Chapter 1 #3
“They are not my rooms in the sense that appears to be alarming you.”
“That is scarcely reassuring.”
“No,” he admitted. “But it is accurate.”
She stood abruptly, agitation lending strength where exhaustion had not. “If I enter such a place with you and am seen—”
“Then you become a woman publicly associated with me rather than a woman standing alone. The distinction matters.”
“It ought not.”
“No. But it does.”
Her breath came faster. “You speak as if protection may be conjured by sheer nerve.”
“Often it may.”
“And arrogance?”
“Arrogance is useful only when one can support it with planning.”
Her chin lifted. “How fortunate for you, then, that you think so well of yourself.”
“There,” Edward said softly, watching some of the fear burn into temper, “you are at last beginning to look like a woman who might survive.”
He paused.
There was another step to be taken, and once taken it could not be easily untaken. He felt it before he said it—the faint click of strategy locking into place.
The idea arrived fully formed, so suited to the ugliness of the situation that he mistrusted it at once for being elegant. But elegance was not, in itself, a vice.
“We require an explanation the world will accept without straining its imagination,” he said.
“No,” Lydia said at once. “We require a solution. That is not the same thing.”
“On the contrary. In London, explanations are often the only solutions people believe.”
Her eyes narrowed immediately. “I dislike that tone.”
“You have excellent instincts.”
“Sir.”
He inclined his head. “We shall tell anyone who asks that we are engaged.”
For one suspended second she only stared, then gave a tiny step back as if the words themselves had physical force. “We shall do what?”
“Become engaged. Briefly, one hopes. Publicly. Convincingly.” He spoke as evenly as if discussing the weather, though something in his own pulse had quickened.
“You may be seen with me tomorrow. A ring may be procured. Finchley will understand at once that you are no longer isolated, and society, which adores a romantic development more than truth, will do the labor of spreading the story for us.”
“You are mad.” She paced toward the road.
“Very likely,” he said.
“This is absurd.”
“It is effective.”
She turned back toward him. “It is dishonest.”
He met her gaze. “So is forgery.”
A carriage rolled past in a thunder of wheels. Dust swirled in its wake.
“And if the lie is discovered?” she asked at last.
“Then people will conclude I behaved rashly for a lady.” His shoulder shifted in the slightest shrug. “It will injure me less than it will protect you.”
“That may not ruin you,” she said. “It may ruin me.”
“No.” His tone sharpened with quiet certainty. “Not if it is done properly.”
“Properly.” She looked almost scandalized. “There is a method to false engagements?”
“There is a method to everything.”
For a moment neither of them moved. He saw the instant she noticed the weight beneath that answer. Not what precisely it concealed, but that it had not come from frivolity. The realization altered her expression again, leaving it more searching than before.
“Why would you risk your name for mine?” she asked.
Edward looked past her toward the trees, their leaves stirring in the late light. “My name is not as fragile as yours,” he said. “That is reason enough.”
It was true.
It was also not the whole of it. There was something about her.
Not her beauty, though she possessed that too in a way sharpened rather than softened by distress.
Not even her courage, though she clearly had it or she would never have made it to the park bench.
It was the fiercer thing beneath both: the discipline with which she had held herself together, the intelligence in every answer, the palpable humiliation she refused to let become collapse.
He admired strength. Always had.
He held out his arm. “The Honorable Edward Hallworth,” he said. “Since I have proposed a fraudulent courtship, introductions seem overdue.”
Her gaze dropped to the crook of his elbow, then lifted to his face.
“Lydia Ashby,” she said.
Ashby.
No title. No family connection he knew. Which meant Finchley had indeed selected his prey with care.
“Miss Ashby,” Edward said, more gently than before, “this is the moment in which you decide whether I am a fool, a villain, or merely the only useful man presently available.”
“I have not yet ruled out any of the three.”
“Excellent. Suspicion is healthy.”
Her mouth twitched. Then, after a hesitation that seemed to cost her more than he liked to witness, she placed her hand on his sleeve.
Through the layers of cloth and leather, he felt the tremor in her fingers. A faint current ran up his arm, quick and wholly disproportionate to so slight a touch.
Edward hailed a hackney and handed Lydia inside before following her.
He gave the driver an address two streets off his true destination, then amended it after they were underway, and then amended it again for good measure.
By the time the carriage had taken a needlessly circuitous route through mews, quieter West End turns, and back toward Mayfair, he was satisfied no one had followed.
Only then did he allow himself to look fully at the woman seated opposite him.
Lamps had begun to bloom along the streets, each one blurring into a wavering gold smear whenever the carriage jolted over uneven paving.
Inside the hackney, the dimness softened Lydia’s features but could not disguise her tension.
The air held the stale, close warmth of worn leather and dust, and each jolt of the wheels over the paving stones seemed to travel straight through her spine.
Her hands remained clasped too tightly in her lap.
She was trying very hard not to show it.
The effort touched him more than open panic might have done.
“You may breathe, Miss Ashby,” he said quietly. “The carriage is not an instrument of judgment. It is merely uncomfortable.”
Her eyes flicked to his. “I beg your pardon?”
“You are sitting as though the squabs have insulted you personally.”
For one second she looked startled. Then, despite everything, she huffed the smallest laugh.
It transformed her. Not because merriment made her prettier—though it did—but because it loosened the fear-shadowed set of her expression enough for him to glimpse what she might look like when she was not cornered by circumstance.
“You make jokes at peculiar times,” she said.
“I make them at strategic times.” He grinned.
“Is that what this is? Strategy?”
“Often.” He leaned one shoulder against the carriage wall. “Sometimes even kindness, though I make no promises as to frequency.”
