The motor car dropped Duchess Graham near the Somerset ducal family’s villa. Margie, mildly disappointed by the rather modest size of the place, was just about to press the bell at the front gate.

But…… what exactly am I planning to do once I’m here?

A simple question rose in her mind and stilled her hand. Because the only thing she could actually do right now was barge in on her husband’s social gathering and humiliate him in the process.

What would Frederic think of me if he saw me show up here? A tiresome stalker, a controlling obsessive, a childish wife trailing after her husband everywhere? If I press this bell and call for Frederic Graham, he’ll probably demand a divorce on the spot, saying he can’t stand to be around someone as repulsive and ignorant as me. I can’t let that happen! Oh. Thank goodness I came to my senses in time. That could have ended very badly!

Staring blankly at the prettily blooming roses and trailing vines, Margie lifted her finger away from the bell.

“Let’s just go home for now. Wait there until my husband comes back, and when he does, have a proper conversation……”

She gave a shudder and turned to leave.

“……Well, would you look at that. Out again, Frederic!”

“Our Duke Graham is a complete disaster at poker.”

“At this point it’s gone beyond losing the pot. This is mindless charity. Is this what they call noblesse oblige from a duke of distinguished bearing?”

Animated voices and a burst of overlapping laughter spilled over the garden wall.

Graham? My husband, Frederic?

Margie’s head turned back toward the sound. Her gaze moved to a glass pavilion set some tens of metres from the grand front gate. Beneath a hexagonal glass dome inside a garden barely half the size of the Flynn estate, five or six young men sat shoulder to shoulder, laughing and chattering.

Lowering her shoulders slightly and pressing herself out of sight, she found Frederic almost immediately. Picking out the tallest and most striking man among them was no great effort.

“……!”

The moment she spotted him, she clapped both hands over her mouth. To smother the cry that nearly escaped her.

The Frederic Graham she knew was someone who maintained a perfectly pressed uniform without a single crease, an immaculate hairstyle, an arrogantly lifted chin, a rigid posture, and eyes sharp as a blade, all of it held in place right up until the moment he got into bed. In short, his obsessive fastidiousness and his emotionally stripped manner were as much his trademark as the weight of being the Graham household’s young lord.

That same man, who had shown her nothing but a perfection so complete it felt inhuman……

“Fold.”

He set his cards down on the table and conceded the round. In a state that could not possibly be Frederic Graham.

Disheveled golden hair, listless emerald eyes, a half-undone necktie, a jacket tossed carelessly aside and rumpled where it lay, and on top of all that……

“Light.”

A cigarette!

“Yes, Your Grace.”

Frederic flicked his fingers and the attendant standing behind him came at a run. He held a lit match courteously to the tip of the cigar between Frederic’s lips. Frederic offered the barest tilt of his head in return, the magnanimity of a man accustomed to being obeyed.

Is this actually the Frederic I know? Not just someone who looks like him?

Even seeing it with her own eyes, Margie had to scan him from head to toe several times before it would register. But she already knew the answer to that foolish question better than anyone. There couldn’t possibly be two creatures this perfect in the world.

Good heavens, my husband looks like that and he’s smoking on top of it. It’s so……

“……s*xy.”

Margie let out a faint, unsteady breath.

“He’s exactly like ‘Agnus,’ the hero of 〈The Grand Ducal Household’s Lewd Wedding Night〉……”

All through her reading of the novel, she had thought the breathless descriptions of ‘Agnus’ and his masculinity and dissolute beauty were a bit much. This author is wonderful in every other way, but the hero worship goes a little too far. Who goes on and on like this about the eyes and nose and lips of a man they’re fond of. Even if it’s fiction, there’s a limit. Must be a woman with no experience with men whatsoever. That was what Margie had firmly believed.

Yet the Frederic before her now was radiating something that surpassed any written description, an allure laced with an unreality and a hollow, languorous beauty that didn’t quite belong to the waking world.

That author must have had quite the experience……

Margie found herself finally, fully convinced.

She had made up her mind to reread 〈The Grand Ducal Household’s Lewd Wedding Night〉 when she got home, and was swallowing against a dry throat, when,

“Where’d the money come from? Even a doting father-in-law rolling in wealth wouldn’t just hand his son-in-law a fortune to throw away at cards, however fond he is of him.”

Not landing a single win and losing hand after hand, one of the men beside him asked with a nudge of concern.

“I sold the watch Miss Flynn gave me as a wedding gift.”

Frederic replied flatly, reaching toward the ashtray sitting a little ways off.

“What. You sold it? Are you out of your mind!”

“That’s something you pass down to your son, and your son’s son, for generations to come, and you sold it? Are you serious? You’re joking, right?”

“Have you ever seen Graham joke?”

“Oh, Lord. Please forgive our Duke Graham his incorruptible soul.”

“And his ignorance, while You’re at it. Amen.”

The moment they heard Frederic had sold the watch, everyone fell over themselves to condemn him.

The wristwatch he had received as a wedding gift was the most expensive among things already known to be luxury items. The brand carried considerable artistic value, too much to dismiss as mere extravagance, and the men seated around the poker table knew better than anyone how much effort Margie Flynn had put into getting her hands on it. That watch was, in the world of men, one of the great romantic ambitions of a lifetime.

“On top of everything, wasn’t the new model they just released a limited edition of five in the entire Allied Nations? If you’d held onto it even a little longer, the premium would’ve been astronomical. Like you said, it never should’ve been sold in the first place.”

“The premium.”

Having successfully pulled the ashtray closer, Frederic gave a short laugh, the kind a man gives when he hears something genuinely amusing. Nothing about any of this was actually funny.

“That’s probably why they paid such a generous price. Even threw in a compliment about being privileged to receive such a fine piece of stolen goods.”

He tapped his ash elegantly into the tray and gave a small shrug of both shoulders. What caught Margie’s eye, unexpectedly, were his fingers, long and fine, against a hand that was rougher by comparison, and the veins running across the back of it, full of a masculine vitality.

“Listen, Your Grace. You still need to lose at a reasonable pace. The rest of us feel a little guilty taking everything.”

The man who had come out the winner of this round pulled the pile of winnings toward himself with unabashed greed and grinned.

“What does it matter. All I have left is money, since I’ve already sold off my conscience and my honor. Take it all.”

“Well, look at you. Married into a wealthy family and you’ve gotten quite glib, haven’t you?”

The man who had been scolding him just moments ago for selling a watch that should have been handed down through generations burst out laughing at Frederic’s quip.

“Speaking of which, Frederic, how did you end up marrying the Flynn girl anyway? You had no connection to that family whatsoever.”

“Exactly. No matter how deep in debt, for Graham, the finest of noble houses, to take in a lowly Flynn as a son-in-law……”

“They say the nouveau riche give off a peculiar smell that no perfume can cover. Something like the grimy stench of banknotes dredged up from the gutter?”