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“This,” Penhurst said, after a pause, “is a very old document, Your Grace.”

“It is a contract that needs fulfillment, Penhurst. And I am the man who will fulfill it.” Adam reached into his coat and placed the special license on the table beside the contract. “I was at the Archbishop of Canterbury’s office earlier this morning.”

Penhurst set the family contract down, and eyed the special license, no doubt reading the archbishop’s signature and the official seal out of the corner of his eye.

Then he stood.

He was a shorter man, though heavyset across the shoulders. Still, if he thought he could intimidate Adam through his heft, then he had another thing coming.

“You are stealing another man’s bride,” Penhurst accused, his tone very quiet now. “You are using an old piece of paper as your cover, and you are taking a woman who was promised to me.”

Adam’s jaw tensed. He was not doing this out of sentiment. He barely even knew Lady Juliet Gainsborough.

The only point that mattered was Eloise.

Eloise in ten years, making her debut, moving through rooms full of men with Penhurst’s eyes doing that rapid, proprietary accounting before she’d crossed the threshold. Adam was not going to be the father who prepared her for that by accepting it as simply how the world worked.

“No,” Adam said, doing his best to keep his temper in check. “I am honoring an agreement that predates yours by fifty years.”

“Lord Clarkston gave his consent!” Penhurst stepped closer, which put them at a distance Adam found almost interesting in its confidence. “I paid very generously for the right to⁠—!”

The right?

This cad was pushing his luck, was he not?

“You have no right to her.” Adam did not move. “Lady Juliet will marry me, and the ceremony will take place within the week.”

The color in Penhurst’s face had shifted from red to something darker at the jaw and temples. He breathed in through his nose, and when he spoke again, his voice dropped low and flat. “She belongs to me. Clarkston promised her. I paid for that promise. She belongs⁠—”

She belongs to me.

Adam had heard those words before, and he did not enjoy being reminded of them just now.

He moved before the word finished; he leaned close enough to see the pulse thudding in the viscount’s neck and the slight, involuntary backward shift of his heels.

“Listen well, Penhurst. You will not approach her,” he said, very quietly even as the rage churned. “You will not write to her, or send word through any person or by any means. You will not contact her father. You will not speak her name in company with any suggestion of prior claim or familiarity.” He held Penhurst’s eyes. “And if I hear that you have interfered, in any form whatsoever, with Lady Juliet or with this marriage, you will answer to me, personally.”

Penhurst’s chin lifted, though his jaw quivered and his eyes shook in their sockets. “Is…is that a threat, Your Grace?”

Adam stepped back. He took his hat and the contract from the desk and turned for the door. “Oh no. No, Viscount. It is a promise,” he said.

With that, Adam walked out without waiting to hear what the man did with it.

The carriage was at the corner. Adam swung up inside, pulled the door shut, and the wheels were already moving as he settled back.

London went past the window at its usual indifferent pace: a crossing sweeper at the gutter, two men outside a coffeehouse deep in argument, a governess navigating the pavement with two small charges whose strongly divergent views on direction were being aired at considerable volume.

An ordinary morning in an ordinary city that was entirely unaware that Adam was sitting alone and trying, with limited success, to stop grinding his back teeth.

“—and that is entirely the wrong way to hold a book,” Eloise said, with her nose turned up, and she looked rather adorable doing so.

Juliet looked down at the large volume of fairy stories she’d been given. She had come to Eloise’s chambers after breakfast and been assigned the window seat within thirty seconds, handed the book in under a minute, and corrected on her grip within two.

“Two hands,” Eloise said, demonstrating with her own. “Otherwise the spine cracks. Papa has very strong feelings about it.”

“I stand corrected.” Juliet adjusted her hold, and Eloise gave a nod of satisfaction and returned to her own reading.

She sat cross-legged on the floor, the yellow star-patterned quilt from her bed drawn over her shoulders, her dark braid in an advanced state of dissolution, entirely comfortable in her own domain.