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Conrad and Cait exchanged a glance.

“Pardon, my lord?” Cait startled.

“That his sister is in love with the very man who thinks to bring an errant king to heel? One who has come, I assume, to ask for support in such a cause.”

Conrad was rarely rendered speechless, but he needn’t have worried that this was one of the few occasions. The baron quickly filled the void with more words.

“The circumstances that bring an unwed maid and an earl into my hall are curious indeed. But that matters naught, I suppose. You will forgive my mutterings. But her brother is a dear friend of yours, is he not? One of the founding members of your knightly order? The Order of the Broken Blade? I also wonder whose blade it is named for, but that, I fear, is a discussion for another day. Just now your friends are already beginning to arrive in London. You’ve little time to waste here, in my hall, listening to the ramblings of an old man.”

Conrad regained some, though not all, of his composure.

“Lord Lindemere.” How had the man learned so much? And why was he not threatening to toss him out of his hall? “We have indeed come to seek your assistance.”

Before he finished, the baron waved his hand in the air for Conrad to stop.

“And I will consider giving it, but only if you and Lady Cait join me for a drink.”

The former earl’s enemy had surprised him in nearly every way possible, but he had no choice but to comply, and so he nodded. In response to an order from the baron, the servants scurried to bring seats to the platform, which was no longer arranged for a meal.

Conrad watched as his men were led from the hall by the steward. Ansel did not appear pleased, but Conrad shook his head in response to his marshal’s silent question. Lindemere may be a touch mad, but he was no murderer.

“Sit, dear boy.”

The corner of Cait’s mouth lifted, and Conrad fought a smile of his own. He could not recall being called “dear boy” even when he was, in fact, a boy.

“Wine or ale?”

They sat on either side of Lindemere, in high-backed chairs as intricately carved as the baron’s. Each had taken two servants to carry, and Conrad could understand why as his fingers rested on the arm of his own seat.

“Ale,” he said at the same time that Cait asked for wine.

Her favorite drink, he remembered, was hypocras, the spiced wine not as common here as it was north of the border. When the wine goblet was handed to her, Conrad found himself watching as Cait took the first sip. Listening as she murmured an obligatory compliment. He tried not to envision her backside pressed against him in sleep. Or the curve of her waist, the only part of her body he’d dared touch these past days.

How had Lindemere surmised the truth of his connection to Cait so quickly?

The way you look at her, you fool.

Conrad took a sip of the ale he’d been given and turned to Lindemere.

“You are not at all what I expected,” he said.

Honesty. Conrad’s secret weapon.

Lindemere drank, a dribble of ale getting caught in his white beard. “Hmmm.”

“My father had few kind words for you, my lord.”

Cait gasped.

Lindemere raised his mug. “Rest in peace.”

All three of them drank to his father, despite what Conrad had said.

“If he sat here with us, I’d have few kind words for him. Your father was both rash and temperamental, though only marginally more so than his nephew.”

Conrad’s cousin Marcus had died years before his parents, and he hardly remembered the man. But he had, of course, heard rumors.

“’Tis true I had his belongings removed from his bedchamber.”