Oliver. He would be beside himself and blame himself too.
She pressed her thumb against the ring again and held the thought of him like a coal in her palm, small and fierce and steady.
He would come. She knew it with a certainty that had nothing to do with sentiment and everything to do with the man she loved. She knew him. Whatever Penharrow intended, whatever he imagined he had reclaimed by taking her out of that carriage, he had made one significant miscalculation.
He did not know who was coming for her.
She kept her face composed and her hands still and let the carriage carry her, and thought about Oliver, and breathed.
It was notone of Penharrow’s London properties. She understood that much when the carriage finally stopped and she stepped out into a graveled courtyard fringed with bare elms. A hired house, somewhere south of the river, close enoughto London that the city’s smoke still bruised the horizon but far enough that the noise of it had faded to nothing. A comfortable house. Discreet. The kind of house a man might take for a few weeks without attracting any particular interest from the neighbors.
She had time, in the few steps between the carriage door and the entrance, to note the lane, the direction from which they had come, the single gate in the garden wall, the two men standing near the stables who watched her arrival with the professional detachment of hired men who asked no questions. She filed all of it away in the part of her mind she kept for survival and followed the man inside.
Penharrow was waiting for her in the drawing room.
He looked exactly as she remembered, which was the most disturbing thing about him. She had built him into something monstrous in the months since Wales, something vast and dark that occupied the spaces fear lived in, and here he was, just a man of middling height with neat dark hair going silver at the temples and the composed, faintly bored expression of someone who had just won an argument he had never doubted he would win. He was immaculately dressed. He stood beside the fireplace with a glass of wine in his hand as though she had simply called on him at a reasonable hour and been shown in.
He looked at her the way he always had. As though she were something he owned.
“Megan.” He said her name with a particular kind of possession, as though she were a painting returned from a restorer, something temporarily misplaced and now back where it belonged. “You look well. Rather better than I expected, given the company you’ve been keeping.”
She said nothing. She knew how to say nothing in ways that cost her the least, and she employed the skill now, standing straight in the middle of his hired drawing room with her hands loose at her sides.
“I see they’ve dressed you.” He let his gaze move over the gown her mother had chosen for her, the soft green wool, the high neck, the quiet elegance of it, and there was something in his expression she recognized with cold clarity. Displeasure carefully contained. It was her mother’s taste on her skin and he knew it, and he did not like it. “You look like a Fairfax.”
“I am a Fairfax,” she said. “But then you knew that all those years ago.”
The words came out steady and flat and utterly without performance. They were simply true.
Something shifted in his face, the first small crack in the composed surface of him. Not anger. Something more dangerous than anger, the affronted certainty of a man who had never in his life had his version of reality corrected by a woman he considered his.
“How novel,” he said softly. “Five weeks with a title and suddenly you have opinions.”
“Your guardianship documents are fraudulent,” she said. “You know that. My family’s solicitor knows that. The courts will see it within the week.” She paused. “You have nothing.”
He turned back to the fireplace. “I have you.”
She watched the back of his shoulders and thought, with a clarity that surprised her, that she was not afraid of him. She was many things standing in this room. She was furious. She was calculating. She was thinking about the gate in the garden wall and the direction of the road and the distance back to the city. She was thinking about Oliver and Harry and her mother and the small fierce fact of the ring on her finger.
But she was not afraid.
She had been afraid before and it had not saved her, not once, and she had stopped needing it for that.
“Oliver knows where I am,” she said. It was still not true. But it would be. She believed it the way she believed the sun wouldcome up, with the quiet, unshakeable confidence of someone who had decided to stake everything on it.
Penharrow turned back to look at her. Something moved behind his eyes, something he swallowed quickly and replaced with his customary blankness.
“Then he is welcome to come and discuss the matter,” he said. “I have a ward. He has a woman he has been spending considerable time with. I’m certain we can arrive at an arrangement.”
“There will be no arrangement,” she said simply. “There is nothing you have that anyone wants.”
He looked at her for a long moment. She looked back, and did not look away, and after a moment he turned back to the fire and said nothing more.
She stood in the middle of his drawing room and waited, and thought about the ring, and breathed.
Across the lanefrom the house, back against the garden wall of the property opposite, a man stood very still in the shadow of a leafless oak and watched through a gap in the gate.
Thomas Marsh had been employed by the Bow Street Runners for eleven years, and he had spent the last three days outside the various properties of the Earl of Penharrow at the personal instruction of the Duke of Newbury’s solicitor. He had been following Penharrow for days and he’d not been detected. It was a skill he was unlikely to be surpassed in.
