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Marcus didn’t want a secured line.

He wanted a human being.

So he had suggested, through careful channels and borrowed favors, that the Bellmeres host their annual summer garden party with a slightly expanded guest list. Every eligible woman within a tasteful radius received an invitation. Bellmere would be pleased to host. Society would be pleased to attend. And Marcus would be pleased to watch.

He had expected to feel satisfied by the end of it. Confirmed in his cynicism. Ready to choose the least terrible option and call it duty.

Instead, he felt hollow.

The sun climbed higher. His shirt stuck to his back. Sweat rolled down the line of his spine and soaked into borrowed cloth. His hands, which were used to reins and pens, were not used to shears for hours on end. He kept pruning because he had to, because standing still would draw attention, and attention would ruin everything.

He bent back to the rose bush, jaw set, cutting a little harder than necessary.

That was when he heard a voice that did not sound like it was performing.

“Excuse me, sir.”

Marcus looked up.

She stood at the edge of the gravel path with one hand raised to shade her eyes. Her dress was pale green muslin, simple and soft in the seams like it had been washed and repaired and worn for real life, not just for display. She wore no jewelry except a small cameo at her throat. Her dark hair was pinned up sensibly, without the elaborate curls and decorations that turned other women into floral arrangements.

She wasn’t beautiful in the way portraits preferred. Her nose was a shade too prominent, her mouth a bit too wide.

But her eyes.

Her eyes were brown and direct and clear in a way that startled him, like a lake that didn’t bother pretending it was shallow.

Marcus rose slowly, suddenly aware of everything about himself. The dirt on his hands. The sweat. The rough stubble he’d left as proof of humility. The ridiculousness of a duke disguised as a gardener, standing in a rose bed like a character in a moral fable.

“Yes, miss?” he said, voice raspier than he intended.

She studied him with the frankness of someone who didn’t need permission to notice things.

“You’ve been working since morning.”

It wasn’t a question.

Marcus blinked. “It’s my work.”

“Yes, but it’s nearly eighty degrees.” She held out a tin cup. Condensation beaded on its sides, glittering like relief. “And I haven’t seen you take any water.”

He stared at it.

In all those hours, no one had offered him anything except orders.

“The punch table is just there,” she continued, nodding toward the main party. “But you looked… occupied. So I thought I’d bring it to you.”

Her hand was bare. No gloves. Her nails were trimmed short, practical. There was a faint ink stain on her index finger.

Marcus’s chest tightened, absurdly.

“That’s very kind,” he heard himself say.

She stepped closer, still holding out the cup like kindness was a simple tool that belonged in the world. “It’s basic decency,” she replied. “Which seems to be in rather short supply today.”

There was a dry note in her voice that told him she’d seen what he’d seen. The handkerchief. The snapped fingers. The lavender pot abandoned like a servant would grow out of the soil to clean it up.

Marcus took the cup. Their fingers brushed, and he felt calluses on her palm.

Not delicate. Not ornamental. Earned.

He drank. The water was cool, faintly lemony. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was until the third swallow. It felt like something inside him unclenched.

He handed it back. “Thank you. Truly.”

“You’re welcome.” She smiled, and it transformed her face into something bright and unexpectedly lovely. “I’m Rosalind. Rosalind Thorne.”

The name didn’t ring any bell in his mind. Which meant she wasn’t one of the grand families. Not on his mother’s endless list of candidates.

Marcus hesitated.

He had prepared a name, something forgettable. Something safe. A lie designed to slide off the tongue without catching.

But she was looking at him like she’d notice if he blinked wrong.

“I’m…” He felt the lie thicken in his throat. “Thomas,” he said finally, using his middle name as if that made it less deceitful. “Thomas.”

“Well, Thomas.” Rosalind’s eyes flicked to the roses he’d been cutting. “You’re doing a lovely job. They’ll be spectacular next week.”

Something in him wanted to laugh at the absurdity of being praised for roses he owned, in a garden party he engineered, by a woman who didn’t know she was speaking to the most powerful man within fifty miles.

Rosalind glanced back toward the party, and her smile softened into something slightly guarded. “I should return before my cousin notices I’ve wandered off. She worries.”

