She had learned, over the years, to read a room before she entered it. To read a man’s posture before he spoke. To read the particular quality of silence that preceded bad news, the way it had a texture to it, a weight that pressed against the skin even before the words arrived.
She had not expected to need that skill here.
But she saw it the moment Oliver came through the garden gate. Not in his face, exactly, though his face had its own language and she was beginning to learn it. It was something in the way he moved. The deliberateness of it. The careful management of a man who was carrying something heavy and had already decided how he was going to set it down.
Megan set her trowel on the garden wall and straightened.
The garden at Saxton House was nothing like the kitchen garden at the hunting lodge. It was a proper thing, laid out with formal beds and a stone bench and roses that would be extravagant in summer. She had spent the morning here because the Duchess had suggested it with gentle tact, and because the air was mild and the bees were working through the early lavender, and because it was harder to think inside the house than outsideit. Inside there were portraits and Persian rugs and footmen whose faces she was still learning to read, and the constant subtle pressure of being someone’s guest. Outside there were only sky and soil and the particular kind of freedom that came from putting your hands in the dirt.
She had been thinking about the Duke. About what he must think of her. About what Oliver must think, now that the first intensity of their journey had settled into the quieter reality of actual life in an actual house.
She had been thinking, in the private way she did not allow herself to think for long, about Oliver himself.
And now he was walking toward her with that particular deliberateness, and she set all of it aside, because whatever was in his face required her full attention.
“You’ve been to the solicitor,” she said.
It wasn’t a question. He looked at her steadily. “Yes.”
She waited. She was good at waiting. She had spent fourteen years becoming exceptional at it.
“It’s worse than we hoped.” He stopped a few feet away, close enough that she could see the fine lines around his eyes, the ones that hadn’t been there six months ago. Or perhaps they had and she simply hadn’t had time to notice. “Penharrow has filed a petition for guardianship. He’s claiming you’re a ward of his estate. A minor under his legal protection.”
The morning seemed to cool slightly, though the sun hadn’t moved.
“He’s claiming I’m a minor.”
“He’s altered the dates. Filed documents suggesting you were born in 1797, which would make you fifteen, not twenty-one. Which would make the petition?—”
“Legitimate.” The word tasted like metal. “He’s falsified my age.”
“Yes.”
“No one could possibly think I was fifteen if they saw me.”She looked at the roses. They were not yet in bloom, just tight green fists waiting to open, and she thought, with the strange dissociation that sometimes took her when reality was too blunt to absorb directly, that she envied them. Knowing what they would become. Knowing it was only a matter of time.
“He’s going to get an injunction before we have a chance to confront the courts with anything and I’ll have to go back to him—legally,” she said. “That’s what you’re telling me.”
“My solicitor believes he’ll move for it by Friday. If it’s granted, any constable in England is legally obligated to detain you and return you to Penharrow’s custody.” He said the words precisely, without softening them, and she was grateful for that. She had always hated softening. “He doesn’t need the petition to succeed in court. He just needs the injunction. Just needs a legal pretext to get you through his door again.”
There it was. The shape of it. Clean and complete and perfectly calibrated, in the way that only Penharrow could calibrate something—right down to the specific mechanism of her undoing.
Megan sat down on the stone bench.
She was aware of Oliver watching her. She was aware of her own breathing, which was careful and deliberate because it needed to be. She was aware of the lavender and the bees and the distant sound of horses in the paddock, all of it entirely indifferent to the fact that her former captor had just reached through the English legal system to put a leash back around her neck.
She had been free for six weeks. She had almost started to believe in it.
“There’s more,” Oliver said.
Of course there was.
She looked at him. He was standing with his hat in his hands, turning it slightly, a gesture she had come to understand meant he was about to say something that cost him something to say.
“My grandmother has proposed a solution.” He stopped. Started again. “She’s quite clear that it would work. Legally. That it would supersede the petition entirely and make the injunction moot.” Another pause. “It would also require something of you that I have no right to ask.”
“Tell me,” Megan said.
“Marriage.”
