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“Juliet,” he called, his breath catching in his throat when she looked up, her gaze open.

The words didn’t come, however, which was rather absurd since he knew what he meant to say. For some reason, his tongue felt heavy in his mouth, unable to form the words.

Footsteps came quickly up the stairs, shattering the moment, and the butler appeared at the landing with a sealed letter in his hand, his expression carefully controlled.

“Your Grace. Forgive the hour, but a boy delivered this less than a quarter of an hour ago. He was told to say it was urgent.”

Adam took it. The seal was plain wax, no crest, no mark. He broke it and read three lines, unsigned. His fingers tightened to the point of crinkling the paper as he read them over again.

“What is it?” Juliet said.

He folded the note. He looked at her face in the dim lamplight, her eyes searching his, her hands still at her sides. “It is about Penhurst,” he said. “He has approached the Marquess of Proudlake. He has made an offer for his daughter.”

Juliet’s face drained of all color. “Valerie,” she said, her tone shaky.

Adam sighed. “Yes.”

She pressed her lips together. He watched her hands close slowly at her sides. When her eyes came back to his, past surprise now, moving quickly toward something colder and more deliberate.

“He is doing this because of me,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, and the veins in his temples were starting to throb. That old husk of a bastard. He was going to deal with that man until he couldn’t even crawl to the edges of the ton. “But I am not going to let him get what he wants,” he said quietly. “You can rest assured.”

She looked at him for a long moment, the lamplight low between them, the house still, the corridor narrow, and said nothing.

She did not have to, because he meant every word.

Juliet moved first.

She turned from the dim corridor and walked back to her room, and she heard his step behind her without having asked him to follow. The door closed.

The lamp on her writing table was burning low. Someone had left it; Mrs. Priscilla, most likely, knowing they’d been out late. Juliet went to the center of the room and stood there with her hands at her sides, and the worry that had been held at bay by the day’s brightness—Eloise asleep on her feet, the river going bronze, and the gingerbread—came forward all at once.

“Valerie won’t understand what she is walking into,” she said.

Adam didn’t look the least bit frazzled. “Proudlake has only been approached. Nothing is settled.”

“Proudlake is a practical man.” She turned to face him. He had stopped just inside the door, still in his coat. “Practical men count what a thing is worth before they ask whether it is good. Penhurst has money, and he knows how to present it.”

Her voice stayed even; she needed it to. “Valerie has none of the options I had, and she does not know there is anything to run from.” She pressed her lips together. “I know what his attention is like. Wherever I was, he was always watching. She would not know how to brace for any of that, Adam.”

Adam’s eyes had not left her face. “I won’t let it reach that point,” he said.

Juliet heard him; she knew he was trying to comfort her, but… “You cannot simply…”

“I can.” He said it almost flippantly. “Proudlake and I hold mutual interests in two business concerns. He will hear from me before the week is out. And I have information about Penhurst; information he would not wish circulated in the clubs.” He paused. “He chose poorly.”

She looked at him across the low light. The way he stood there, calmly talking about dismantling another man’s scheme the way someone else might discuss a change in the weather.

“You’d do all that for Valerie,” she said.

“For you,” he said, his eyes going soft in a way that made the skin of her face warm up.

Then she said, “You were barely civil to her when she came to call. You greeted her as if she had arrived with an invoice.”

A quarter of one dark brow rose. “Would you have preferred I be overly warm with a woman who is not my wife?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Don’t do that. Don’t try to shift the point. And you are prickly,” she gestured at the broad, immovable shape of him. “With everyone. You were prickly the night I arrived at your door. You are prickly at balls. The entire ton is half-convinced you’re the villain in a gothic novel.”