The Duke's Command

The carriage wheels ground against the cobblestones of Ravenshire Manor like a warning. Elara Ashwood had been awake since before dawn, watching the landscape change through the smudged carriage window — the soft, familiar rolling hills of her childhood gradually surrendering to something starker. Older. The trees here grew closer together, their branches interlocking overhead like the fingers of conspirators, blocking out the pale morning light until the road felt less like a path and more like a throat being swallowed down. She pressed her gloved fingers together in her lap and told herself she was not afraid. She was the daughter of Baron Ashwood. Slight in title, perhaps, but not in dignity. She had memorised three languages by the age of twelve, debated theology with her father's colleagues at fourteen, and managed the entire Ashwood estate accounts by sixteen when her father's health had begun its long, quiet retreat. She had survived her mother's grief after his passing. She had survived the whispers that followed when her mother, barely eighteen months a widow, had accepted Lord Voss's proposal with what society considered indecent haste. She had survived the stares at every assembly hall from Bath to London — the sideways glances, the raised fans, the barely concealed murmurs of "the Ashwood girl, you know, whose mother married so far above herself." She could survive whatever waited beyond those iron gates. The carriage lurched as they passed through them, and Elara got her first full view of Ravenshire Manor. It was enormous. That was the only word her usually precise mind could produce. Enormous and grey and ancient, built from stone that seemed to have absorbed every storm that had ever passed over it and grown stronger for the experience. Four storeys of tall windows stared down at the approaching carriages like a row of unblinking eyes. Ivy climbed the eastern wing in dark ropes. Two stone lions flanked the entrance steps, their expressions — Elara thought — rather more welcoming than what she suspected awaited inside. Her mother reached across the carriage and pressed her hand. "It is magnificent, is it not?" "It is," Elara agreed carefully, because it was. Magnificence and warmth were simply not the same thing. The carriage rolled to a stop. A footman appeared to open the door with practiced efficiency, and Lord Voss — her stepfather, still a strange word, still sitting awkwardly in her mouth — descended first to hand her mother down. Elara followed without assistance, setting her boot on the gravel drive and straightening to her full height. That was when she saw him. Sebastian Voss stood at the top of the stone steps as though the manor had been built specifically to frame him. He was taller than she had expected from his father's descriptions — broad-shouldered, impeccably dressed in a dark coat that required no ornamentation to command attention. His hair was dark, his jaw set with the kind of firm composure that came not from effort but from long habit. Everything about him suggested a man who had never once in his adult life been uncertain of his place in a room. He did not come forward to greet them. He did not descend the steps. He simply stood there — hands clasped loosely behind his back, dark eyes moving over the arriving party with the measured calm of a general assessing new terrain — and waited for the world to come to him. Which, Elara supposed, it always had. His gaze moved to her mother first, and something almost warm flickered briefly in his expression — dutiful warmth, the kind extended to a guest one has prepared for but not chosen. He exchanged a few words with his father that the wind carried away before they reached her. Then his eyes moved to Elara. They stayed there longer than was polite. Not in the way men sometimes looked at her — she was not so vain as to be unaware that she was considered handsome, nor so naive as to be unaware of what that sometimes cost her. This was different. This was a particular, thorough assessment of someone cataloguing a potential problem. She felt it move over her like a cold hand — her face, her posture, the set of her chin — and when he had apparently concluded whatever private calculation he'd been making, his expression settled into something perfectly, deliberately blank. Not a bow. Not a word of welcome. He turned and disappeared inside as though the whole matter had already exhausted his interest. Beside her, she heard her mother exhale a small, hopeful breath. "He is simply reserved, darling. Lord Voss assures me he is very—" "Reserved," Elara said. "Yes." She kept her own expression perfectly pleasant as they climbed the steps. She was, after all, her father's daughter — and Baron Ashwood had taught her that the surest way to lose any contest was to let your opponent know they had drawn first blood. Sebastian Voss had made his position clear before she had spoken a single word. Very well. So had she. She crossed the threshold of Ravenshire Manor with her head high and the quiet, settled certainty that whatever was about to begin between them, she did not intend to lose it.