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“Absurd man.” She sidestepped him. “Pardon me, Hansbury, but I’ve an important appointment that I cannot be late for.”
“What appointment would that be?”
The fool was following her. Anne tugged at the top corner of the parcel until Sophie finally relented and let her take it. “A meeting with the directors of the Greenwich seamen’s hospital. I am going to become that child’s guardian, after all.”
“What the devil are you on about?”
She refused to answer, or to look at him. A few moments later, he directed the question over his shoulder. “What the devil is she on about?”
“She intends us to walk all the way to Greenwich, it would seem, milord.”
Sophie’s nostrils flared. “Anne.”
“Good God, you’re even more insensible than I thought. Here, my carriage is just down the street, parked out front of Boodle’s. Allow me to drive you.”
She stopped walking. “Lord Hansbury,” she said, staring beyond him, “do not take this as a personal offense, but you are one of the last people I should like to see just now.”
He huffed a laugh, but there didn’t sound to be any humor in it. “I suppose I ought to be used to hearing that by now, but very well. Pride yourself in having shocked me. I didn’t realize I’d been so very foul toward you.”
A twinge of guilt picked at her resolve. She met his eye. “You weren’t foul—or not that foul—but …”
She had been able to beat down the concerns of everyone else. Anne and her belief that Rafe had taken the Portsmouth Road to obscurity; her parents and their fear that Rafe would not be a good husband if he ever did return; even her own former fears, she had battled and won. The truth was that only this overgrown, spoiled creature beside her, who she had first condemned as a vapid idiot, had uttered the worst words, the ones that could be true. The ones that could shatter her.
Honor aside, what if Rafe couldn’t return to her? What if something horrid prevented his ability to do so?
“Your honesty was more than I cared hear,” she finished. “That is not your own fault.”
The sun disappeared behind a blue-tinted cloud, casting the street in cool shadow. It was the sort of weather that might bring anything. The sort of day that refused prediction.
He was still looking at her when she sighed. “If I go with you, it must be on the condition that you will spare me further scolding during the journey.”
Hansbury squinted at her, his stare considering. He pointed at Anne. “Is she always quite so demanding?”
“Anne,” Sophie said loudly, “do not answer him.”
He grinned. Whatever darkness had been building in his features seemed to ease. “Mine’s the third one, parked just there. You know, the cleanest of them all, with the big fat crest.”
Sophie made sure to keep a half stride ahead of him. “Your arrogance is devastating. And I mean that in the most derogatory sense.”
“If you’re ever seeking a change in employment—”
Curse the man! He was surely jesting, whispering loud enough to be heard as he was, but the very principle riled her. “Hansbury, I will have your own coachman run you over in the street if you don’t leave my maid alone.”
“The carriage might regret that,” he grinned, handing both ladies into the vehicle.
Sophie glimpsed the clock in the window of the gentlemen’s club just before the door closed. One hour. It would take a lot of raillery, and perhaps a miracle, for sixty minutes to see her into Rafe’s arms.
She settled on the cushions. Her palms prickled with sweat. The heaviness in her chest had only intensified, making her head swim. God above, she did not want to leave without him tomorrow. Without Barnard, either.
In the space between her feet where she’d been staring, a large black boot appeared. She glanced up to find Hansbury staring at her, his brows raised in silent question. She dabbed the perspiration from her brow and drew a deep breath, nodding. Her shoulders straightened on the exhale.
“I would have expected more from a ducal carriage, you know,” she said.
One foot in front of the other. That was how Rafe entered Balfour’s. The Saturday crush, was it? Even better.
He ignored the audible gasps of patrons, the gaping jaws of employees, the sound of something shattering. One of Thomas’s porcelain pieces, more than like. Hopefully a yellow Sevres.
A fortnight ago, that sound might have put lethal fear into Rafe’s veins. Today, he weathered it with utter indifference. Thomas, he knew, had much bigger issues to contend with.
