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Her dark lashes lifted. “I want you to have me. I … want you.”

He swallowed and pressed a firm kiss to her forehead before backing away. “Sophie, before you say that, there’s something else I’ve need to tell you.”

The room came into focus for the first time, his senses permitted to awaken in the space he’d opened between them. It was spacious and yet strewn with the signs of her: blue ribbon wadded up on the dressing table, a half open armoire door, an uncovered inkpot beside a paring knife, rumpled bed linens hanging partly off the mattress. It occurred to him, very much against his will, that the size of her bedchamber would likely rival that of the rooms presiding over the Cheapside draper’s shop—or any other lodgings he could afford.

He gestured toward the chair tucked under her escritoire. “May I?”

Sophie nodded, and he crossed the room to retrieve the chair, placing it across from her own at the dressing table. He hadn’t accounted for the candle; this arrangement put its light squarely between them. Every inch of her became visible, from the brave intensity of her expression to the delineations of her soft, curving thighs beneath her dressing robe. He wanted to be courageous enough to meet her eye while he spoke, but he wasn’t. He studied his own hands in his lap, tracing the edges of his fingernails.

“There is a reason,” he said, “for my dishonesty. I’ve never taken from my father for the sake of good fun, or even out of want.”

Seconds passed. She wasn’t going to press him along with encouraging phrases, then. This was entirely up to him.

“You’ve heard talk of my mother, I know.”

“Yes. That night at the store you—you shared a little with me.” She shifted in her seat. “How old were you, when she died?”

Rafe bit the inside of his cheek. Hard. “She didn’t die. She isn’t … dead.” His next words came in a coarse reduction of his voice: “She lives in Greenwich.”

“What?” Her anger was unmistakable. “You—you—lied to me?”

“No.” His eyes leapt up. Her chest was heaving, her fingers gripping white-knuckled on the chair arms. “I never lied to you. I spoke to you of loss, and I sure as hell understand loss.”

“Deceiving your father I can understand. I see, now, that he’s beastly to you. But me?” Her gaze eviscerated him.

“Sophie.”

He inched forward in his chair but she pushed back at the same moment, reestablishing distance and putting her face in thin shadow. Rafe drew a deep breath. He had expected the confession to be the worst part. He’d been wrong.

“I need you to understand not a soul knows of this aside from myself, her nurse, and the proprietors of the institution she was placed in. Not Alfie, not Chenoweth, no one. I have borne this secret for almost eight years. The loneliness …” He swallowed the lump in his throat. “I have borne it out of necessity. That I am telling you is the surest form of trust I could ever offer a person.”

Her fingers drummed on the chair in a light, hollow crescendo. “Tell me then. Tell me everything.”

Incredible, really, how a secret buried deeper than the six feet signifying eternal death could slip out with such ease. Sophie had struck something deep within him, chiseled away at this point from their first meeting, and now he flowed freely for her, mirroring her openness with no effort at all. By God, he wanted her to know him. To see him.

He lost himself in the recitation. He began at some indeterminate point before the disaster, trying to piece together a semblance of what childhood had been like for him. Windy pony rides on the downs, seasoned by his mother’s laughter. He, a muddy, fearless boy. The tension that lived within the walls of their home, that even he, aged seven, could sense and dreaded returning to. The fights he heard through the walls at night, which threatened to rear up again at the dinner table. The way he had first known his mother’s parents as jubilant, red-faced, horse-loving people with a sizable estate to visit and explore, until their visits grew less, and less, as every mention of them sparked an argument loud enough to prevent his sleep.

“She took it all with remarkable strength, my mother did.” He ran a hand over his jaw and the coarse stubble reminded him how late the hour was, how long the day. “She learned that reacting was what he craved most. He wanted—still wants—people to fan the flames of an argument. He can’t do as much to you if you show no feeling. I learned that from her.”

“And you said it was a riding accident?” Sophie’s tone had softened.

He nodded. “She was good at managing my father, as best as anyone can manage a powder keg, but they had a tremendous row. He wanted to sell the farm and the horses and move to London, and he wanted her parents’ money to fund the beginnings of what is now that accursed store.” His chest ached, as it did every time he thought of this. “She loved her animals, Sophie. And she wasn’t fond of asking for charity. What he was proposing … Well, I’ve never asked her. But it must’ve been akin to her worst nightmare. Between the loan and the move, he would have finally broken what remained of her connection to her family.

“She went for a ride. I’d been listening to them fight from outside the window, and by the time she came out of the cottage, I was … upset.” The back of his eyes burned, even now, at the percussive phantoms of his parents’ raised voices that day. “She wouldn’t let me ride out with her. And when night fell, and she still hadn’t returned, my father sent Chenoweth out searching. She, uh, had fallen, somehow. Bloodied the back of her head on a rock. She wasn’t responding.” He absent-mindedly touched the back of his own head, his skin seeming to crawl over the fragile bony protrusions of skull.

“But she lived?” Sophie’s knees came into his field of view. She scooted closer to him and took his hands in hers. God, it was like a salve to his soul, the feel of her comforting touch.

“By some miracle, she did. You must understand”—he swallowed and looked up—“she’s never been quite herself since. The injury altered her disposition. Where she was fearless and calm, well, she’s prone to any number of moods now. She’s—she’s not well.”

Her hands squeezed his, tightly enough to brush the cusp of pain. “Loss,” she said.

“Loss,” he repeated.

“How did all this come to be, Rafe? How has your father convinced everyone—even Mr. Chenoweth—that she died?”

He made circular motions with his thumb, passing over each of her nails. His heartbeat had slowed considerably, to almost drowsy, relieved depths. “She didn’t wake for days. Everyone thought death a certainty. The physician, the vicar, even my grandparents. They clawed their way in. Nothing was to stop them from seeing their daughter.”

“Do they know?”