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It was not the answer of a girl regurgitating a lesson. It was the answer of someone who had truly considered the question. She had clearly thought about what it meant to walk into a strange house and be responsible for the people in it. How to respect those people.

“And lastly, would you obey your husband in all things?”

Here, she paused longer than the question warranted. The proverbial answer was a simple yes, but Nathaniel had come to expect anything, but in the few minutes he had beheld her. He watched her chin lift defiantly; the only visible sign of the war being fought behind her composed face.

“I would obey him… in all things worth obeying,” she replied, which elicited laughter from the men. “And I should hope he’d have the sense to marry a woman capable of telling the difference.”

The room fell very quiet. Somewhere behind Nathaniel, a man muttered something about impertinence.

For the first time all evening, Nathaniel found himself at a loss for words. Not from shock, but from awe. His green-eyed beauty had just stood on a stage where she’d been dragged against her will, in front of a room of men who’d paid for the privilege of buying her, and she had found a way to tell her truth without losing her composure.

It was not the answer of a woman trying to win the best suitor. It was the answer of a woman who had decided that if she must be sold, she would at least be sold as herself.

Why are you here if you don’t want to be sold?

He didn’t ask the question aloud. He didn’t need to. The tight-knuckled grip of her gloved hands at her sides. The way her eyes kept flicking toward the doors before she caught herself and dragged them back told him that she had been brought here as surely as she’d been dragged down that staircase.

She was not a willing participant in her own sale. She stood very straight because falling apart was the one thing left within her power to refuse them.

“The bidding may now commence,” the auctioneer announced, and the room stirred.

Nathaniel reminded himself, with some effort, why he had come.

You are not here for a wife. You have no interest in this auction. You have no interest in this woman. You need the host. You need whatever connects the host to Cumberlea. Every moment you spend distracted is a moment stolen from Isabella’s memory.

He held on to that thought through the first several rounds of bidding. He stayed silent and focused. He watched the crowd circle the stage, cataloging which men had begun to bid eagerly and which held back. He filed away every name he overheard and searched for anything that might lead him closer to the host’s inner circle.

The first two women were bid on and claimed by masked strangers with a bored efficiency that turned his stomach, as if they had just acquired paintings. The third woman was a bit more contentious, with a few bidders becoming aggressive until the last man was standing.

Then the bidding on his green-eyed beauty began, and a voice near the front of the room called out a number with a lazy drawl that made his hand curl at his side before he’d decided to react. The remaining men began to circle the stage, leaning closer to it like vultures.

“Fifteen hundred for the last one standing,” the auctioneer boomed, smirking. “And worth every shilling, I should think. A woman with that much spirit in her, and so clearly a beauty…” He laughed, the sound low and unpleasant. “I think it makes for far better sport than the docile sort. Takes longer to break them, but God, it’s more entertaining while it lasts.”

Something in Nathaniel went very cold. He knew that tone. He had heard it before, in drawing rooms and clubs, from men who spoke of women the way they spoke of horses they meant to run into the ground. Men who regarded the opposite sex as something to be enjoyed, used, and discarded once its spirit had been sufficiently crushed.

He had heard it more than once in the careful, secondhand accounts of what Cumberlea had said about his sister before he’d ruined her.

Spirited. Entertaining. Words that meant nothing except that a man had already decided a woman’s resistance was part of the pleasure he intended to take from her.

He thought of Isabella laughing before her wedding, certain the world would be kind to her. He thought of little Iris, asleep in a nursery three miles from here, orphaned by exactly this species of man.

He would not stand in this room and watch it happen again. He felt a pull stronger than any rope.

“Sixteen hundred,” he called, lifting his hand. The words came out flat, carrying without effort across the sudden hush that fell over the room.

Heads turned to him. Whispers rose and spread, a current running from one cluster of masked men to the next.

“Who is that?”

“Does anyone know him?”

“He’s new to this; I am sure of it.”

“Did anyone talk to him?”

On the stage, her head snapped up. Her green eyes found him across the room, and this time neither of them looked away.

As if a bolt of lightning struck his chest, he took in once again just how beautiful she was. Her brown hair was pulled up elegantly, with tendrils framing her face. She had high, pink cheekbones and soft curves, accentuated by her soft pink gown.