Page 116 of The Earl She Once Saved

“One of a hundred,” she repeated.

“I drew constantly during the war.”

“Your entire supply of subjects seems to have been rather limited.”

He flinched. She bent and lifted another sheet. The movement was careful, almost tender. That was harder to bear than accusation.

“This is dated two years after we met.”

“I had forgotten that one, too.”

“And this?”

Another date.

Rafe looked away. “I have not opened that folio in years.”

She studied his face. She did not believe him. He saw it in the quiet certainty of her eyes.

The lie was poor. Worse, it insulted them both. Yet the truth stood before him as something vast and impossible: he carried her face through battle because there had been nights when it was the only gentle thing he could remember. He had drawn her when sleep would not come, when pain closed around his ribs and when men beside him spoke of the women waiting at home.

No woman waited for Rafe. So he invented one. He had given the remembered girl a hundred lives, never once imagining he would stand before the woman and explain them.

Verity lowered the drawing. “You remembered me.”

There was wonder in her voice. Rafe could endure anger. He had no defense against that softness.

“You attach too much importance to a soldier’s habit.”

Her face changed. He saw the wound and the remorse nearly made him cross the space between them. But one gentle word would leave him wholly exposed, and he did not have the courage to learn whether she could return what he felt. For his own sake, he reached for something colder.

“What were you doing in my room?”

Verity went still.

“Going through my papers,” he continued. “Opening my chest.”

Color rose slowly into her cheeks.

“I believed you might be concealing something else,” she admitted.

“And that gave you the right to search through my possessions?”

“No.”

The quiet admission checked him.

Verity gathered the sheets into a single pile. “It did not.”

Rafe should have accepted the apology. He should have told her the drawings did not matter beside the reason she had come looking.

Instead, shame drove him forward. “Have you no more regard for propriety than this?”

It landed where he aimed it. Her head came up. Whatever tenderness had entered her face disappeared.

“Propriety?”

“You entered a gentleman’s bedchamber without permission.”