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“I cannot check me own pace wi’ the coach to be of any help,” Chenoweth said. His voice was solemn, grave. “He’d notice if I tried.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to.”

Their eyes connected. Rafe’s thumb rubbed against the satin lining of his coat pocket; he’d found a tear in it, or perhaps created the defect while they’d stood here, talking. He could feel the questions loaded at the back of Chenoweth’s tongue, and then the man sighed.

“I’ll give direction that he be saddled. Best change every fifteen miles if you ’ave any hope at all of catchin’ us—wherever the bleedin’ ’ell we’re to go.”

“Thank you.”

It would all be over soon, whatever it was to be.

Rafe washed and dressed himself in his bedchamber at his father’s house. His actions were mindless, mechanical, he couldn’t remember from one arm to the next what he had sponged and what he hadn’t. The door was unbolted, the curtains thrown open, and the bed still made, if rumpled. A strange feeling of resignation came over him. This would be the last time he stood in this room that had never really been his.

He wouldn’t miss a bedamned inch of it.

The tall boots pinched the tops of his calves, but the riding crop still felt natural in his hand, no different than a watch or a pen might. He was Margaret Balfour’s son yet. A tolerable horseman when the occasion demanded it.

He gripped the door handle. The leather of his glove squeaked against the brass.

The desk in the corner beckoned to him. It might take but five minutes to pen an explanation, and an apology. Because damn him, it hadn’t just been Sophie on the wrong side of things last night. She was frightened for her own heart. She was so utterly alive and spirited and vocal, it was easy to forget that grief still lived in her, a shadow to be fought day after day.

Don’t go expecting me to wait on you. The words—her words—coiled in his chest like a viper preparing to strike. They were a show of her strength, no doubt. A virtue to be lauded, probably, except he couldn’t feel anything but an acid ache knowing she had leveled them at him.

It was time Rafe chose Rafe. He stepped into the corridor.

He was part arrogant fool, because this venture was about more than protecting the nameless and faceless of the institution. In shielding them from Thomas, he was effectively rerouting that pistol-wielding anger at himself. What would happen, when they inevitably met face-to-face? The truth would come out a third time, even if Rafe never spoke a word of it.

If Sophie waited on him, on the man he would be once he returned—assuming he did return—he would tell her things that deserved more than ink and paper.

twenty-six

One day later

Rafe had gone.

Oh, it was all over the cursed scandal sheets; it would have been impossible to avoid, even if Sophie hadn’t been frothing at the mouth to put her hands on every one of them. As if they would say something new. As if one’s version of events would be more sensible than the last. She was probably the only soul in Mayfair who didn’t believe them, who suspected Thomas Balfour of cooking up the headlines himself for his own benefit.

“When did you become so taken up with those things?”

Sophie’s head snatched up. Her mother stood in the drawing room’s center, hands folded protectively over her favorite black reticule. Sophie hadn’t heard her enter the room.

“I’m not,” Sophie said, beginning to crumple the sheet. She forced herself to fold it instead, the headline ‘Runaway Merchant Causes Chaos for Earl’ collapsing in on itself. She despised the sheets, their authors, and their confounded readers for believing such a diminution of Rafe’s character.

They portrayed him as an utter villain, a filthy member of the nouveau riche who had suckled wealth from his father—the ‘true proprietor of Balfour’s’—and landed both Thomas and Lord Penney in a vexing predicament. Some nonsense about the older men’s business dealings having depended upon Rafe marrying Miss Penney. By running, he had proven himself an ungrateful wastrel, his pockets supposedly full of his father’s money and poor Miss Penney heartbroken besides.

Sophie thought it was all rubbish, if well concocted. If the elder Balfour was behind the tale, he had managed to interlay his name beside that of the earl’s, depicting them as faultless allies.

What a wretched joke. This had nothing to do with the Penneys, but with audaciously stupid male pride. Rafe was either pursuing his evil father to the institution, or Thomas Balfour had become privy to his son’s plans, and was at this moment abducting him for some malicious purpose.

She had heard the closing of a door early yesterday morning, and when she had peered down into the square, saw the back of a coach pulling off from No. 36. It could have been both men inside.

Who sounds like a scandal sheet author, now? She wanted to believe she was ridiculous, but the scar on his back—

“You’ll ruin your gloves, doing that.” Her mother’s voice broke into the whirlpool of madness that had taken over her brain. “Here.”

So much for not crinkling the paper. When it transferred from Sophie’s hands to Lady St. Quinton’s, it was in the shape of a ball.

“Now when did you purchase those?” Mama asked, taking Sophie’s hand and pulling on the tip of her white-lace-covered middle finger. “I don’t recall seeing them before.”