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Whatever pleasantness she had looked on him with before vanished. “Is it so ridiculous to imagine my having business there?”

“I think it ridiculous that you’re taking up this sham.”

“Sham?” She spoke the word loudly. He hadn’t much noticed her voice until now. It was slightly deep for a woman, idling where the lower register of a flute would play. Resonate and fast. She took a step nearer. “Just what do you think I’m about?”

Rafe swallowed. “I think,” he said slowly, “that you’re preparing to blackmail me. You’re just taking the long way about it.”

Seconds ticked away, silent and unchecked. Muscles flexed and abated in her neck; she was breathing nearly as hard as he was.

“Are you?” he asked finally.

“I am asking you for a favor, sir. Will you take me to the dockyard at Deptford?”

An acidic, humorless laugh escaped him. The sham not only continued, she sharpened her arrows in accompaniment. “No.”

She squared her shoulders. Now she really looked like an admiral of some sort, what with that silver frogging and that piercing, metallic glare. “Then yes,” she said, “I suppose I am blackmailing you. I think you know quite well I overheard your private conversation at Lady Milton’s ball, so unless you should like your various business endeavors to grow all the more complex, or for Miss Penney to hear of them—”

Footsteps crossing the room’s threshold silenced her. Rafe turned back to the portrait—at some point he had angled his body toward hers—and he stared at his hands forming fists over the railing. There was not a curse sufficient for this feeling. He was beholden to Thomas, already. He didn’t know that he could stand a second dictator in his life.

You need only appease her until you’ve secured Miss Penney’s hand. Once you’re wed, she can say whatever she likes. It wouldn’t matter, then, if she turned Thomas fully against him, or his wife, either. He was after one thing: freedom. How very unfortunate it must take the form of money.

She had caged him; that much was clear. Whatever she knew, she realized the strength of it to threaten him with such confidence, had divined enough about his own goals to go directly to using Miss Penney’s name. There was nothing left for it but to make do. As long as she didn’t ask money of him—God help him, the mere thought set fire to his lungs—he’d be fine.

Two couples had entered the room and were chattering happily somewhere nearby. Rafe refused to look at them or at her; he only knew Miss St. Quinton had taken his proffered arm when he felt the light splay of her fingers at his elbow. They maintained a wide distance as they walked the two remaining rooms of the exhibit. How bloody ironic, that she should stop to admire the depictions of the cardinal virtues in the middle room, and how fortuitous that she did not attempt to speak to him again.

Rafe tried to forget her presence, wavering before several portraits he’d been desperately hoping to see: The exquisite drama of the Prince Regent, looking far slimmer and nobler than he was known to be, standing casually beside his horse while a storm raged overhead. The churning seas behind Admiral Boscawen; the magnificent play of lamplight in Cupid and Psyche.

But the skylights had blackened with the onset of night, and laughter curled up from the vestibule. Rafe squinted and blinked, all but smacking himself, but his concentration was lost.

Miss St. Quinton went silently with him down the stairs and out onto the street, where her maid waited. In the time they had spent indoors, the lamplighter had been by. Pall Mall glowed with gaslight. Flickering orange shadows bent on the buildings, in the puddles between uneven cobbles. The wind was kicking up.

“Are you headed in the direction of home, Mr. Balfour?”

He ought to say no. “I’m returning to Berkeley Square, yes.”

They resumed their silent walk. It wasn’t until they were approaching the end of St. James’s Street that he located his voice. “What are your terms, then?”

She tilted her face to his. A gust of wind split the space between them, lifting the feather up and away from her face. She didn’t appear flush with self-satisfaction as he had expected, but rather the opposite. Guileless. Tired. “My terms?”

He nodded once.

“Take me to the Deptford Dockyard in Greenwich. Discreetly, on the thirty-first.”

He nearly stopped in the street, but her hand dragged him forward. Part of him wanted to accuse her of jesting cruelly with him still, but he knew, now, that she was being sincere. Never mind that it didn’t make a whit of sense, that it only complicated everything he thought he’d known about her.

“The dockyard isn’t a possibility. Not just anyone can enter, you know, and certainly not someone such as yourself.”

She turned on him with ferocious quickness. “I must go. You will make it possible.”

“Why?”

The lonely syllable hung in the air. The fiery intensity of her eyes flitted past him, to where her maid stood several paces behind. “I must be there on the thirty-first. Surely that is all that concerns you.”

“I’m telling you that isn’t possible.” Rafe felt her temper kindling and hastened to add, “Perhaps if you tell me your purpose, I can find a solution.”

Miss St. Quinton sniffed. Lifted her chin and looked askance. “There is a ship arriving in Greenwich that I must see.”

This became more convoluted by the moment. He massaged the bridge of his nose. “The Royal Hospital is just up the river. That would be a perfectly acceptable place for you to be seen, if it’s just about seeing the curst ship pass—”