“Your cousin brought you?” Marcus asked, because he didn’t want the moment to end.

“Yes. Margaret Bellmere.” Rosalind’s expression turned fond, almost rueful. “She means well. She thinks I should get out more, meet people. Though I suspect I’m rather hopeless at it.”

“You seem to be managing well enough,” Marcus said.

“Do I?” Rosalind laughed quietly. “I spent the last hour hiding in the library. I only came out because I felt guilty about Margaret going to all this trouble.”

Her gaze drifted back to him and held, as if admitting that was not quite the whole truth.

“And then I saw you,” she said, and trailed off like she was embarrassed by her own sincerity.

Marcus’s hands tightened around his shears.

If he said the wrong thing, she would retreat. If he said nothing, she would leave anyway.

“Will you be here tomorrow night?” he asked suddenly. The formal dinner was the end of the weekend. He had planned to attend as himself, to see how these women behaved when the Duke of Renfield was not invisible.

Rosalind shook her head. “Oh, no. That’s for the main guests. I’m only here for the day.” She gestured vaguely at the house, at the world she wasn’t quite part of. “Margaret tried to insist I stay, but I don’t belong at something so formal.”

There was no self-pity in her voice. Just a plain statement of fact, like weather.

Marcus felt something sharp in his chest, and to his surprise it wasn’t pity for her. It was anger at the lines that made her believe she didn’t belong.

“Perhaps we’ll meet again,” he said instead, because the truth was a cliff edge and he wasn’t ready to jump.

“Perhaps.” Rosalind smiled once more. “Goodbye, Thomas. Stay in the shade when you can.”

And then she walked away, her simple dress moving easily in the breeze, returning to the party like someone stepping back into a room that never quite warmed for her.

Marcus watched her rejoin her cousin. Margaret Bellmere squeezed Rosalind’s hand, protective in a small, affectionate way. Rosalind stood slightly apart from the others, present but not of them.

An outsider.

Just as he’d made himself.

He looked down at his dirt-stained hands and felt the weight of what he’d done settle over him like a heavy coat in summer. He had found what he was looking for.

And he had lied to her.

That night, Rosalind Thorne could not sleep.

Her room above the bookshop was narrow and familiar, smelling of old paper and lamp oil and the faint tang of ink. Moonlight crept across the ceiling like slow water. The street below was quiet except for a distant dog bark and the occasional footstep of a night watchman calling the hour.

Rosalind lay on her back, staring at the dark, and kept seeing a man with pruning shears and startled eyes.

Thomas.

She turned onto her side, pulling the thin blanket up to her chin, and tried to be sensible. He was a gardener. She was a shopkeeper. They had spoken for a few minutes in a rose garden full of strangers pretending not to be strangers.

So why did it feel like something more than a passing kindness?

Because he had looked at her as if her words mattered. Because he had seemed surprised she treated him like a person, and that surprise had made her angry in a way she couldn’t quite name.

Not at him.

At the world that trained people to be invisible.

And at herself, if she was honest, because she had nearly stayed in the library all afternoon, hiding behind books like they were walls. It had been the heat that drove her outside. It had been guilt that pushed her feet toward the path. It had been a moment of decision, brief and bright.

She pressed her forehead to the cool window glass.

Margaret would ask again soon, as she always did, why Rosalind insisted on living above the shop alone, mending her own dresses and keeping her life small.

Rosalind knew exactly what she was missing.

She just didn’t want the kind of world that came with it.

But she wanted to see Thomas again.

The absurdity of wanting something and having no idea how to find it made her laugh softly into the night.

She didn’t know where gardeners lived. She didn’t know how they moved through the seasons. The world of servants was invisible to people like her, just as her world was invisible to ladies who snapped their fingers.

The church bell struck three.

Rosalind finally closed her eyes and willed sleep to come. It didn’t.

Four hours before the Bellmeres’ formal dinner, Marcus Hadley stood in front of his wardrobe and hated every piece of clothing he owned.

His valet, impeccably neat as always, hovered at the doorway.

“Your Grace,” the man said, “the carriage will be ready at six. Shall I lay out the blue coat?”

Marcus stared at the blue coat as if it had insulted him personally.

“No,” he said.

