent for Brenda at eight o’clock.
She looked her up and down with eyes as sharp as a bird’s.
She told her she knew exactly who and what she was.
Brenda did not bother to lie to her.
The Dowager told her she had watched her carry trays for a week.
She said she knew a gentlewoman in a maid’s gown just as she knew a fortune hunter in widow’s black.
She explained how Victoria had broken Gregory’s heart ten years ago.
She said she would rather see him risk a fine ruin standing up than accept a quiet one on his knees.
She promised Brenda a gown, her own woman to dress her hair, and her absolute blessing.
She told her she was doing it because no woman had made Gregory laugh in ten years.
She asked her what she had said to make him laugh.
Brenda told her she refused to be torn down for his convenience.
The old woman laughed until she had to wipe her eyes.
She declared Brenda would do very well indeed.
The ball was the magnificent peak of the autumn season.
Brenda walked into it on the arm of the Duke of Dunwood.
The Dowager’s woman had dressed her in a stunning gown of deep green silk.
They had arranged her plain brown hair into something elegant and completely unfamiliar.
When she looked in the mirror, she saw the ghost of the woman she might have been if her father had lived.
Gregory met her at the foot of the great stairs.
When he saw her, he stopped completely dead.
The perfect cold mask vanished entirely.
He looked at her with such naked emotion she had to look away.
They entered the ballroom, and the entire crowd turned to stare.
The whisper went round the room like wind tearing through a wheat field.
The Dowager sailed up beside them and announced Brenda as her grandson’s intended.
The room drank the story down whole.
Victoria stood across the ballroom in her flattering black.
Her eyes locked onto Brenda.
Brenda watched her face cycle rapidly through surprise, calculation, and deep, sudden fear.
She crossed the room to them with a smile fixed in place.
She laid her hand on Gregory’s sleeve, ignoring Brenda entirely.
Then she turned her blade-like smile on Brenda.
She questioned her pedigree, asking where the Felbridges were from.
She intended to expose her ignorance in front of the listening crowd.
Brenda smiled back calmly.
She told her her people were dead.
She told her her father was a generous clergyman who died poor because he trusted false friends.
She looked straight into Victoria’s furious eyes.
She said she had learned young that goodness and grandeur were rarely the same thing.
Someone in the crowd gave a small, stifled laugh.
Victoria realized she had just lost a public exchange to a complete nobody.
The fear beneath her beauty surfaced visibly.
She drifted away, defeated for the evening.
Gregory drew Brenda out onto the cold, dark terrace later.
He told her she should not have made a dangerous enemy of her.
She told him she would rather take the blow standing than let her win.
She told him Victoria did not love him; she merely needed his money.
She warned him not to mistake desperation for affection.
He stood in the dark and finally let the mask fall away.
He admitted he had loved her desperately when he was young.
He confessed that the worst part was not losing her, but standing there while the room laughed at him.
He had spent ten years ensuring no one would ever laugh at him again.
Brenda told him he was not a fool, merely a man whose grief had gone on far too long.
He asked her where she would go when the deception was over.
She told him the truth: another house, another gray gown, another library to dust.
She went back inside because she could not bear to stand beside him for another second.
The lie was supposed to last only one night.
But Victoria did not leave.
She lingered through the week, watching their every move.
The fiction had to be maintained day after exhausting day.
Brenda played the fiancée at every dinner and every endless evening of cards.
Gregory watched her with a helpless attention he had not paid to anything in years.
They spent their afternoons reading Greek together in the sanctuary of the library.
He listened to her speak about the things she loved.
He told her he could no longer recall why he had ever thought wanting nothing was the safest course.
They were falling dangerously, hopelessly in love.
And then the fragile structure finally broke.
Victoria found Brenda alone in the morning room.
She closed the heavy door behind her, dropping the smile entirely.
She told her she knew exactly what she was.
She had bribed a maid and learned Brenda was the girl who blacked the grates.
She threatened to expose her to the entire county and ruin Gregory completely.
She laid the terrible choice before her.
She reached into her reticule, withdrew a thick envelope, and laid fifty pounds on the desk.
She offered Brenda the money to walk away and disappear.
Fifty pounds would have secured Brenda’s safety for years.
Brenda looked at her beautiful, aging, frightened face.
She pushed the envelope back across the polished wood.
She refused her money.
She told her she would rather scrub steps in the rain for the rest of her life than help her break him a second time.
She told her she could expose her, but she would do it knowing a housemaid had refused her bribe.
Victoria stormed out of the room, her facade in ruins.
Brenda went to the library that night to find Gregory.
She told him the truth was out and the game was over.
She offered to leave immediately and take the blame entirely upon herself.
She offered to paint herself as an adventuress who had cruelly deceived him.
She offered her own absolute ruin to save his pride.
She began to cry, a weakness she despised.
He crossed the room and stood very close to her.
He refused to let her go.
He told her his grandmother had already heard about the bribe from Victoria’s own maid.
He said he was entirely finished with pretending.
He said he no longer cared if the entire world laughed at him.
He asked her to marry him in earnest.
He told her she was the very first true thing he had found in a decade.
She looked up into his intense green eyes and finally said his given name.
He closed his eyes as though bracing himself against the overwhelming relief of it.
Victoria made her desperate scene at the final great dinner.
She stood up in her flattering black, commanding the attention of the entire long table.
She announced that the company had been cruelly deceived.
She declared that the woman sitting beside the Duke was a common housemaid dressed in borrowed silk.
The silence in the dining room was absolute and terrifying.
Before Gregory could rise, Brenda stood up in her green silk.
She was not ashamed, and she let the room see her pride.
She confirmed Victoria’s accusation clearly and loudly.
She told them her father was a clergyman who died in debt.
She told them she had chosen honest physical labor over dishonest comfort.
She told the staring faces that there was absolutely no shame in working with her hands.
She said the only shame belonged to whoever taught them to laugh at honest work.
Gregory stood up beside her and took her reddened hand in front of everyone.
He told the room she was worth more in courage and wit than every fortune at the table.
He announced that he had asked her to be his wife, and she had accepted.
He invited anyone who found the matter amusing to leave his house immediately.
Absolutely no one laughed.
Victoria had not realized that a room only mocks a man who is terrified of mockery.
Gregory was no longer afraid.
Victoria stood alone at the foot of the table, entirely finished.
She realized she had lost the massive gamble of her life.
She left Westridge that night in the dark, without saying goodbye.
Brenda watched her carriage lamps fade down the avenue, feeling only a profound, quiet pity.
They were married in the spring in the small gray church in the valley.
The county attended warmly, eager to be part of a romance that defied all sense.
Brenda signed the register as Brenda Felbridge for the very last time.
She wished her gentle, ruined father had lived to see his daughter so completely loved.
The years of freezing attics and gray gowns were finally over.
In the long, light evenings of their first summer, Gregory and Brenda sat together in the library.
It was her library now, in plain fact.
They read Greek together, or simply sat in comfortable, profound silence.
She was finally in the place where she had always been most herself.
She was wholly, plainly, and permanently seen.
He had asked her once in this room to pretend.
She knew she would never have to pretend again.
THE END
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Disclaimer
This story is a work of fiction inspired by real events. Names, characters, and details have been altered. Any resemblance is coincidental. The author and publisher disclaim accuracy, liability, and responsibility for interpretations or reliance. If you would like to share your story, please send it to [email protected].