Her gaze lingered on him a moment longer than before. “You still have not told me precisely where you are taking me,” she said.
“To a dull and expensive building in Mayfair populated by men who believe themselves much more fascinating than they are.”
“That is not a place. It is an indictment.”
“It is a club,” he said. “You will be comfortable there for tonight.”
“For tonight,” she repeated.
“For tonight.”
“And tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow I speak to your solicitor. I begin tracing the note. I discover whether Finchley is operating alone or with assistance. I also acquire a ring, which I admit is a sentence I did not expect to utter this afternoon.”
A flicker passed over her face—alarm, disbelief, perhaps even the faintest shade of indignation. The carriage lurched around a corner, and her hand shot out to brace against the seat before she caught herself and folded it back into her lap.
“You speak as if all this were already settled.”
“Not settled. Merely likely.”
Her gaze dropped to her folded hands. “You speak as if such men always have help.”
“Such men usually do.”
He looked out the narrow window for a moment, watching lamplight streak across the glass. “Predatory men are seldom inventive. They thrive because institutions are lazy, because people prefer comfort to conflict, and because someone always decides discretion is cheaper than justice.”
When he looked back, she was watching him with that same searching expression from the bench.
“You do not sound like the man society claims you are,” she said quietly.
The observation ought to have amused him. Instead it landed in some inconvenient place just behind his ribs.
“And what man is that?” he asked.
“A careless one.”
Edward smiled, but there was little mirth in it. “Society is very attached to easy stories.”
“Are you?”
“No.”
The answer came too fast to dissemble.
An awareness passed between them then—more intimate than either of them had any right to share. It unsettled him, not because he disliked it, but because he did not.
By the time the carriage slowed at last, full evening had settled over Mayfair. The club rose before them in handsome restraint—polished brass, dark brick, discreet lamps, the sort of solid respectability that concealed as much as it displayed.
Lydia looked out the window and went very still. “If I step down here with you,” she said, fingers pressing into the seat, “there will be no undoing it.”
Edward’s hand closed around the latch, then stopped.
“Do not worry about me,” he said.
She turned to him.
“Do it because you deserve one night in which no one may follow you, frighten you, or put a hand on you without permission.”
A steadier light flickered in her gaze. Something that looked very like hunger—not for him, though he was vain enough to notice the possibility existed—but for the thing she had perhaps been denied for too long: relief, safety, choice.
“And if I refuse?” she asked.
“Then we find another address. Another plan.” He met her eyes and held them. “I will not press you, Miss Ashby.”
He meant it, and the realization mattered more to him than it should have, perhaps because he sensed that she was listening for coercion in every word and finding none, or because he found, unexpectedly, that he wanted her to know the difference.
“You are impossible,” she murmured.
“So I am often told.”
The footman opened the door before Edward could. Cool evening air rushed into the carriage.
Lydia drew a breath, then placed her gloved hand in Edward’s. He helped her down. Her fingers were still cold, but this time they closed more firmly around his, less like a reflex of fear than a conscious act of trust.
Inside, the club was all muffled carpet, dark wood, low lamplight, and discreet silence.
Voices carried only in softened fragments from some distant room below.
A porter at the far end of the hall looked up as Edward entered, his face schooled at once into professional blankness when he took in Lydia beside him.
“Hawkins,” Edward said.
“Sir.”
“Miss Ashby will have the blue rooms above the back stair.”
“At once.”
“No inquiries.” Edward drew off one glove, then the other. “And if anyone asks whether Miss Ashby is here, you have abruptly forgotten how language works.”
“Yes, sir.”
The porter’s expression did not alter. Years in service had clearly given Hawkins a high tolerance for unusual instructions.
Lydia’s mouth almost softened.
Almost.
Edward stepped back a fraction, easing the pressure of his proximity. “You need not decide anything tonight,” he said. “Not about the engagement. Not about me. Not even about tomorrow.”
Hawkins lifted a lamp, warm light gilding the stair rail behind him.
“Tonight,” Edward said, “you rest.”
For one long moment Lydia did not move. Then she said, “Tomorrow will still be reckless.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“And you still mean to proceed.”
He held her gaze. “Yes.”
A faint crease appeared between her brows. “You have already decided.”
He had.
Because this no longer felt like passing gallantry, nor even righteous irritation on behalf of a wronged woman. Some deeper instinct had risen beneath both—protective, yes, strategic, certainly, but also alarmingly personal, and far too soon.
Hawkins turned toward the stairs. After the briefest hesitation, Lydia followed him. At the landing she paused and glanced down.
The lamp caught one side of her face and left the other in shadow. Her expression was unreadable from where Edward stood. Then she disappeared from view.
Edward remained where he was until the sound of her footsteps had faded. Then he turned away.
The door to the small private study off the rear corridor stood half open. Beyond it waited paper, ink, and the sort of work he had once done often enough that his body still recognized the rhythm of it before his mind named the task.
Find the solicitor.
Find the note.
Learn how far Finchley’s reach extended.
Learn who had profited from underestimating Lydia Ashby.
He crossed the threshold, lit the lamp, and sat. The familiar scratch of pen against paper steadied him at once. Inquiry had always been simpler than feeling. Facts could be assembled, motives tested, weak points discovered and pressed. People, however, were untidy.
And Miss Lydia Ashby, with her trembling hands, furious dignity, and ink-stained fingers, had unsettled him in a way no stranger ought.
That was inconvenient. It was also, he admitted as he sanded the first note and set it aside, the most alive he had felt in months.
Somewhere in London, a man believed he had cornered a woman with no one to defend her.
Edward dipped his pen again.
Mr. Finchley was about to discover how very badly he had judged the matter.