A pause.

“Shall I lay out the black?”

“I’m not going.”

The valet’s expression did not change, which was precisely what made it so irritating. “Sir… the dinner is partially in your honor.”

“I know what Lord Bellmere will be expecting.” Marcus turned away from the wardrobe with sudden, restless energy and crossed to the desk. He yanked out writing paper like he might tear a hole in the world with a pen.

He couldn’t sit at that table with those women who had treated him like furniture.

He couldn’t smile and pretend he hadn’t seen what lived behind their pleasant faces.

And he especially could not do it knowing Rosalind wouldn’t be there, knowing she would go home to her small room above a shop and think, perhaps, of a gardener who had looked at her like sunlight felt.

The lie was growing larger by the hour.

It needed to stop before it became something he couldn’t take back.

“I need information,” Marcus said, writing quickly. “A woman named Rosalind Thorne. She is cousin to Margaret Bellmere. I need to know where she lives, what she does.”

He looked up sharply.

“Quietly,” he added. “No one can know I’m asking.”

The valet’s eyes flickered, almost imperceptibly. “As you wish, Your Grace.”

Marcus’s jaw tightened. “It’s not what you’re thinking.”

“Of course not,” the valet replied in the tone of a man who had seen dukes do far stranger things than chase after a woman.

Marcus shoved the paper toward him. “Please.”

When he was alone, Marcus sat at the desk and stared at his own handwriting until it blurred.

His entire life had been performance. Duty. Expectations. The steady weight of being what others required him to be.

And then, in a rose garden, a woman had offered him water.

Simple kindness. Uncalculated. Real.

He didn’t know how to explain the gardener without sounding cruel. He didn’t know how to reveal himself without losing her.

But he knew one thing with absolute clarity:

He would rather risk humiliation than return to loneliness.

Two days later, at precisely two o’clock in the afternoon, the bell above Thorne & Co. Books chimed.

Rosalind looked up from the account ledger she’d been wrestling with, grateful for an interruption.

Then the pen slipped from her fingers.

A man stood in the doorway who had Thomas’s eyes but none of Thomas’s roughness. His coat fit perfectly, tailored and expensive. His boots shone like black mirrors. His hair was neatly cut. His jaw was clean-shaven.

Everything about him announced money.

Not just wealth, but the kind that expected doors to open before it arrived.

Rosalind’s heart did something unpleasantly complicated.

He stepped inside, and the little shop felt suddenly too small, too warm, too honest. Books were stacked everywhere, towers of paper and ink and dust. Her life was visible here in a way it never was at a party.

He stopped a few feet from the counter and took off his hat as if the gesture mattered.

“Miss Thorne,” he said quietly.

Rosalind swallowed. “You’re not a gardener.”

“No,” he replied. And though his voice was controlled, there was something in it that sounded like nerves. “I’m not.”

The words hung between them like a snapped thread.

“My name is Marcus Hadley,” he continued. He took a breath, as if bracing for impact. “I am the Duke of Renfield.”

Of course he was.

Because nothing in Rosalind’s life could ever be simple without also being cruelly funny.

She should be angry. She knew she should. He had lied to her. He had let her speak to him like he was a man in need, and she had offered kindness and thought herself clever for it, thought herself decent in a world that was often neither.

But looking at him now, she saw something she hadn’t expected.

Worry.

Vulnerability.

The look of someone who had taken off a mask and didn’t know if his face would be accepted.

“Why?” Rosalind asked. The word came out steadier than she felt.

Marcus’s fingers tightened around his hat brim. “I wanted to see them as they really were. The women at the party. I needed to know who they were when they thought no one important was watching.”

“So you tested them,” Rosalind said.

“Yes.” He met her eyes without flinching. “And they failed.”

Rosalind’s mouth tightened. “And I passed?”

Marcus’s expression shifted, something earnest breaking through the polish. “You were the only one who saw me. You noticed I hadn’t had water. You spoke to me like I mattered.”

“I saw Thomas,” Rosalind corrected, heat in her chest. “A gardener working in the heat. I didn’t see you.”

“That’s the thing,” Marcus said, voice low, urgent. “You did see me. The real me. Not the title.”

