Page 100 of Rules for Ruin

“I know who you are.”

Her lips trembled. She shook her head. “You don’t.”

“I’ve known since the beginning.”

A startled look crossed her face. “But how—?”

“We’re the same,” he said. “I told you so the night we met.”

Understanding registered in her dark blue gaze. Her expression softened. “We may well be so. It doesn’t change the facts. I came to London for a purpose.”

Gabriel didn’t have to ask what that purpose was. She’d admitted it to him that afternoon in Hyde Park. It was Compton who had drawn her here, not the glamour of the season or the hope of finding a wealthy husband. What Gabriel didn’t understand was why.

“All this effort,” he said. “The fine clothes. The Mayfair address. The tales about your French finishing school and your wealthy former guardian. Have any of them been true?”

“A version of the truth.”

His brow creased. “And for what? Merely to stop Compton from standing in the way of some bill in Parliament?” He scanned her face. “Who’s subsidizing it all? Lady Belwood?”

“No,” Effie said. “Not Lady Belwood. Someone else.”

“Who?”

For a moment it appeared she wouldn’t answer. And then: “A lady who champions the causes of women.”

“What lady?”

“It doesn’t matter who she is now. It’s who she was before. A vulnerable lady like so many others—exploited by a powerful man, unprotected by a loathsome half brother. Her fortune taken from her, and her reputation destroyed.”

Gabriel stared at Effie in dawning understanding. “Good God,” he uttered. “Not Wingard’s sister?”

26

Effie had no intention of revealing Miss Corvus’s secrets. How could she when she didn’t know the half of them herself? But after what she had learned in Trowley Green, and after Gabriel had accepted her—truly accepted her—she couldn’t lie to him any longer.

He was right. They were the same.

Perhaps they even belonged together. It certainly felt that way, on his lap and in his arms. Here, at last, she was safe, and known, and…

Beloved.

Gabriel hadn’t said it in so many words, but the emotion was there all the same. It was in the way he held her and comforted her. In the tenderness that deepened his voice and softened the hard edges of his granite-hewn face. No longer cynical, he had looked into her eyes with raw sincerity.

“I know who you are,” he’d said.

Effie’s heart had thumped heavily in answer. This connection between them…It was a form of kinship she’d never encountered. An elemental recognition, all tangled up with vulnerability and desire. The temptation to give in to it was great indeed. But in the aftermath of learning about her mother, another feeling had emerged in Effie’s aching heart. An iron-forged sense of what she owed to Miss Corvus.

Reluctantly, she withdrew from Gabriel’s arms. He didn’t attempt to stop her, only looked at her steadily, his expression intent, as she collected her bonnet from the adjoining seat and moved to take its place.

“I don’t know her by that name,” she said, arranging her skirts. “But I believe she may well be her.”

Gabriel sat up straighter as she settled beside him, leaning toward her in her seat, his pale blue eyes riveted to her face. “Wingard said his sister went abroad. He told me she’d died.”

“A version of death. The lady who raised me wasn’t a broken woman. She was a creature of singular strength. So much so that I spent all my life imagining her cold and heartless.”

His brows notched. “You say she raised you—”

“As much as a child can be raised in an orphanage. There was no love or affection in that place.” The old bitterness threatened as Effie uttered the words. She recognized it now for what it was: childhood ignorance; a misperception of the facts.