Lady Ashley Never Behaves (The Season of Secrets #4)

Prologue

Lady Ashley Ware stood in the shadows, watching the ballroom at the Duke of Blackstone’s magnificent London townhome. With a sigh, she recalled that three years ago, she’d caused a scandal and was still barely tolerated at events such as these. Hence the reason she stood in the shadows.

This ball was supposed to be a glorious night, the celebration for her best friend Lady Courtney’s marriage to Lord Lucien Furoe, a man who had come back from the dead.

For five long years, Courtney had mourned him, but he’d returned to her, somewhat damaged, with amnesia, but like a fairytale, true love could not be stopped, and Courtney got her second chance.

The ball was hosted by His Grace. A man so proper that every woman here had doubled checked her appearance and was on their best behavior. But they needn’t have bothered. The handsome staid duke was drinking as if there were no tomorrow.

No one but a handful of his close friends knew that the man’s drinking was driven from loss. The love of his life, Kitty, a mistress from a gentleman’s establishment, had been killed by Lord Lucien’s enemy.

This public display of grief was so unlike Blackstone, and it fascinated Ashley, considering the duke took every opportunity to ensure she knew exactly how distasteful he found her unpardonable behavior.

He had forbidden his younger sister Farah to be in her vicinity.

He didn’t want Farah tainted by association with her. But Farah, too, was now married.

As the evening progressed, Blackstone made his way steadily through what appeared to be several bottles of his finest brandy. His grief for Kitty, carefully hidden behind aristocratic composure during the day, seemed to manifest itself in increasingly reckless drinking as the night wore on.

Ashley noticed his condition when she stepped onto the terrace for a breath of fresh air, needing respite from the crowded ballroom and the pitying looks that still followed her wherever she went in society since her very public scandal several years ago.

She’d never seen His Grace drunk. Had never seen him with a hair out of place or showing any weakness, come to think of it.

Perhaps this display confirmed he was human after all.

When she heard His Grace stumble and curse, followed by a loud crash, she knew she should simply get one of the stuffy duke’s servants, but being her impetuous self, and being a kind person, she realized the duke was hurting and probably wouldn’t want his guests to know anything. She decided to help him.

Moving further into the garden, she found the duke slumped on a stone bench in a secluded corner, his usually immaculate appearance disheveled, his dark hair falling across his forehead.

In the moonlight, he looked younger than his thirty years, as handsome as ever, but more vulnerable than she’d ever seen him.

“Your Grace?” she approached cautiously, concerned despite their history of mutual dislike. He barely acknowledged her presence if they were in the same room. “Are you quite well?”

He looked up at her with eyes that held a grief so profound, it took her breath away. “Lady Ashley,” he said, his voice slurred but still recognizably aristocratic. “Come to witness the mighty fall?”

“I came for air,” she replied honestly, studying his face with growing concern. “But I can see you’re…unwell. Perhaps I should call for someone—”

“No.” The word came out sharper than he’d intended, and he visibly struggled to moderate his tone. “No one else. They’ve all seen enough of my…weakness.”

Ashley had intended only to check on the duke’s welfare—a simple act of kindness from one wounded soul to another. But as she sat beside him on the stone bench, listening to his raw confession of grief, something fundamental shifted between them.

“Everything is about her,” Blackstone whispered, his usual aristocratic reserve stripped away by brandy and anguish. “Every breath, every heartbeat, every waking moment. She’s gone, and I… I don’t know how to exist without her.”

The naked pain in his voice struck something deep in Ashley’s chest. For three years, she’d been defined by her scandal, reduced to a cautionary tale whispered about in drawing rooms. But here was the Duke of Blackstone—the man who had cut her dead at countless social events, who had looked through her as if she were invisible—revealing himself to be as broken as she was.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly, her anger at his past treatment of her dissolving in the face of his genuine anguish. “I know what it’s like to lose someone you love.”

“Do you?” He turned to look at her properly for the first time, taking in her face in the moonlight. Without his usual mask of aristocratic disdain, he looked younger, more vulnerable. “I’d forgotten…your scandal. A love affair gone wrong.”

