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“I should’ve told you I was alive,” he said.

Caleb snorted. “Well, that’s at least a start. Do you know how I found out?”

“No.”

“My father wrote me. You might think a woman would be inconsolable after her dead fiancé appeared at her doorstep just two days after she married another man, but not my sister.”

Andrew winced, another little slash across his heart, but Caleb continued. “Instead she fell into a state. She wasn’t sad, she wasn’t angry. She wasn’t anything. She walked around for two months with nothing more than a blank stare, hardly seeing anyone. She wouldn’t talk to anyone. Parkem tried raging at her and begging and sweet-talking her. Nothing snapped her out of it.

“My father thought I might be able to talk to her, so I came down from Edinburgh for two weeks. Nothing I said did a thing.”

Andrew’s tongue was dry and it hurt to swallow around the emotion building in his throat at the thought of Lavinia with all the light in her dimmed.

“What brought her back?” he asked.

Caleb shrugged. “I don’t know. Apparently, one morning she woke up and decided to reenter the world. She never told anyone what had happened, but we all know what caused it.”

Him. The things he’d said. Those ugly words. It had felt good saying them and watching her face crumple. He’d wanted to hurt her badly, but now he was a different man. Now he couldn’t imagine anything as cowardly.

“I’m not going to hurt her if that’s what has you worried,” said Andrew.

“You’re a fool if you believe that,” said Caleb.

“It’s the truth.”

His old friend cocked his head to the side and studied him. “It’s too late, you know. You’ve already hurt her just by coming back.”

Caleb’s words twisted, a knife to the gut.

“If you can’t be certain you won’t hurt her again, leave her alone,” Caleb said.

Andrew knew he should be able to promise that. They were just simple words that, with the application of his considerable reserves of willpower, should’ve been easy to execute. But nothing about Lavinia was simple. He’d tasted her again, and his appetite for her had come roaring back. He should be man enough to walk away from her and the inevitability of the mess they would make of their lives if this all went wrong. She was at the center of his mission. He still had to work with her. Protect her.

How are you going to do that when even thinking about Wark looking at her makes you rage?

“You think you know what’s best for your sister?” asked Andrew.

Caleb nodded. “I do, even if she doesn’t want to hear it.”

“And what is that?” asked Andrew.

“She should marry Wark.”

The words hit Andrew like a punch to the gut. Of course Caleb, who knew nothing of Wark’s plot, thought she should marry the man. Wark might be a bore, but he was wealthy and he was clearly infatuated with her, if not outright lustful. Which was why, at the present moment, Andrew wanted to put his fist through a wall just thinking about Lavinia walking down the aisle to meet that man.

“She doesn’t like him,” he ground out.

“Then why did she agree to dine at his house last night?” Caleb asked.

Because she’s working for me and scaring me witless while doing it. Except he couldn’t say that, so instead he kept his mouth shut.

“I won’t pretend to like the way Wark looks at my sister. What man would? But sometimes there are other powers at play,” said Caleb.

“Like what?” asked Andrew.

“Money.”

Money. It was what had motivated Andrew for years, taking him away from Eyemouth and Lavinia in the quest to build a life for her that he thought she deserved. It had been in the pursuit of money that he’d sailed out on the voyage that had nearly killed him. And when he saw who she’d married and convinced himself as to why, it had all come back to money. He’d spent the past twelve years of his life wrapped up in the hard pursuit of it, yet he hadn’t become him any happier for it, only a more comfortable version of himself.