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“I don't know where you can go, but you need to disappear until your twenty-first birthday, which is … when? … soon, I think.”
“Six weeks,” Caroline whispered. “Six weeks exactly.”
“Can you do it?”
“Hide?”
Percy nodded.
“I'll have to, won't I? I'll need funds, though. I have a bit of pin money, but I don't have access to my inheritance until my birthday.”
Percy winced as Caroline peeled the cloth away from his shoulder. “I can give you a little,” he said.
“I'll pay you back. With interest.”
“Good. You'll have to leave tonight.”
Caroline looked around the room. “But the mess … We have to clean up the blood.”
“No, leave it. Better I let you get away because you shot me than because I simply botched the plan.”
“One of these days you're going to have to stand up to your father.”
“It'll be easier with you gone. There is a perfectly nice girl two towns over I've a mind to court. She's quiet and biddable, and not nearly as skinny as you.”
Caroline immediately pitied the poor girl. “I hope everything works out for you,” she lied.
“No, you don't. But I don't care. Really doesn't matter what you think, as long as you're gone.”
“Do you know, Percy, but that is precisely how I feel about you?”
Amazingly, Percy smiled, and for the first time in the eighteen months since Caroline had come to live with the youngest branch of the Prewitts, she felt a sense of kinship with this boy who was so nearly her age.
“Where will you go?” he asked.
“Better you don't know. That way your father can't badger it out of you.”
“Good point.”
“Besides, I haven't a clue. I haven't any relations, you know. That is how I ended up here with you. But after ten years of defending myself against my ever-so-caring guardians, I should think I should be able to manage in the outside world for six weeks.”
“If any female can do it, it would be you.”
Caroline raised her brows. “Why Percy, was that a compliment? I'm stunned.”
“It wasn't even close to being a compliment. What kind of man would want a woman who could get along quite well without him?”
“The kind who could get along quite well without his father,” Caroline retorted.
Percy scowled as he flicked his head toward his bureau. “Open up the top drawer … no, the one on the right …”
“Percy, these are your undergarments!” Caroline exclaimed, slamming the drawer shut in disgust.
“Do you want me to lend you money or not? That's where I hide it.”
“Well, it stands to reason that no one would want to look in there,” she murmured. “Perhaps if you bathed more often…”
“God!” he burst out. “I cannot wait until you leave. You, Caroline Trent, are the devil's own daughter. You are plague. You are pestilence. You are—”