She was talking about her father. The familiar sting of that assumption—that she had been some naive girl seduced and abandoned—rose in her throat. But tonight, with grief hanging between them like morning mist, the old defensive anger seemed pointless.

“It wasn’t quite what everyone believes,” she said carefully. “But the consequences were…severe.”

His jaw tightened with unexpected anger on her behalf. “Society is cruel to women who dare to feel, to want, to love. I know. I’m guilty of that. You deserved better than their judgment.”

“Did I?” Ashley’s laugh held three years of accumulated bitterness. “I’ve been a cautionary tale for so long, I’ve almost forgotten what it felt like to be anything else.”

“You were nineteen,” he said, leaning closer. In the moonlight, his dark eyes held something she’d never seen before—compassion, understanding, recognition of shared pain. “Nineteen and caught up in circumstances beyond your control. Taken advantage of by a cad. What crime is that?”

The gentleness in his voice, so at odds with the cold disapproval she’d grown accustomed to from him, cracked something inside her chest. When he reached out to touch her cheek, she didn’t pull away.

“You’re not alone,” he said quietly. “You don’t have to carry this burden alone anymore.”

Three years of careful composure of maintaining dignity in the face of whispers and snubs, suddenly crumbled. The tears came without warning, great gulping sobs that she tried desperately to muffle against his shoulder as his arms came around her.

“Shh,” he murmured, his voice infinitely gentle. “Let it out. You’re safe here.”

Safe. When was the last time anyone had made her feel safe? When was the last time someone had held her without judgment, without calculation of what association with her might cost them?

When he tilted her face up to his, his thumb brushing away her tears, Ashley saw her own loneliness reflected in his eyes. Two people who had been surviving rather than living, finding unexpected solace in each other’s pain.

The kiss, when it came, was born of desperation rather than passion—two drowning souls reaching for something, anything, to anchor them to hope.

His lips were warm against hers, tasting of brandy and grief, and she kissed him back with equal fervor, pouring three years of isolation and loneliness into that single moment of connection.

Time seemed suspended in the moonlit garden.

The distant sounds of celebration faded away, leaving only the whisper of wind through the trees and the thundering of her own heartbeat.

This was madness—kissing the Duke of Blackstone, the man who had been her harshest judge, in a garden where anyone might see them.

But for these stolen moments, Ashley allowed herself to forget consequences, to forget propriety, to forget everything except the warmth of his embrace and the desperate comfort they offered each other.

It was the shocked gasp that brought reality crashing back.

“Good God!”

They sprang apart as if burned, Ashley’s hands flying to her disheveled hair while Blackstone struggled to straighten his cravat.

Lord Derrick stood at the entrance to their secluded alcove, his wife and two other society matrons gaping behind him like carrion birds who had discovered a particularly choice piece of scandal.

The Duke of Blackstone, disheveled and clearly intoxicated, caught in passionate embrace with the notorious Lady Ashley Ware. In a garden. At the most prominent wedding of the Season. With witnesses.

Ashley felt the blood drain from her face as the full magnitude of her situation crashed over her.

This wasn’t merely another scandal—this was complete and utter ruin.

No amount of careful behavior, no years of quiet dignity, could overcome being caught in such a compromising position.

One scandal might be eventually overlooked but two…

“I…we…” she stammered, her mind reeling as she tried to find words that might somehow salvage this disaster.

But Blackstone had already risen to his feet, his aristocratic composure sliding back into place despite his obvious intoxication.

When he offered her his arm with perfect propriety, as if they hadn’t just been discovered in the most compromising circumstances imaginable, Ashley could only stare at him in bewilderment.

“Lord Derrick,” he said with icy politeness. “Lady Derrick. I trust you’re enjoying the wedding festivities.”

The casual tone, as if nothing untoward had occurred, seemed to momentarily nonplus their audience. But Ashley could see the gleeful calculation in Lady Derrick’s eyes, could practically hear the scandal being refined into its most damaging form.

By tomorrow morning, all of London would know. By tomorrow evening, she would be completely ostracized, and the Duke of Blackstone’s reputation would suffer considerably by association.