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Silvester’s eyes traveled over her slowly. “Your wish is my command. Though I should tell you that I reserved the entire inn for the night. You will be greeted by the innkeeper and his wife, with no other guests to witness our arrival. I ordered meals to be brought to our rooms.”

Stella rolled her eyes. “I suppose that level of extravagance befits a duke.”

“That level of privacy does,” Silvester said promptly. “I had to fire our butler yesterday, after he provided one of the papers with a detailed account of our wedding night, down to the menu I requested.”

“How on earth did he learn the details?”

“From my valet. So, no valet. I fired him as well.”

Stella’s eyes rounded. “Do I still have a maid?”

“Your maid follows in another carriage, but only because I hesitated to tell Mrs. Thyme that I would act as your lady’s maid.” His smile was positively wolfish.

“You are so unlike your reputation,” she exclaimed.

Silvester leaned back. “True. For good and ill.”

“Ill?”

“My mother finds it extremely annoying that my pleasing manners are artifice.”

“Pleasing manners are always artifice, are they not?” Stella asked.

“Refinement is learned,” Silvester said, nodding. “My father never bothered. My mother does not consider it a necessity.”

“But you do.”

He nodded. “My childhood was punctuated by my parents’ eccentricities. I decided as a boy that my life would be improved if polite society welcomed rather than gawked at me.”

Stella forced herself to say what she was thinking. “I am awkward, and my aunt would be the first to say that I possess no refinement. I ask the wrong questions, am interested in the wrong things, am likely to turn the wrong way in a dance, and regularly drop wineglasses. My aunt has told me a hundred times that the object of conversation is to amuse, which I regularly forget.”

“I married you because you are mine, Stella. Mine.”

Stella considered that sentence thrilling and extremely unhelpful. She raised an eyebrow.

“I’ve crafted most of my life to parameters set by polite society,” Silvester added, folding his arms over his chest. His mouth looked definitely mulish.

“The better to win,” Stella prompted him.

“There’s nothing to be won by being sociable,” he scoffed.

She smiled at him. “The title of most desirable, most affable, most charming. All of which covered up the battles you were winning on the side, which had to do with currency, as I understand it. Perhaps more.”

A moment’s silence, and he said, “I might have something to do with the way banks handle their debt.”

“Hopefully, you haven’t yet opened your own bank?”

“I have no interest.”

“Yet the Bank of England desperately needs you to think for them.”

Silvester moved his shoulders restlessly. “Those fools don’t understand the danger that they risk. I’ll be unsurprised if there’s another run on the bank in a year or two, leaving a mere five thousand sovereigns in the vault. Who will they turn to, then?”

“You,” Stella said, grinning at him. “They’ll turn to you.”

“I suppose I’ll inject some sovereigns into their holdings if need be,” he grumbled.

“All this . . . this cover allows you to do just as you wish. It seems to me that your duchess ought to be an extension of the way you have chosen to live your life.”