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His father’s grip seized and loosened on his shoulder, an active presence impossible to ignore. Rafe intensified his pleasant smile. “Oh?”

“Yes. The man never announces his new properties until the first of the month, but he makes exceptions for friends. It seems there’s a fine house soon to be let in Grosvenor’s Square.”

The tempo of Rafe’s pulse increased. The most illustrious square in Mayfair or a nondescript one room townhouse, he didn’t care. He just wanted a home. “Perhaps you could arrange for me to meet him there,” he said, hoping he sounded calm. “I would like to see the place.”

Thomas’s pale eyes narrowed, his smile slipping. “Well, we’ll have to see about all that now, won’t we?” His grip tightened until it caused a stripe of pain along the top of Rafe’s shoulder blade. “I don’t think well of you neglecting your duty. This match is important to me, Rafe.”

The sensation of that shoulder grip lingered, phantomlike, as Chenoweth drove Rafe to the Bancrofts. He fiddled with his waistcoat in the dark carriage, cursing when a rut in the road pushed one of the tiny silver buttons back out of place.

Still better than having a valet. And even though everything his father had said sounded like a taunt, some vague threat without origins in sense, at least the bastard was still talking about it.

A house. Mine. Rafe smiled into the darkness, tightening the final knot in his cravat. God, he thought he could be content forever if he had four walls of his own. A place where he didn’t need to bolt his chamber door to draw a full breath, where his mother could come to live in the comfort she deserved.

The small tenement in Greenwich where she stayed now was a poor example of a home, but he could never have afforded to let anything closer to Mayfair. Even if he could, the risk would be too great—she could be recognized on the days she was well enough to go outside. He could be recognized coming and going from her home. Contract work took him south of the Thames often enough that he was still able to visit her every few weeks.

He would go see her tomorrow; it was the last week of the month. He hadn’t realized it until his conversation—could he call that a conversation?—with his father. Time had grown elusive since the Miltons’ ball. Since Miss St. Quinton.

Rafe traveled under the anonymity of a hired hackney, visiting the apothecary and paying the landlord and Abigail, Mother’s nurse. And, if Mother was in such a mood, he visited her. It wasn’t safe for them to communicate directly with him. He never knew what condition he might find her in, but he could not—he could not—risk Thomas intercepting a missive from her.

Spirited laughter spooled out from the Bancrofts’ brick townhouse, reaching Rafe before he’d climbed the first step. Events like this made him nervous, emphasized all the differences in his raising and that of the haut ton’s. But the possibility that Miss Penney might be within, might now be amenable to forging their mutual interests, gave him uncharacteristic confidence.

“Will yourn filly be about tonight?” Chenoweth asked as he closed the carriage door.

Rafe frowned, looking over his shoulder at the coachman, whose grin was shadowed by the gaslit carriage lamps. “Who?”

“O come now.” Chenoweth waggled his fingers about his neck. “A pretty one she be, of such dark hair and fiery manner.”

He was no doubt was referring to Miss St. Quinton’s relentlessly sharp tongue, which he’d only gotten the barest glimpse of. But Miss St. Quinton was fire—sparks of it in her eyes, a simmering foundation of it in her thoughts, ever curious, ever plotting.

His rational, Grosvenor-Square-Miss-Penney-minded brain interrupted. Right, like the time she plotted to blackmail you. Last week, was it?

“I don’t know, nor care,” Rafe said grimly. “Thank you, Chenoweth. I’ll send for you in a bit.”

“Off with you lad! Don’t be comin’ back mopish!” called the coachman as Rafe mounted the steps.

Between Chenoweth and Alfie, Rafe felt like he had two enthusiastically supportive grandmothers. Not a bad lot, in truth, save the fact they thrived on embarrassing the devil out of him.

The Bancrofts’ home was unpleasantly warm. Light glowed from hand-tooled wall sconces and candelabras, banishing any trace of shadow. The close drawing room was aflame with orange softness when Rafe was shown into it, and the chorus of overlapping voices—jeering, laughing, competing for volume over one another—sent little lightning bolts of pain into his eardrums.

A footman balancing a silver tray of champagne glasses paused by his side. He was bone-thin, his black livery clinging to spindly limbs in a feat of tailoring that was almost morbid. The footman opened his broad mouth, and though Rafe watched his lips move, all he heard was the nearby uproar about bets placed on a horse race.

“Thank you,” Rafe said, smiling tensely as he took the offered glass. The scene was thrusting him back to his last society-fangled event, to the stolen sips of brandy and his own failures.

He took a conservative sip from the stemmed glass. Bubbles fizzled on his tongue, smooth and rich and delectable. God, what all this must cost. In beeswax candles and overpriced champagne alone, it all amounted to absurdity—

His next breath stuck in his throat. Across the room, beside a marble mantelpiece, talking to a gentleman, wearing a gown of the deepest lead grey, was Miss St. Quinton.

Her fingers curled around an almost-empty glass. There was a dullness about her eyes, so incongruous with her smiling Cupid’s bow mouth. And the fellow talking to her, his eyes were far from dull. They shimmered with unmistakable male mischief, the rewarding thrill of pursuit. Hell.

Rafe made to turn his head away, but Miss St. Quinton’s gaze captured his in the final instant. Her lips changed. Changed into something less of a smile, yet more … real. She dipped her chin in a gesture so faint, Rafe questioned if he’d imagined it, and then she looked away.

The loudness of the room fell back around him, and he was suddenly aware he was standing by himself, clutching the stem of his glass with a white-knuckle grip. He had only skimmed a fraction off the top of the champagne, but swore then that he wouldn’t touch it again—frivolity be damned. His head was already swimming, not quite his own, for reasons he didn’t care to analyze.

“Young Balfour,” a man’s voice burst through the crowd. “Come ’ere, boy. Perhaps you can settle this dispute.”

Rafe met the middle-aged man’s gaze. He was seated in the corner, where three mismatched chairs had been pushed together. He vaguely recognized the man’s crooked nose and sweaty countenance, and his two male companions smiled expectantly up.

“What’s the trouble?” Rafe asked, forcing a smile and joining the men.