Ravenwood glared at the blank page mocking him with its unblemished purity.

He was alone in his office, seated behind his father’s stately escritoire. When he was a child, he would often climb up into the thick leather chair and scrawl a few lines in his journal.

During his adolescent years, particularly after the loss of his parents, those scrawled lines had ceased being a recapitulation of his day. He didn’t wish to dwell on his grief and anger; he longed to escape it.

And so he had turned to poetry. Expressing things he wished would happen, rather than life as it really was. It was an escape, yes, but it also provided a brief moment of hope in days that otherwise would have none.

Days like today.

He was about to wed a woman he didn’t even know. A woman who didn’t know him—and perhaps never would.

The boy who had scribbled in his journal, the man who anguished over every dissonant couplet, that wasn’t the Duke of Ravenwood. It was Lawrence Pembroke. A man with dreams and sorrows, fears and fury, apathy and abject love. ’Twas the secret side of himself he only allowed to breathe for a few moments every morning before carefully locking it away in a hidden drawer within his desk.

Today, even his recklessly romantic side had run out of hope. There was nothing left to write. The dreams inside those worn journal pages were destined to remain just that. Empty dreams.

A knock sounded upon his office door.

Ravenwood closed the stubborn journal and locked it inside its secret panel. “Come in.”

Mrs. Brown, the housekeeper, cracked open the door but did not venture inside after her curtsey. “Pardon the interruption, your grace. Just wanting to see if you had any additional requirements for the wedding breakfast. There’s still time to send Martha on another run to the market.”

Ravenwood rubbed his face. What did he know about planning wedding breakfasts?

He’d already changed the menu twice. Even though a love match was not his fortune, he wished the breakfast to at least be tolerable to the bride.

Yet the only meal he’d ever seen Miss Ross consume was what his sister Amelia had served at her dinner party—namely, Ravenwood’s favorite foods, because she’d intended to manipulate him into attending that cursed charity gala.

He would no doubt look like a perfect cad by featuring his own favorite supper dishes at a wedding breakfast, but it was the best he could do. He would not write to his bride—or worse, his sister—in search of advice. His was not a love match, and he refused to look like a romantical fool.

“Perhaps some canapés,” he said at last. Footmen had been serving trays of them at the auction. They might be one of Miss Ross’s preferred appetizers, or they might simply be the easiest thing to have on hand at her gala. In any case, at least it was another option. “That will be all.”

“Yes, your grace.” Mrs. Brown bobbed her respects and quickly closed the door.

Her footsteps were soundless on the carpet in the corridor, but Ravenwood had no doubt she was moving with all haste to inform Martha of her impending return to market.

Such was the power and the curse of being duke. Everyone did everything with all haste in their eagerness to accede to his commands. Had he proclaimed, We shall serve worms in mud sauce, such a menu would have been executed without question.

His title was not solely to blame. Being the sort of duke that he had become also had much to do with the matter.

Inheriting at a young age meant he’d had to try that much harder to live up to impossibly high expectations. To be taken seriously. To be respected.

Since then, he’d been called many things. Cold, proper, haughty, imperious, dismissive. These were not insults. They were character traits of a man who appreciated order. It was all he knew. He had perhaps grown into an outwardly hard man, but not, he felt, an unworthy one.

Until last night.

He pushed to his feet and strode from his office to an unassuming little sitting room on the opposite wing of the manor. The room was empty, save for a single gilded portrait upon the far wall. No one entered this room but Ravenwood.

No one was allowed to.

He assumed his customary position before his cherished painting and stared into its dry, cracked depths. When his uncle Blaylock had become guardian to two orphaned siblings, the man had rolled up this canvas and tossed it into a dark closet so that he could use the magnificent frame to showcase his own family.

The rescued painting contained the only family portrait of Ravenwood, his sister, and their much-loved parents.

It was an unusual piece because the artist had captured more than the family—he’d included the entire room in the background. From the vase of roses on the windowsill to the one-of-a-kind furniture before the fire, every aspect had been faithfully represented.

Ravenwood had been young at the time it had been painted, but he remembered why they’d chosen this small sitting room to star in such a portrait. The little parlor had belonged to his mother. She would invite her children into it every evening, to listen to her read aloud for an hour before the nursemaids packed them off to bed.

The duke would complain good-naturedly that listening to his wife’s voice was ever so much slower than simply reading the book himself—but he never once missed an opportunity to sit in his brocade hand-carved chair before the fire, listening along with his children.

Uncle Blaylock had sold that chair, and everything else depicted in the portrait. He’d turned the cozy sitting room into a showcase for hunting trophies. Instead of housing memories of the best years of Ravenwood’s childhood life, the room became a shrine to death. To loss.

The moment he reached his majority, he’d banished his uncle and the animal carcasses from Ravenwood House forever.

He hadn’t been able to locate the one-of-a-kind furniture pieces the room had once boasted, nor recreate the sense of love and family it had once had. He and Amelia had been alone against the world back then.

After she’d married, it was just Ravenwood.

For another hour, anyway. He consulted his pocket watch to be certain, then sent one final gaze toward the painting.

The last people to see him as Lawrence and not the Duke of Ravenwood gazed back at him from the scarred canvas. The last people to truly know him.

All anyone saw now when they looked at him was what he allowed them to see.

He wished he could be more. He appreciated being a duke—it made him feel close to his father, who had been the most exemplary duke of his time—but he wished it didn’t preclude him from also being a man. From having conversations deeper than “Yes, your grace” and “As you wish, your grace.”

He wanted love. He wanted a family. He wanted warm nights before a crackling fire, reading aloud with his wife as they took turns cuddling their squirming children in their arms.

Not the lonely, loveless upbringing he and his sister had endured after their parents died. He wanted the warm, joyful days of love and laughter. Of family.

He didn’t want a house he merely owned. He wanted a home where he belonged.

And yet, in an alarmingly short period of time, Ravenwood House was about to be invaded by yet another stranger. Someone else would live within these same walls, her very presence ensuring he would never be able to fully put down his guard, even in his own home. He would no longer feel comfortable.

He stalked from the sitting room toward his dressing chamber. He might not have planned to marry her, but he would not dishonor Miss Ross or his duty as a duke in any way. In half an hour, he would be ready and waiting beside the altar.

And his life would never be the same again.