Nora gulped.
Captain Pugboat leaped onto her lap. Reflexively, she stroked his soft, wrinkled fur until even that made her feel like a monster. The man who had so quickly begun to fill her mind and her heart was suffering because of an action she had taken, and her only response was to stroke the puppy in her lap like a madman?
Mr. Grenville stared up at the ceiling. “Who could have done such a thing?”
Nora pushed Captain Pugboat onto the floor. She didn’t deserve him.
She didn’t deserve any of them.
Lady Roundtree and Mr. Grenville were in the presence of a fraud.
This was her chance to come clean to them both… Yet she couldn’t do it, no matter how much she might wish she could. The consequences would be too disastrous.
If Mr. Grenville discovered the truth, the very best she could hope for was him giving her the cut direct and never speaking to her again.
However, the most likely scenario was losing him, her cousin, her post, and the secret income all at once. Without the funds from the cartoons, she would not be able to rescue her family from poverty by helping to make their small farm self-sustaining again.
But she was done with caricatures of real people.
They weren’t worth the price on her soul.
She had meant the drawings as a means of helping her family, not hurting Mr. Grenville’s loved ones.
The reduced income might mean Carter’s plans to make the sheep farm self-sustainable this year wouldn’t happen after all. But she couldn’t risk an innocent being hurt again.
Lady Roundtree set down her teacup. “Has the caricature caused her harm?”
“Worse than harm.” Mr. Grenville’s eyes were blank and haunted. “She’s now a laughingstock.”
Nausea filled Nora’s stomach.
This was hell. She had never meant to hurt anyone. Not Mr. Grenville, not his sister, not even the Lord of Pleasure.
She was just the feather-witted country hick they all thought she was, trying her best to make the most of a temporary situation before being sent back home to slave to the bone beside her brother as they watched their grandparents wither and die.
There was no way for everyone to win.
“It’s my fault,” Mr. Grenville said brokenly. “It’s my job to protect my sister.”
Nora’s gut twisted. It was not his fault. He was a wonderful brother. A wonderfulperson. Heat pricked her eyes at how much he was hurting. How muchshehad hurt him and his family.
She ached to comfort him, but she was powerless to ease his pain.
Worse, she couldn’t even apologize for the damage she had accidentally caused.
Chapter 21
It had taken a fair amount of blunt to wrangle the name of the caricaturist’s third-party agency from the owner of the printing house, but Heath was finally in the office of a man who knew the scoundrel’s name.
It hadn’t been easy. When Heath had finally met with the publisher, the man had no idea from whence the drawings came. All transactions passed through a confidential intermediary. The printing house had no reason to break their word.
To the publisher, digging deeper wasn’t worth the price of potentially losing their primary attraction. Until the anonymous artist had turned London on its ear, the printing house had been failing financially. Now they were not. Caricatures were lucrative business.
Heath did not care. Camellia should not be part of it.
He was going to put a stop to the caricatures right now.
“How much?” he asked the wiry gentleman behind the boxwood desk. “My client’s pockets are bottomless.”
