“You are not a fool,” he said, which seemed to surprise him slightly.
“No.”
He picked up his coffee again. “My nephew has a tendency toward what I will generously call conviction. He forms it quickly and holds it absolutely. It is not always wisdom.” He paused. “He has formed a very particular conviction where you are concerned.”
Megan said nothing.
“Oliver is heir to this dukedom,” the Duke continued, his voice measured. “He has responsibilities that extend considerably beyond his personal grievances, however legitimate. What he does from here—how visibly he moves against Penharrow, how publicly he aligns himself with your cause—will have consequences for this family for years to come. Penharrow has allies in Parliament. He has the ear of men who could make Oliver’s position very difficult.” He looked at her directly. “I am not asking you to abandon your testimony. I am asking you to consider whether your presence here, as Oliver’s particular project, serves his interests or endangers them.”
Megan set her teacup down carefully.
“Your Grace,” she said, “I would ask you one thing before I answer that.”
A slight inclination of his head.
“Did you know? Not about me specifically. I don’t imagine you did. But about men like Penharrow. The things they do. The women who disappear into houses like his and are never spoken of.” She held his gaze without blinking. “Did men of your standing know, and look the other way because it was convenient?”
The silence that followed was not comfortable.
“That is not a question I am prepared to answer to a stranger at my breakfast table,” the Duke said finally.
“No,” Megan agreed quietly. “But it’s the right question.” She straightened in her chair. “I understand what I am, Your Grace. I understand what I represent to a room full of gentlemen. I am inconvenient. I am a problem polite society prefers to manage quietly, from a distance, with a small sum of money and a strong suggestion that I remove myself somewhere I won’t cause difficulty.” She folded her hands in her lap. “I have been managed in precisely that way for fourteen years. I don’t intend to permit it again.”
The Duke’s eyebrows rose a fraction.
“Your nephew did not create my situation,” Megan continued. “He chose to do something about it when most men would not. That choice is his, made with open eyes, and it is not mine to unmake for him because it is costly. If he decides the cost is too high—if he tells me himself that he wishes me gone—then I will go.” She met the Duke’s eyes. “But I will not be managed out of this house by a conversation at the breakfast table, however elegantly conducted.”
Another silence.
The Duke of Saxton looked at her for a long moment with an expression she could not entirely read. Something moved through it. Not warmth exactly, but something adjacent to respect, arrived at reluctantly and not without some irritation.
“Oliver said you were stronger than you looked,” he said at last.
“He was right.” She picked up her teacup again. “He usually is.”
The Duke made a sound that was not quite a laugh. He lifted his newspaper with the air of a man who had said what he came to say and found the conversation had not gone as anticipated. “Help yourself to the sideboard. You look as though you haven’t eaten properly in a week.”
“A week and a half,” Megan said. “But who’s counting.”
She rose and moved to the sideboard before she could see his reaction, filling her plate with the sort of unhurried composure she had spent fourteen years perfecting, and thought that wherever Oliver was this morning, she hoped someone was looking after him half as well as this castle’s cook was evidently capable of looking after her.
She sat back down.
Outside the windows, the frost-silver grounds glittered in the pale winter sun, and nowhere in this room were there bars on the windows.
She ate her breakfast.
Nothing had ever tasted so good.
She’d almost finished eating when the Duke folded up his paper, stood and tucked it under his arm. “Please excuse me. I do hate leaving a guest to eat alone, but Oliver should be here shortly. I suspect he’s seeing to the guards.” He turned, then turned back. “You are welcome to stay in my home as long as you please, Miss Megan. God help me, but I can see what my nephew sees in you and why he believes he can defeat Penharrow. I hope you are both right.”
She merely nodded her head. She didn’t know how long she would be staying. That was up to Oliver and his plan.
No sooner than the Duke left than Oliver arrived.
He filled the doorway the way he always seemed to fill every space he entered, not through any effort or performance of presence, simply because nature had made him the kind of man that rooms rearranged themselves around.
Megan had seen him exhausted and filthy and half-frozen, and he had still been the most devastatingly handsome man she’d ever encountered. She had not prepared herself adequately for his clean appearance.
