Page 24 of The Baronet’s Bartered Bride

It hurt too much to have only scraps of him. A few remarks when she brought him a cup of warm milk or cider on those late nights, to calm him before sleep, sharing a brief exchange of words as he told her about his evening and she soaked up every bit of knowledge she could about the life he led outside those walls. It would tear her heart to brush his coats free of the scent of smoke and chicory after he went to the coffeehouse to meet and argue with his friends. She would disappear, dusting rooms that felt soulless without him when he was away working with his pupils, or looking for work.

She could not go back to being a servant. To being furniture in his life.

“I would have thought you more interested in why Lord Wigsby was trying to kill me.”

“My next question.”

He closed his arm around her as a sudden stop from a wagon in front of them made their horse draw up, and the temperamental Shire horse in the heavy harness turned and snapped at their Trotter, who sidestepped quickly. Joseph had the reflexes of an active man, though she had only ever known him to live in his head.

What else did she not know about him, after living with him all this time?

“It is as I said.”

She gripped his forearm, holding his leather glove to her middle, not entirely for fear that she might fall from the horse. A deep, steady heat spread through her from the press of his arm.

“I helped his daughter elope, and he was angry.”

“Angry enough to kill? If she shamed him so much, I should think he’d try throttling her. Though I don’t approve of the measure,” he added as she twisted her head to look up at him.

A mistake. His head was close, the angle of his jaw in line with her lips, close enough to press in a kiss.

“He—the groom—was a penniless rogue, with more debts than prospects, but enough charm to beguile my lady and every other lass he met.” Including Inez, who would have caved to Priscilla’s pleading even without the honeyed promises of her elegant beau. It had seemed the truest of love.

“And he can’t have hoped for financial support from Wigsby, for the man disowned his daughter on the spot, once he discovered her theft.”

“So the source of his ire?”

Inez swallowed. “Several priceless items—family jewels—disappeared along with his daughter.”

She couldn’t say that Priscilla had carried them away, because that was not true. Inez had secured the jewels to deliver to Priscilla, to give her and her lover a new life together. But when Priscilla was not at the designated meeting area, and word came that she and her new husband had made a hasty passage to France, Inez was left holding the bag of spoils.

She hadn’t dared return to Wigsby’s house to replace them, not with the theft already discovered. And she couldn’t very well take ship to France and track down the newlyweds.

So she decided to disappear. And the quiet little house in George Court, home to a vicar’s daughter and tradeswoman who rarely entertained and a vicar’s son who came and went at odd hours around the demands of his noble employer, had been safe.

Until the moment she first brought Joseph Illingworth his tea, and realized her heart, which she had thought scarred to firmness, had become soft again.

Her head must have gone soft too. All this time, while the jewels lay hidden in Priscilla’s old work bag, she’d hoped in a childish part of her mind that the whole affair would be forgotten. When she ought to have been aware every moment that Lord Wigsby would be on the hunt. Not for his daughter, whom he surrendered easily, but for that which had more value to him: his pride, and his riches.

“He believes you abetted her escape, and the theft?”

“So it would seem.” Inez swallowed hard and felt the iron ring around her throat, the bruising taking effect. It would be hard to eat and drink for a day or three.

But she had gone without food before, when she was younger. And she had survived other bangs and bruises.

“You will be safe in my house,” Joseph said firmly.

Inez pushed down a near-hysterical laugh. Safe from what? Not from her own foolishness, certainly. She had tried to pull herself out of that cook fire, and here she was, jumping with both legs back into it.

“His lordship won’t find you there,” Joseph said, as if he sensed she didn’t believe him.

For a moment, as they rode along, Inez tried to imagine it. Tried to imagine living in harmony with him as his maid, passing him in the hall, bleaching his linens, consoling him when he got turned down for a position, congratulating him when he was accepted. Night after night, to watch him absorbed in his book and feel that strange ache that he should be so far away, though there beneath her nose.

Worse, to watch him woo and win another woman, as he had wooed that vapid Susannah Pettigrew. Inez had guessed from the first that the Quaker girl, for all her passionate moral principles, wasn’t a girl who knew her own heart. Inez had suspected—as had Joseph’s sister—that Miss Pettigrew would cause Joseph heartbreak, and she had.

Could Inez stand by and watch him lose his heart to another, when it would break her own heart to lose him all over again?

He took a different route out of Cheapside, up Snow Hill to Holborn, and Inez distracted herself by observing this part of London that was unknown to her. Her family had taken up lodgings by the docks when they first followed her father to England, after receiving his note that he’d been discharged from his crew and was stranded. She’d hoped, as had her mother, that London would be a new world for them. Such a thriving city, the largest in all of Europe, had to offer opportunities for all three of them.