The way he’d wrapped his coat around her. The way he’d stood still as a rock when she’d asked him what she was to him. The way his eyes had burned, even when his lips hadn’t moved.
The throb in her chest was sharp. Immediate. Unwelcome.
“Miss Turner?”
“Oh, my apologies,” she said quickly. Her face must be giving away her state of mind more clearly than before.
“Thinking about ruffians?”
A quick laugh burst free. “Something like that.”
He didn’t press. Just leaned back and glanced out the window, murmuring, “I’ve never had a home. Not a proper one.”
Calliope studied his slanted face. “I’m sorry.”
“No need to be. My circumstances... Well, let’s just say, I never met my father. And my mother refused to admit she even gave birth to a son. I was passed from family member to family member. Different estates, different counties. Until my uncle took me in on a more permanent footing.”
“That must have been difficult.”
He shrugged, meeting her gaze. “It made me the man I am today.”
“A ruffian?” she teased.
He grinned. “Exactly so.”
The carriage slowed.
“Ah, we seem to be arriving. I’ll make arrangements with the innkeeper. You’ll have complete discretion, no questions, until you decide what you want to do.”
“That’s unnecessary, Mr. Peregrine.”
“On the contrary, I find purpose in helping you with this small matter.”
What a peculiar man. “Are you staying at the inn as well?”
He winked at her. “I own this inn.”
Calliope’s jaw slackened, but before she had time to respond, the carriage came to a halt and Mr. Peregrine jumped out and offered his hand.
Prince hopped out first.
Calliope hesitated. What if she was making a mistake? They werecertainly not in Maxen’s territory anymore... She had no idea what she was doing. No idea if she’d made the right choice. All she knew was that she hadn’t expected her heart to pinch like this. All for a man whose world was chaos. A man she’d walked away from. A man she hadn’t stopped thinking about for a single breath.
She placed her palm in his and stepped out from the carriage.
*
Maxen tore throughthe streets of Brighton, his boots striking the ground with the fury of a man barely holding himself together. And he was barely holding himself together. By a thread thinner than the last miserable wisp of a man hair on a balding man.
She was gone.
Gone.
And he hadn’t the faintest bloody notion where.
He hadn’t felt this unmoored—this utterlylost—since he’d stood on the scorched earth of his youth, broken, beaten, and furious, with nothing but the name of his father on his tongue and a fire in his chest that refused to die. That fire had led him tothem.
To his brothers.
