“You answer it. I’ve got hay in my hair.”
“I like you with hay in your hair.”
But the knock came again—more insistent, oddly familiar in its rhythm.
Finally, Seth doubled back and opened the door shirtless, his breeches hanging low on his hips. When the figure came into view, Charlotte’s mouth fell open.
“Reginald?”
She reached for her shawl as Seth leaned against the doorway, one eyebrow raised, his expression somewhere between annoyed and dangerously calm.
Reginald, in a travel-stained coat and scuffed boots, looked utterly miserable.
He had the grace to glance away when he realized Seth wasn’t precisely clothed for polite society—or any society at all. “I do beg your pardon. I—erm—didn’t mean to interrupt anything.”
“If you came to make good on your threats, or seek money from my wife and I, I suggest you leave now, lest I send you home in far less pristine conditions than you arrived in,” Seth muttered, his voice deceptively mild.
“No!” Reginald’s face went pink. “Good God, no. I—that was... that was unforgivable. And I’m not proud of it, if that means anything.”
Charlotte stepped forward, pulling her shawl tighter. “Then why are you here, Reginald?”
He hesitated. Then, with visible effort, he lifted his chin. “May I enter?”
Seth made no move to step aside. Finally, Charlotte touched her husband’s forearm lightly. “Let him in. He’s half-frozen.”
Seth gave her a look—brief, unreadable—but after a long breath, he stepped aside. Reginald ducked his head and entered, his coat soaked through at the shoulders, curls wind-tossed and damp.
The door shut behind him with a thud. For a moment, only the spitting fire dared make a sound.
Charlotte gestured toward the chair opposite the hearth. “You’d best sit before you fall.”
Reginald obeyed stiffly, lowering himself as though his limbs had locked from cold. He peeled off his gloves with numb fingers and turned them over in his lap, not quite looking at her.
“I wasn’t certain I would find you,” he said, voice quieter now, but more sure of itself. “Though I admit I had the advantage of a scullery maid with a fondness for brandy and no loyalty to Aunt Phyllis.”
Charlotte blinked. “You questioned the servants?”
“I bribed Amelia’s—therealAmelia’s lady’s maid, Marie. With an entire bottle of Southwick sherry.”
Seth crossed to the mantle and leaned his hip against it, arms folded. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t uncork one in your honor.”
“I didn’t come for drink,” Reginald said. Then, glancing up at Charlotte, “I came for you.”
She arched a brow, folding her arms too. “Need I remind you, you threatened me the last time we spoke, cousin.”
“I did,” he agreed softly. “I meant to—well. I believed I was justified at the time. I thought I was acting in desperation, but in truth, I was acting out of vanity and fear. I hoped to buy a future that I hadn’t earned, and I thought—foolishly—that you owed it to me.”
Charlotte said nothing.
Reginald looked between them. “And I see now, I owed you. An apology. A proper one.”
Seth snorted. “Did Victoria send you?”
That caught him off guard. “No—well… not directly, so to speak.”
He rubbed a hand through his hair, dislodging a bit of mist.
“She said if I ever wanted her to look at me again with anything other than contempt, I had to become a man she might respect. And that began with owning my sins… for driving my cousin away.”