Rosalind stepped back, bracing her hands on the counter. “You lied to me.”

“I know.” The words were simple, unadorned. No excuses. “And I’m sorry.”

Silence stretched, filled only by the ticking of the old clock near the door.

Rosalind wanted to pace, but the shop was cramped with books and memories. She wanted to throw something, but she wasn’t a dramatic person. She wanted to protect herself, and the only shield she had was honesty sharpened into a blade.

“You could have come back as Thomas,” she said. “Kept the lie going. Made this easier for yourself.”

Marcus shook his head. “Because I don’t want to build anything on lies. And because you deserve better than games.”

His gaze flicked around the shop, not in judgment, but in something that looked like respect. “When I’m Marcus Hadley, people perform for me. They tell me what they think I want to hear. They see the estate, the title, the power. But with you, in those few minutes, I was simply a man.”

Rosalind’s throat tightened despite herself.

She hated that his words landed.

She hated that she believed him.

“I’m a shopkeeper,” she said finally, forcing practicality into her voice. “I live in two rooms above this store. I get ink on my fingers more often than not. I say what I think even when I shouldn’t. Your mother would be horrified.”

Marcus’s mouth twitched. “My mother is horrified by most things. It’s her natural state.”

Rosalind almost laughed, and the near-laughter made her furious because it meant she wasn’t fully armored.

He stepped closer, slowly, as if giving her every chance to send him away.

“I’m not asking you to fit into my world,” he said. “I’m asking if I might fit into yours.”

“That’s not how this works,” Rosalind whispered. “Dukes don’t… do that.”

“Dukes do whatever they choose,” Marcus replied gently. “That’s rather the point.”

He lifted his hand, palm open, not grabbing, not insisting. An offer and a question.

“I choose honesty,” he said. “I choose someone who brings water to gardeners. Someone who hides in libraries during parties. Someone real.”

Rosalind stared at his hand as if it were a doorway. Behind it was everything impossible: gossip, disapproval, a life turned inside out.

But behind refusing it was something else.

A quiet, gnawing question that would follow her for years.

What if?

She placed her hand in his.

His fingers closed around hers, warm and steady.

“I’m still angry about the lying,” she said, voice trembling despite her efforts.

“That’s fair,” Marcus replied immediately. “I would be angry too.”

“And I don’t know how any of this works,” Rosalind continued, because truth was the only way she knew to walk forward. “Courting a duke. Becoming… whatever I would become.”

Marcus smiled, and this time it was the uncertain smile from the garden, the one that looked like a man rather than a monument. “Neither do I. I’ve never courted anyone honestly before.”

The shop bell chimed again, and Mrs. Chen, a regular customer with a sharp eye and sharper opinions, peeked in. She saw them standing hand in hand, lifted her brows in silent delight, and retreated without a word.

Rosalind’s cheeks heated. “Well,” she said faintly, “I suppose the gossip starts now.”

“Let it,” Marcus said, squeezing her hand gently. “I’ve spent my whole life doing what people expect. I’d like to try doing what I want instead.”

Rosalind looked up at him, at this impossible man who had made himself invisible to find something real and had found it in her small, stubborn life.

“And what do you want?” she asked.

Marcus’s gaze moved around the shop, taking in the stacks of books, the worn counter, the quiet evidence of a life built by persistence rather than privilege.

Then he looked back at her.

“This,” he said simply.

Rosalind felt something in her chest unlock, something she hadn’t realized had been bolted for years.

“You’re slightly mad,” she murmured.

“Completely,” Marcus agreed.

He lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles, old-fashioned and gentle, and somehow it made her heart race more than any grand gesture could have.

Outside, the town of Ashford would talk.

His mother would object.

Society would clutch pearls and invent stories sharp enough to cut.

But inside Thorne & Co. Books, none of that mattered in that moment, because a duke had dressed as a gardener and discovered that kindness, when offered without calculation, could turn an entire life toward the light.

Rosalind leaned forward, the scent of paper and lemon water and summer air wrapping around them.

“Yes,” she said softly, choosing risk over regret. “I want it to be our story.”

And when Marcus kissed her among the books and dust and afternoon sun, it felt like the most honest thing in the world.

THE END