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“They’re gone, now.” It was one of the biggest ifs he carried with him. What if they had insisted on taking him and raising him themselves? Or what if he could have grown enough and saved enough to pull his mother from that institution before their deaths? He dreamt, sometimes, of what their joy would have looked like on learning their daughter still lived. “They died thinking she was dead, too. I had my suspicions long before I had proof.”

He raised Sophie’s left hand to his lips and kissed the tender flesh between her thumb and forefinger. “Best I can figure, my father saw an opportunity.” His chest swelled with rancor, and he had to lower her hand back to his lap. “He quietly had her sent off to an institution. An asylum, in truth. A place in Hampshire, used to be an abbey. I didn’t know that for ages, though, not until I grew brave enough to look through his ledgers and recognized the same strange sum being paid out every quarter.”

He had traced the payments back to September of ’96, the month of the accident. He spent the year that followed discreetly monitoring Thomas’s outgoing correspondence, taking note of every address and cross-checking dates against the ledgers. Finally, he had put the pieces together: Locks Heath Asylum, Hampshire, England.

“What made you suspicious?” Sophie rose silently. She turned and lowered herself into his lap, looping her arms around his neck and stroking the ends of his hair. His very muscles seemed to exhale.

“The vicar read her last rites. It had been days and she hadn’t responded to anyone’s touch or opened her eyes. Both events combined were enough to send her folks back home, and the next morning when I woke, her sickbed was empty. My father made a show, of course, of dry-eyed weeping and telling me she had passed in the night. But she was just … gone.” Rafe let his head fall to her shoulder. “The funeral was the same sort of pompous affair. I could feel it, that he was putting on a damn show. I haven’t a clue how no one else could see it, why they all riddle it as some tragedy of his to this day.

“Once she was assumed dead, he moved us here. He claimed everything she had, including, eventually, what inheritance her parents had set aside for her. Part of what he’s built here has been with her blood. He’s a bad man, Sophie. He can be dangerous. If he ever learns of what I’ve done—”

“Don’t.” She pressed a finger to his lips, and he felt the tremor in it. “Don’t say it.”

He swallowed. “I have to. You need to hear this.”

He adjusted her on his lap, taking her uncorseted waist in his hands. Her eyes were wide, her throat lurching on a swallow. “What I’ve done,” he whispered, “cheating him out of his earnings at the store, it’s nothing compared to what he’s lost to that institution over the years. He thinks he’s outwitted everyone. If he—”

“Rafe.” Her voice was featherlight. Her fingers curled into his hair.

Thomas learning of his son’s betrayal would be equivalent to firing a hotshot cannonball into a sea of coal gas. Explosive. Lethal. Rafe had considered many times what he would be forced to do if placed in that situation, but never before now had the reality bothered him so greatly.

“If he ever finds out, you’ll never see me again.”

twenty-two

He stayed long enough to answer her questions. Even as she watched his eyes begin to droop from exhaustion and she fought back a yawn, he held her in that chair.

Rafe’s hands roamed idly over her back, up and down her arm. She had loosened his cravat and disarranged the starched ends of his collar while he spoke. Her mind was in a thousand places. He seemed to be the only grounding presence in the world—the solidness of his chest to lean on, the supportive and sensual warmth of his lap, the constant play of his hands.

She had known his heart. Now, she was learning the other pieces that made up such a man: Determination, for once he had learned of his mother’s whereabouts, he stopped at nothing to earn enough coin to provide for her. Bravery, for he had scarcely been out of boyhood when he traveled all night and day to reach that asylum, with no guarantee of his scheme’s success.

The institution’s proprietress must have seen his heart, too. She and her husband had been keeping quiet and collecting Thomas’s coin all these years.

“I wonder if it was the right decision, at times.” Rafe’s voice had grown distant, as though he was speaking as much to himself as to her. “I know that institution didn’t care for her, but there’s much I’ve not been able to give her, myself.”

“If I know anything about you, Rafe, it’s that you’ve done the absolute best you could.” She had thoroughly mussed his hair, and twirled a short auburn strand around her ring finger. “And she’s your mother. I simply cannot believe she’d rather be elsewhere, without you in her life.”

He nodded and the action plucked the lock free from her grasp. “But she deserves better. A nicer place, and perhaps a nicer nurse, too. I don’t get to see her altogether that often. I worry about being spotted. Alfie’s already suspicious of me.”

You should tell him. She stopped the words before they crossed her lips. It was not her place to say such things. Not yet. Tonight, she would relish the fact that he had trusted her. It was a privilege, a source of pride, perhaps the greatest intimacy of all.

“I think … I think I had to do it, though.” His fingers stilled on her arm and he settled the blunt bone of his chin at the crook of her neck. “This way, the only person in the world who might wish her harm doesn’t know her whereabouts.”

“I hope to meet her someday.”

He exhaled a warm breath across her throat and moved to rise. “I wish for that too.”

Sophie climbed from his lap, her feet tingling as blood rushed back into them. He seemed tall, his face and hair and mouth criminally distant now. The words came before she could stop them. “Why don’t you stay?”

The stubby candle had extinguished itself. Moonlight in the windowpanes revealed only the black of his eyes and the shelter of the fourposter bed behind him. “I would love to, Sophie. But I don’t think that’s a good idea tonight. I’ve given you enough to think on for years. I want you to have time to do just that.”

“I don’t need to think.” She slipped her hands around his lean waist. “Tonight has only strengthened my regard for you.”

He wrapped her in a hug, adjusting his hold until all she heard was the heavy brush of his wool coat against her ears. She didn’t dare move, but curled all of herself into the sensation, fingers digging into his back, toes planting into the carpet, her eyes squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. She felt him decide to pull back the moment before he did so.

“I hope you see, now, how much bigger this is.” He held her at arm’s length, studying her closely. “I have lived this way for years; it’s nothing new for me. But you—you don’t have to choose this. What you’re doing for Barnard is a wonderful thing, Sophie. That should be your focus. Not my troubles.”

Your troubles are my troubles.