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“It’s a warning from an unknown source. Penhurst dined with Lord Proudlake this evening,” he said. “Valerie was present. Proudlake has indicated he will give his answer by Friday. I presume whoever sent this knows about your friendship with Valerie.”

Friday was four days away.

“Then you need to go to him now,” she said. “Tonight⁠—”

“Tonight,” he agreed. He was already moving toward his own room. “I need Daniel. And there is a former business associate of Penhurst’s whose cooperation I have been holding in reserve.” He stopped at the threshold and turned back. “This will not take long.” He looked at her across the dim corridor, one long look, the letter closed in his fist. “And when I come back, I want to hear what you were going to say.”

He went down the stairs. The front door closed, and the sound of it rang up through the quiet house and died, and the street beyond fell silent.

She stood in the corridor with the lamp guttering at the far end, and her hand pressed flat to her sternum, her heart beating at twice its ordinary rate.

She did not lock her door. She went back to her room, sat on the edge of her bed in the near dark, and waited. She thought about what Penhurst stood to lose when Adam Townsend decided a man needed to be dealt with.

And she thought, too, about what she had been about to say.

He’d sent a note to White’s from the carriage, and Daniel had been standing at the club’s front steps when Adam’s driver turned the corner, coat already on, the note still folded in one hand. He had not asked what it concerned, but had simply gotten into the carriage.

Proudlake’s study had the look of a room that was used rather than displayed: ledgers weighted at the desk corners, a glass of claret half-drunk at his elbow, a fire recently stoked. The marquess himself was still in his evening coat when the butler showed them in, his cravat loosened but his eyes sharp. He had not yet gone to bed.

He looked at Adam, and then at Daniel, and his expression moved through surprise and landed somewhere closer to wary. “Ravenlocke.” A pause. “It is past midnight.”

“I am aware,” Adam said. “I would not have come at this hour without cause.”

Proudlake closed the ledger on his desk. He gestured once at the chairs near the fire and did not take one himself. “What cause?”

“Godfrey Brantham, Viscount Penhurst,” Adam said. “I understand he dined with you this evening.”

Something in Proudlake’s face went taut. He looked at Adam for a moment, measuring—Adam suspected—how much he ought to reveal, before setting his hands flat on the desk. He’d apparently decided to be truthful.

“He did,” he said. “And he made a proposal before he left that I have been sitting with since.” He looked at the claret glass and appeared to decide against it. “My daughter is just twenty years of age, and that mad man is fifty, with his wife barely four months in the ground. He sat in that chair and told me she would want for nothing, as though I had raised her to be a transaction.”

Adam found it ironic; the contrast between this man and Juliet’s own father. That man had been more than willing to treat his own daughter like chattel, with no remorse. Adam wondered just how much more his wife had suffered in her childhood than she had not let him know of…and he found himself vowing to make sure she never experienced anything like this from him. Ever.

Adam’s hands curled into fists. He could only imagine the smarmy look on the old lecher’s face as he must have gone on, and it disgusted him. “What did you say to him?”

Proudlake arched a brow. “I told him to remove himself from my house.”

Daniel, who had taken the nearer chair when they’d arrived, looked up. “With or without the port?”

Proudlake gave him a flat look. “Without, of course. He has no right to it.”

“Naturally.” Daniel laced his fingers across one knee.

“Who told you?” Proudlake said, his eyes returning to Adam.

“You need not know that, for now.” He kept it at that. “The reason it matters to me is that Penhurst is not acting at random. My wife was his intended before she came to me. He is going after Valerie because she is the closest thing to hand.”

Proudlake stilled, as his eyes moved from Adam to Daniel and back. “He is doing this because of the Duchess?” There were stirrings of anger in his tone.

“Yes.” Adam nodded. “That is the conclusion we have reached. Penhurst, after all, is a very vile man.”

Proudlake exhaled, loud and long. “Then I want to know what you intend to do about it.”

“That,” Adam said, “is why I am here.”

Adam took two papers from his coat: the note that had sent him out into the night and, beside it, a column of figures in his own hand, written in the carriage on the way over. He placed both on the desk.

“He told someone at his club that he was certain of Proudlake,” Adam said. “He was expecting a yes by Friday.” He tapped the figures. “This is Penhurst’s financial position: what it is now, and what it will look like inside three weeks if certain things are arranged correctly.”