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She inhaled sharply and met his eye in one incisive movement. “Yes?”

“I asked if you were well.” His look was unnerving. Utterly focused. “Are you well?”

What a sensibly mundane question, one that she had surely been asked every week of her life. It only burned her throat and lungs and eyes now because everything about today had pressed the bruise of grief. And because Mr. Balfour had a voice that she could only class as other—

He could speak blasphemy and raise the hair on her arms.

“I should like to leave. Now, if you please.”

One of the only benefits of living with a man like Thomas Balfour was you became intimately acquainted with shifts in the human condition. Rafe had learned, by some prey-like instinct, to perceive tension in his fingertips when he entered a room. To hear infinitesimal, sliced, cross-sections of a person’s tone, and read the thin slides for implications:

I’m displeased with you. I need you to do this, but I won’t ask. If you don’t leave now, it’ll be your head next.

Rafe had sensed Miss St. Quinton’s mood change in invisible waves—a flinch, a held breath, a twitching finger—all predictors of metamorphosis. He recalled his own voice as he’d looked at her.

“Are you all right? Is everything well, Miss St. Quinton?”

She hadn’t seemed to hear him at all. And when she had, well, every word from her mouth was a slashing knife. The silence between them now, as the carriage swept through the streets back toward Mayfair, was merciful if uncomfortable.

You bored her to the last of her patience. He shouldn’t have gone prating on about the Painted Hall; she didn’t care. Just as she didn’t give a whit about him. He only existed to be commanded, bent to her will.

“You said there would be no future visits to Greenwich, if I’m not mistaken,” he said, and his voice sounded strange after so much confined silence.

“I will let you know if I have need of you,” came the hollow reply. She twitched the curtain back. “Your coachman knows to put me out at the mews, yes?”

“I suspect he plans to stop in the square. It is completely dark.”

“Correct him, if you would.”

Rafe complied, and when the carriage slowed to a stop a short while later, he handed Miss St. Quinton out onto the slick pavement and offered his arm. She stared at it. “What are you doing?”

“Walking you home, of course.”

“You were the one so concerned with propriety when we left, were you not? Therefore, you must understand it’s hardly a good idea for you to escort me past every house in the square, alone and at night.” She straightened the edges of her cloak and drew her bonnet farther down her forehead, blanketing her eyes in darkness.

He dropped his arm. “Then let Chenoweth drive to your door.” He flashed a glance at the aged coachman standing a few steps away. He was the only member of Thomas’s staff left over from Rafe’s childhood in the Hampshire countryside. Faithful, jovial, and indisputably a master horseman. It was that skill which kept him employed. It was also that attribute which had made him a steadfast friend of Margaret’s—Rafe’s mother, a fellow horsewoman. Everyone else in Rafe’s life pretended she had never existed at all.

“Absolutely not. No one will be looking for me. But if—if they should, or a neighbor, perhaps, noted an unmarked vehicle instead of the Penneys’—” She shook her head, stamped the end of her parasol against the pavement. “Thank you for the offer, Mr. Balfour, and for today. But I shall walk just fine on my own.”

Rafe looked at Chenoweth again, and the man’s snowy brows arched. He looked nothing like the average coachman, his white beard and broad paunch better suited to leather trews than fine livery. He also looked distinctly amused at what was playing out just now. “Go on, then,” he said in a low voice, flicking his gloved fingers in the direction Miss St. Quinton had set out.

With a scowl, Rafe turned on his heel and caught up with her. She hadn’t made it above a few, breezy strides. “I cannot let you walk alone,” he said. “The devil knows who might be about at this hour.”

“Yes, you can. And you will.” She stopped at the edge of the square, where the light from the surrounding buildings couldn’t reach them. He thought he had exercised the full extent of her patience before, but now he was certain he had: her lips flattened into a thin line and her nostrils flared.

“If someone happens to note your arrival, won’t they think it all the stranger, you arriving alone? Without so much as a vehicle in the street?”

“As I said, no one will notice.”

“Then they won’t notice my trailing behind you like a footman.”

She scoffed and turned her head away. “Men and their preoccupation with honor.”

“It isn’t honor. It’s common decency.” He looked across the blackened, grassy expanse of the square, where the lights of No. 34 shone dimly in the distance. “I’ll stick to the square. You can walk on as you please. You won’t even notice me.”

He wasn’t certain she had nodded until she set off down the pavement, her pace calmer than before.

Rafe clung to the shadows as promised, tracking her progress and eyeing the windows above for any watchful eyes. She walked with wooden elegance, as if she had no need to look farther south than the horizon, as if the earth existed solely for her to stomp upon. An onlooker would deduce her as vain. Entitled. Unfeeling.