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“Oh, I noticed. I helped Crankshaw haul you up the stairs.”
“And I notice that you haven’t denied what I just said. You share some common cause with my brother—you speak his language. What is it that you want from him?”
Her mouth clamped tighter. “I have to go home. I can’t be seen here by anyone else.”
“Why are you here?” He walked to the fireplace and rested his hands against the chimneypiece, absorbing the heat from the fire.
“Why areyouhere?” she countered. “I thought you were staying at your club.”
“I want to stay close to my sister, Lady Beatrice.” His head throbbed with pain and his mind was crowded with questions. MissPenny hadn’t even known he’d be here. She hadn’t come to see him. She’d come to seeRafe.
Darkness obliterated the glowing coals for a moment. “Why Rafe?” he asked, staring at hot coals instead of her, so that she wouldn’t read the jealousy in his eyes.
Not jealousy. He couldn’t possibly be jealous. He’d been hit over the head. He wasn’t thinking clearly.
“It’s complicated,” she replied.
“I’m sure it is. Nothing you do would ever be simple.” Changing gowns midway through balls, holding dukes at pistol point, climbing through windows, none of that was ordinary behavior for a young lady. “So everything your uncle told me in that brief, baffling letter—which I read, by the way—is an assemblage of lies.”
Now he watched her closely, searching her face for her reaction.
She squared her shoulders. “That’s correct. He was hoping to influence your feeling about me before you met me and learned the truth.”
“The truth that you’re not a country-bred yet educated young lady with a flair for secretarial work, who is as skilled with a hunting rifle as she is with managing an estate.”
“I’m not.”
She was lying. He knew it by the way her gaze faltered. He knew it because she was equal parts sensible and sensuous. There was something of a country morning in the clearness of her eyes. The scent of sweet heather on her skin.
The straightforward way she talked. She didn’t mince around a subject, coating it with layers of niceties to make it more palatable. She just came right out and said what was on her mind, as if she’d never been taught the art of prevarication, as if she wasn’t accustomed to flattering powerful men, and wasn’t about to start now.
“What did you mean when you said you could help restore Rafe to your uncle’s favor?” he asked.
“As the president of the Society of Antiquaries, my uncle takes certain gentlemen under his wing and grooms them to take on leadership roles in the... society. He has no sons, you see, and he likes to think his influence helps these men realize their potential.”
“I didn’t know my brother had an interest in antiquities.”
“Oh yes, Lord Rafe visits my uncle frequently to converse on the topic.”
“I hope you noticed that my brother’s not so charming anymore,” he said roughly. “He’s gone to seed. He called you a strumpet.”
“Five different ways. Yes, I noticed.”
Something she’d said while they were in the shed made him want to know more about her past. “You said that he was kind to you at a time when you felt very alone?”
“I was orphaned at the age of ten. My parents died while they were traveling abroad. I was sent to live with my guardian, Sir Malcolm. He had lost his wife, Emily, and his daughter, Rebecca, very recently. He wanted me to be a replacement for Rebecca. He gave me her room, her possessions. I even used her hairbrush, with strands of her hair still caught between the bristles. But I could never be her, and he could never be my father.”
“It must have been lonely.”
“You have no idea. He was trying to protect me but he locked me away, restricted my movements; he wouldn’t allow me to have any friends. It was a prison. A benevolent one, but a prison nonetheless. You can’t know how it feels to be helpless. You’re a man, free to roam. A duke. The world rolls out the red carpet.”
He did know what it was like to be locked away, to be helpless.
Her words brought back the dark hold of the ship. The metal manacles biting into his wrists. The gnawing hunger in his belly that intensified every day until he was more beast than boy.
“I’m not unacquainted with loneliness, MissPenny. I’ve lived in seclusion in Cornwall for the last five years.”
“Yes, but my solitude was forced upon me, whereas your seclusion is by choice. Why do you choose to stay in Cornwall?”
