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“Not who I was, nor where I came from.”
Blue eyes glittered in the lanternlight. “It had nothing to do with where you came from, no... but, Adelaide, it had everything to do with who you were.”
“Alfie Trumbull’s daughter.” She paused. “But you never asked me to go back. In five years, the only time you sent me to Lambeth was this time.”
Duchess nodded. “A mistake.”
No. It was perfect.“It wasn’t.”
The other woman’s lips curved. “Because of Clayborn.”
Because of Henry. She’d have returned to Lambeth. Spent the rest of her life on the South Bank if it meant a day with him. An hour.
She was to do just that.
Duchess nodded and moved toward the horses at the front of the carriage, checking harnesses and bridles. “I did not invite you to join me because you were Alfie Trumbull’s daughter. Alfie could have had a dozen daughters, and I wouldn’t have invited them to join me.” She paused. “Or, rather, I might have, but only if they’d had your taste for justice.”
Adelaide gave a little laugh. “I was many things, but a servant to justice was not one of them.”
“Were you not?” Duchess asked casually.
“I was a nipper from Lambeth; I saw the inside of more than one London jail.”
“Well, there’s justice and there’sjustice, don’t you think? The kind of justice that makes a man build a jail, and the kind that lands a girl inside it.” Duchess was quiet for a moment, her blond hair gleaming in the light of the single lantern. “You do yourself a disservice, Adelaide. You weren’t simply a cutpurse; you were a genius. You could see coin in a pocket at twenty yards. But more than that, you could read the marks. And in the two years that I watched you there, on the South Bank, I never saw you take a purse from anyone who didn’t hold power north of the river.” She stroked a hand down the side of one grey’s neck. “I am not wrong.”
“You are not.”
“So tell me, Adelaide Trumbull”—the old name shattered through her—“why is it that the one time you’ve a duke offering up his fortune freely, you’re too afraid to take it?”
The words, softer and gentler than Duchess ever appeared, summoned Adelaide’s tears. She shook her head. “He’ll regret it. In the end.”
“Why, because you were born one thing and became another?” The Duchess shook her head. “My friend—is that not the story of everyone worth loving?”
Adelaide shrugged. “He’s a duke and I’m a thief.”
“All that tells me is that one of you has had to work for what you have, and the other was born with the world in his grasp.”
Adelaide refrained from pointing out that her work wasn’t exactly honest. Or that Henry had lived his life knowing he didn’t deserve what he’d been given at birth. Though she suspected that Duchess would happily tell her that no aristocrat deserved what they were given at birth.
“He was worth it,” she confessed on a whisper. “Staying with him. Mending him. It was worth it.”
There was no censure in Duchess’s eyes when she nodded. “Inside, you said you could not afford him.”
“I am not what he requires.”
“Why not?”
For a while, she had thought she might have a chance at it. At being partner and perhaps even love. A quiet, secret affair beyond the edges of society or family or friends.
Private.
But now, as her past caught up with her, Adelaide realized that life—the one conceived here in the middle of nowhere—would never be theirs. He would always be a duke, education and money and power, and she would always be... “I’m a girl summoned home to Lambeth.”
It had been a beautiful dream, the two of them together sharing bits of their lives and their selves and pretending they had a future with no name.
But the dream was over now.
It was time for her to wake.
