Page 31 of The Scottish Duke's Deal

She found the library without looking.

It was empty. Blessedly so.

She crossed to the window. Her breath fogged the glass. Below, the garden glittered with frost, silent and untouched. A world she could not enter.

Her hand pressed flat to the cold pane.

This is what it was to be a woman in society. You smiled. You curtsied. You paid for someone else’s sin with your own name.

She had tried to be good. To play by the rules. And now, she was ruined anyway.

She remembered Ramsay’s voice—low, certain, unflinching. The way he had spoken to Gifford. The way he had looked at her on the deck. Like he saw her. Like he believed her.

Her throat closed.

No man would save her. And she did not want saving.She wanted to vanish. Just for a moment. Just until the whispers grew tired of circling. Until the world forgot her name.

She walked past the hearth, fingers trailing along the books as if they might ground her. One had been left slightly ajar—Shakespeare. Henry IV. She touched it absently.

Behind her, the door opened. Her heart knew before she turned around.

It was Ramsay.

She watched his reflection in the window first. He did not speak at once but closed the door behind him, soft and deliberate, as though this room was a chapel and silence something sacred. The faint click echoed like a tolling bell.

She turned slowly.

He looked perfect—which, for Ramsay, was unusual. His cravat was precise, his coat unwrinkled, his hair neat—none of the careless rumple or windblown indifference she had grown accustomed to. As though he had dressed for a reckoning.

But it was his gaze that startled her most. There was a kind of wariness to him tonight, as though he had come into the room not just to speak but to confess.

“Rough night?” he asked, voice quiet.

She raised an eyebrow. “Oh, is it showing? I thought the diamonds would distract from my downfall.”

Ramsay crossed to the hearth and stood beside it. “You hold up well. They wouldn’t know unless they were looking. And they’re all looking.”

Eleanor let out a breath, too sharp to be a laugh. “I was thinking I might take the ship back to Greece. Would you recommend the voyage?”

“Winter is coming soon,” he said, his mouth tilting with something like amusement. “I would not. Not without a very warm coat.”

She came to lean against the back of a velvet chair, the cool fabric grounding her. Her eyes roamed his form—flawless tonight and entirely unlike him. It unsettled her more than she cared to admit.

The sharp lines of his coat, the deliberate calm of his posture, the way his hair was combed rather than wind-tossed—it all struck her as… ceremonial. And still, he looked magnificent. Like something carved out of stone and dusk.

How strange,she thought,that a man so serious could carry beauty so carelessly, as if he did not know it. Or worse, as if he did, and it meant nothing.

“You never told me the story. About Penelope.”

There was a pause. Longer than she expected.

“Her mother is dead,” he said.

Eleanor straightened, heart folding in. “I’m sorry.”

“So was I.”

She hesitated. “Why were you in Greece?”