Page 94 of Corrupting his Duchess

“Yes,” he said. “You do.”

She looked down at her hands. “You’re asking me to let you court me.”

“I am,” he said. “Not out of pity. Not out of pressure. Because it makes sense.”

Anna didn’t respond right away.

Her voice, when it came, was quiet. “All right.”

That made him pause– just briefly. He hadn’t expected it to be so easy.

“No questions?” he asked. “No protest?”

She looked up at him then. Her gaze was steady, unreadable.

“What would be the point?”

He said nothing for a moment. Then he stood. “I’ll speak to your mother. She’ll be pleased.”

She simply said, “Very well.”

Matthew studied her face for a beat longer, perhaps hoping to see gratitude. Or regret.

But there was nothing.

He bowed. “Until next time.”

He left without another word.

The door clicked shut behind him.

Anna remained standing, one hand resting on the back of the chair. She stared at the fire, willing the sting in her eyes to fade.

But it didn’t.

CHAPTER 18

London had never felt so loud. The city moved with its usual mechanical elegance, carriages rattling over cobblestones, voices weaving through shopfronts and clubs, everything polished and postured for the Season, but to Henry, it all sounded like static.

He had returned three days earlier, greeted by a stack of correspondence and a slate of meetings lined up with military precision. The weekend at Yeats Hall had been, by every external measure, a success. Agreements signed. Interests aligned. Isaac Stenton appropriately humiliated in front of the right people.

On paper, everything was exactly as it should be.

But Henry hadn’t touched the letters on his desk this morning.

Instead, he sat in the third seat of the long boardroom table at his banker's office in Pall Mall, leather-backed and severe, staring past the polished windows while someone discusseddividend projections. And yet, for every success written in ink, there was a name he hadn’t said out loud in a week.

Anna.

He thought of her more than he meant to. Not just her mouth, or the way she laughed when she didn’t mean to

“– and the new agreement with the Redding partners should take us into the third quarter with a twenty-two percent rise in net profit,” the man across from him said.

Henry did not react.

There was a short, awkward pause. Then a cough.

“Your Grace?” Mr. Bristow prompted.