Graham exhaled once, controlled. “Then call them terms. All doors locked. All windows latched. No visitors admitted, especially not Mr. Pritchard. If anyone asks about papers, you tell them your mother has locked the study.”
Eleanor’s gaze dropped, briefly, to the torn page in her hand.
“If you had to choose,” she said, and for the first time the dryness faltered, “would you save the book, or its reader?”
The question was not about books. It was about what men chose when women became collateral.
Graham’s answer arrived without calculation. “The reader,” he said. “Every time.”
The certainty surprised even him. It was not strategy. It was instinct—raw, immediate, and alarmingly personal.
Something eased in her face. Not trust. Not yet. But a small loosening, as if she had expected men to choose paper and was forced, unwillingly, to revise her belief.
“That is not always what people choose,” she murmured.
“Then they are fools.”
He stepped back toward the door, attention split between her and the window. “I will be in the corridor,” he said. “If you hear anything, anything at all, you call for me.”
“And what of my mother? How do I explain you to her?”
“She will not see me. Say nothing. Tomorrow I will present as an acquaintance, a friend, a suitor. Tell her whatever you please, just so long as it is a lie.”
Eleanor’s chin lifted. “You speak as though you have a right to my obedience. To my home.”
“I have a right to keep you alive,” Graham said, and the truth of it cut deeper than the words. “Whether you obey me is your own damned choice.”
Her eyes flashed at the language, but she did not protest it.
He paused at the door. “Miss Hargrove,” he said.
“Yes?” She meet his gaze.
“Do not underestimate what you are holding.”
Eleanor’s fingers curled around the torn catalogue page as if it were a weapon. “I never do,” she replied.
Graham closed the door and took his post in the corridor.
He had come tonight expecting to retrieve a document. He had not expected the document to have teeth. Or the woman guarding it to have sharper ones. Worst of all, he had not expected the dangerous, disorienting pull of relief every time he heard her breathe. Or the way his body had responded—unwanted, immediate—to the simple fact of her standing her ground.
He set his shoulder against the wall outside the door and listened to the house.
For the first time in years, his mission had acquired a complication he could not file neatly under threat.
He did not have a category for Eleanor Hargrove.
Not yet.
Chapter 3
The next morning, rain fretted at the windows, softening London into shades of pearl and slate, and turning every pane into a mirror in which Eleanor could see only herself, pale and sleepless. In the Hargrove drawing room, curtains were drawn just so, silver polished to a dutiful sheen, and a tray of tea arranged with the prim assurance of routine. It all appeared rather civilized.
The largest chair faced the hearth, angled so a visitor’s back would be to the door. The window seat held a single volume, one of Eleanor’s father’s favorites, left there as bait for the eye. And at the writing desk, where she sat with her shoulders straight and her mind sharper than her nerves, the torn catalogue page lay in plain view.
Not surrendered, but displayed like a challenge laid bare on green baize, daring any man in the room to pretend he had not seen it.
If Lord Rathbourne meant to treat her as a delicate inconvenience, he would be forced to do it while looking directly at the evidence. And if she meant to pretend she was not shaken, she would have to do the same.
