CHAPTER 9
The carriage Ripley showed up with the following morning wasn’t the same one he’d come with before. After Jane settled into its worn leather seats and they began to roll away toward Copperworth, the village where her sister’s school was located, she asked, “Where did you get this rig from?”
“I let it.”
She caught her breath. “Ripley! The cost.”
“Stop,” he said softly. “I have the money.”
She huffed out a breath. He might dismiss his help as nothing, but it wasn’t. She owed him far more than she could ever repay. All her life she had tried to never be in that position. She’d have to find a way to even the scales between them.
A flash entered her mind of his mouth between her legs, of his cock driving into her, but she pushed it away. She didn’t want their passion to be transactional.
She cleared her throat and he arched a brow, as if anticipating her argument. Instead, she asked, “Do you think I’m being right in the way I’m pursuing my sister?”
“How do you mean?”
“There’s a part of me that wants to drive through the night, scream through every town, asking after her. And yet we’re doing this in a measured manner.”
He nodded. “I see. I suppose we could push horses and employees and ourselves to the brink. That’s always an option. But this is a fight, Jane, and I’m the expert on that matter.”
“There’s no denying that.” She pursed her lips. “So what does the expert think?”
“In a fight, it’s better to meter one’s response. To measure strikes before letting them fly. At this point, we don’t know enough to go wild. We’re keeping ourselves from breaking before we need strength.”
She considered that. “I understand. So…how do we do this next part of the fight?”
“We go to the school and question that horrid headmistress who wrote you such an awful message about your sister’s disappearance. It’s easier to dismiss one’s duty by post than in person and she might know more than she wished to share.”
“And if she doesn’t? Or if she won’t?”
His lips thinned like the idea was upsetting. “Then we talk to every schoolmaster and girl who attended lessons with her. All her friends, people in the village who might have encountered her. Anyone who knew Nora.”
Her breath caught at that turn of phrase and she gripped her hands in her lap as fear rose up in her chest and nearly choked her. “Knows,” she corrected, her voice shaking.
His expression fell and he lunged to grab her hands. “I’m sorry. Knows. I’m sorry, Jane. I didn’t mean to say it like that.”
She stared into his eyes. He was so good at hiding his feelings. When she’d first met him, first come to know him, she could never tell what he thought. But over time, she’d begun to see his tells. Little twitches and swiftly buried flashes of emotion. Normally it was a fun game she played for herself.
Today it wasn’t. She saw what he wouldn’t say and she sighed. “I-I realize the worst might happen, could have already happened, to my sister.” She set her shoulders back, tried to stiffen her resolve by straightening her spine. “I don’t want you to think me a fool.”
“Jane, the last thing I’d ever see you as is a fool.”
They were both quiet for a moment as the warmth of that comment eased her a little. He did that so easily, it was almost overpowering.
She drew in a breath. “Do you have siblings?”
He shifted and drew his hands away. “I had a sister. She died at birth.”
“I’m sorry. How old were you?”
“About ten,” he said, and smiled at her. “We were both the much older sibling, it seems, even if I was only that for the span of a breath.”
She nodded. They had so much in common, really. Hard lives punctuated with pain, but also a resilience she often leaned on. She watched him do the same. But she also knew from experience that sometimes cracks appeared in that shell. Then it was precarious to pretend strength. Did that happen to him? Was it possible he sometimes broke?
“I suppose her death,” he continued slowly, as if he had to be careful around this topic, “was just another piece of kindling on the fire of my mother’s sorrow. And I always wonder what that little girl would have been like. What she would be like now at nineteen. How we would have taken care of each other when our mother died.”
“I think she would have been strong,” she said. “Like you.”
