How to Love a Duke in Ten Days (Devil You Know, #1)
Kerrigan Byrne
To every survivor.
#metoo
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Since I began to chase my dreams to be an author, I’ve been lucky enough to gather a tribe of truly incredible women with whom I share this journey. I used to think that these fierce and wonderful female friendships and business relationships were rare and precious. And they are precious, but I was wrong about them being rare.
Throughout history, women have been supporting, elevating, protecting, and loving each other. Though our strict definition of the word tribe may have changed, the overall connotation has not. We need our tribe to survive. And as I look around at the wonderful change that is happening through and on behalf of women, I’m so happy to be here to see it.
Thank you, my ladies, for helping me to survive.
Thank you, Cynthia St. Aubin, for your tireless encouragement and your trust and bravery in the face of unthinkable adversity. You are my beacon and my safe place. I loved going through this crazy year with you. My person.
Thank you, Staci Hart, for your gigantic open heart and for the most precious resources you offer me with abandon: your time, your strength, and your many mad skills. Your generosity and your friendship are gifts I treasure beyond words. This entire project would have immolated without you.
Thank you, Christine, for the incalculable hours you spend on my behalf. I admire the living shit out of you and I owe you everything.
Thank you, Monique and the team at St. Martin’s, for having faith and patience and being the engine that puts my stories into the world.
Thank you, Janna Macgregor, for the bitch fests and the brainstorming.
Thank you, Claire Marti, Kimberly Rocha, RL Merrill, Ellay Branton, Eva Moore, Kimberlie Faye, Dawn Winter, Janet Snell, Lori Foster, Penny Reid, E.V. Echols, Nikita Navalkar, Maida Malby, Martha DelVecchio, Marielle Browne, Cindy Nielsen, Kelli Zimmerman, and the many others who are there with a quick read, an opinion, a word of encouragement, a shout-out online, a hug at a conference, and some wonderful words I get to read for fun.
Just … thank you.
PROLOGUE
L’Ecole de Chardonne
Mont Pèlerin, Lake Geneva, Switzerland, 1880
“Do you know why I called you to my study at such a late hour, Lady Alexandra?” Headmaster Maurice de Marchand’s hand disappeared beneath his imposing desk at her approach, but Alexandra dared not glance down to note it.
She didn’t want to imagine what his hands were up to, concealed from her view.
Besides, liars looked down. And a liar she was about to be.
She’d always hated this room. The overstated opulence. Damask everywhere. Splashing together in garish reds, oranges, and canary yellows. Even at this hour, one felt the need to squint against the visual onslaught.
“No, sir, I do not.” She summoned every lesson in deceit and temerity she’d gleaned from the Countess of Mont Claire in four years, and met the shrewd gaze of the headmaster with what she hoped was clear-eyed innocence.
Objectively, she understood why so many of the girls at de Chardonne found him handsome. With patrician cheekbones and an angular jaw, he portrayed the kind of sartorial elegance found in ladies’ novels. Alexandra thought his neck too long on his strong shoulders, an effect exacerbated by a diminutive chin.
Her friend Julia had once mooned over his brooding, dark eyes, comparing their color to a rich, black Croatian stout. But Julia, she’d long ago decided, was incessantly ridiculous. And if Alexandra had to compare his eyes to anything, it’d be whatever Jean-Yves, the gardener, fertilized his hothouse orchids with.
Julia had obviously forgotten about his penchant to lash the girls’ palms when they misbehaved. It wasn’t kindness in his eyes she noted then. But something else. Something darker.
He wanted them to cry. He moistened his lips at the sight of their tears.
De Marchand’s hand reappeared from beneath the desk, and he templed his fingers, resting the index tips against his lips. The sleeves of his black headmaster robes puddled at his elbows where they rested on the imposing desk. It was a desk shadowed by many such men, passed like a scepter and crown to each new lord of their chateau.
Lord of what, exactly? Alexandra barely suppressed a roll of her eyes. Lord of little girls? How pathetic.
“Come now,” he taunted, his French accent weighting his words with a treacle vibrancy. “You’re perhaps the cleverest girl we’ve ever educated here at de Chardonne.”
Alexandra imagined generations of clever girls before her better trained—or more willing—to hide their intellect. “You flatter me, sir. But I confess pure ignorance as to why I’ve been summoned to your study at so dark an hour.”
His lids lowered to a sleepy cast, his eyes darkening to a rather hostile brunet. “Always so polite,” he murmured, arranging implements on his desk away from his person. A stack of papers trapped beneath a marble paperweight he returned to their leather folder. “So proper and careful.” The uncapped fountain pen he set to the far left. “Perfect marks. Perfect comportment.” He put his letter opener to the far right, equidistant from the pen. “The perfect student … the perfect woman.”
“I am not yet a woman.” The reminder felt imperative. Though she was to graduate de Chardonne in a matter of days, at seventeen she was the youngest in her year, and would remain so for some months hence. “And I am quite aware of my defects, sir.”