Page 51 of The Earl She Once Saved

“Has something happened?” she asked.

He looked up. For a moment, he did not seem to know she was there. Then his expression altered, though not enough.

“No.”

Verity glanced at the letter. “Then you have a peculiar manner of receiving good news.”

His eyes followed hers. He folded the page once, then again, hiding the hand upon it.

“It concerns an obligation of my own.”

The words were quiet and final. She should have left them so. Whatever business followed him to Edgeworth was his, and she had no desire to be drawn into another one of Thornlow’s affairs. She spent too many years untangling the last of them.

Still, she could not help but ask. “An obligation to whom?”

His jaw tightened. “No one you need trouble yourself over.”

The answer struck more sharply than it ought to have done.

Verity lifted her chin. “I assure you, I had not begun troubling myself.”

Something flickered across his face. Regret, perhaps, but it vanished before she could be certain.

“I must go.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

He crossed the room, carrying with him the cold smell of the morning and the faint scent of horse and damp wool. When he came near, his right shoulder moved stiffly beneath his coat. It was the shoulder upon which he had struck the ground.

Verity’s gaze caught there. Rafe noticed.

“It is nothing,” he assured her.

“I did not ask.”

His eyes rested upon her face. For one suspended instant, the room grew too quiet. She remembered mud beneath her palms, his arms around her and his breath against her hair. Then, he stepped away.

“I shall return before we leave for the Marchmonts’.”

Verity had almost forgotten the ball. That alone seemed proof that the fall had injured her more seriously than she supposed.

“You need not hurry on my account.”

He had that look again, as though he wished to say something and had decided against it.

Rafe inclined his head and left. The door closed behind him. Verity stood where he had left her, listening to the retreat of his boots across the hall. A moment later came the opening of the outer door, a man’s voice calling for his horse and the swift disturbance of a house obliged to move around sudden purpose. Then, silence returned.

She went to the window. Rafe appeared below, pulling on his gloves as he crossed the drive. A groom brought his horse. He mounted with less ease than usual, favoring the injured shoulder despite his denials, then turned the animal toward the road. He did not look back.

Verity remained at the glass until the trees swallowed him. That was foolish, so she moved away at once.

The letter was no concern of hers. Neither was the expression upon his face, nor the reason a man who had spent years among battlefields should look at a sheet of paper as though it held something more dangerous than a weapon.

An obligation of his own.

It might have been a debt, a promise, maybe some consequence of the war … or a woman. The thought arrived without permission. Verity rejected it with such force that she nearly laughed.