Page 103 of The Wedding-Crashing Duchess

“She may not when…”

“When she comes home.” Augusta tightened her fingers around his. “When.”

A strange comfort arose, but it disappeared almost immediately when Ronan looked toward the letter again.

“Who takes a child?” Augusta asked after a while. “Why Sarah?”

“Because she guarantees I will go.” Ronan’s thumb moved absently against hers. “Whatever this is, it is about me.”

“You cannot think of anyone?”

“I know men who dislike me.”

“Someone with a grievance against the estate?” she said, trying to piece everything together.

“I cannot think of one serious enough.”

“Someone who wants revenge?”

“Possibly.”

They went in circles after that, and perhaps both knew they were doing it. A stranger who hated Ronan. Someone who wanted something he had not yet named. Someone who knew where Sarah would be and understood exactly what taking her would do to her father.

Augusta stared into the flames until something bright caught the corner of her eye.

The raven. Her gaze moved to Ronan’s cane.

She stared at it for several seconds before saying, “You still do not believe me about that.”

Ronan followed her eyes. “About what?”

“The man I saw that night had that cane.”

“A cane like it,” Ronan sighed. “We have discussed this.”

“I am certain that it was the same cane,” Augusta said. “I know that I was wrong about you, but I was not wrong about that.”

Ronan looked at her for a moment. “How can you be so sure?”

Augusta was not entirely sure how she could explain it to him any better than she already had. She had thought about that night many times since it happened, and she knew that there were several things she could have been mistaken about. But the cane was different.

“Because I remember it,” she replied. “Especially the raven.”

Ronan looked down at his cane.

“This cane,” he said, lifting it slightly from his lap, “was a gift from my father from when I was fifteen. There was a hunting competition on our land every autumn that the men of my family had taken part in for generations. I wanted, more than I have ever wanted anything, to make him proud of me. So I entered, though I had no business doing so at that age.”

“What happened?”

“I won.” His mouth curved, though there was no real humour in it. “But I fell from my horse taking the final jump and shattered my leg in the landing. It never healed as it ought to have. I have walked with a limp ever since, and I have needed a cane since I was sixteen years old.”

Augusta looked at his leg. Of course she knew that he had injured it when he was young, but fifteen suddenly seemed terribly young. She had never thought much about how old he had been when he first needed the cane. To Augusta it was simply something Ronan always carried.

He turned it over once in his hands. “My father had this one made for me not long after. The silver raven is the mark of Ravenhill. He told me he wanted the whole of the county to know precisely whose son had won that competition, disability and all. He was proud of me, Augusta.”

“That is a strange thing to be proud of,” she said softly. Especially when it had led to the injury. But she did not say that part out loud.

“He was not a man who valued caution.” A shadow crossed his face. “I understand now that it might have been the very worst gift he could have given a boy so desperate to please him.”