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“You don’t want a room there, if you don’t mind me saying, sir,” the innkeeper continued with a grave shake of his head. “Mr. Layton’s given bedbugs to every traveler who’s passed through his doors. A filthy scoundrel of a man if ever I saw one.”

Amusement tugged the corner of Lord Hollings’s lip up. “Well, we can’t have that, can we?”

“A disgrace to the profession, Mr. Layton is,” said the innkeeper, his face growing red. “If you’ll forgive me for being so forward, I wouldn’t feel right letting you rest there. Not when I wouldn’t send my worst enemy to the Bull and Branch. Why, I only told my wife yesterday—”

“We’ll stay here,” Jane said, cutting the man short before his ranting spiraled out of control.

When Lord Hollings lifted an eyebrow—in challenge or surprise, she couldn’t tell—she touched him lightly on the arm, the perfect imitation of a wife soothing her husband’s worries. “Taking one room would be fine for one night. Don’t you think, my dear?”

He glanced down at her hand and back up at her eyes. Then a smile broke out over his face. “It will be roughing it, but I’m sure we’ll make do. Wife.”

She shivered. There was that word again. That unpredictable, unimaginable word that sliced through her with a sadness she couldn’t entirely explain.

“Very good.” The innkeeper clasped his hands together before taking up his pen.

“We should like supper brought up to our room as well,” Lord Hollings said to the innkeeper as he signed the register and took the key to the room.

“Of course, sir,” said the little man as he gestured to a boy to see to their bags. “I’ll send the girl up with a tray as soon as possible.”

A rational, sane voice in the back of Jane’s mind rang out, warning her that she was making a mistake agreeing to this. She should insist that they press on to another inn before all of her rules fell away, but at least part of her recognized the fact that everything about this trip was a violation of barriers she’d constructed to keep herself employed.

She closed her eyes for a brief second. She was scared. All of her bluster from that morning was gone. Now, in the lamplit entry of the Shallow Stream, she understood what it meant that she was placing her safety and her future in the hands of a man she hardly knew. Riding with Lord Hollings down an open road was one thing, but crossing the threshold of an inn’s room with him felt like a very different matter. Still, what could she do? Giving up their charade would only make her more vulnerable. At best, the innkeeper might take pity on her and find someplace for her to sleep. At worst, he would cast her from his inn out of concern for the establishment’s respectability.

“Shall we, Lady Hollings?” asked her false husband, jolting her out of her thoughts.

Trust me, his eyes seemed to say. I won’t fail you.

She didn’t really have another option, so she nodded. “Please. I’m exhausted.”

The pair of them broke apart only to climb the stairs up to their room. With every step, the sense of foreboding fell a little heavier around her shoulders.

And yet somehow she trusted him. She wasn’t so naive as to think that any man was exactly how he presented himself to the world, but she wanted to believe that Lord Hollings was the man he seemed to be.

When they reached room eleven, Lord Hollings unlocked the door. “After you,” he said quietly.

Tentatively, she stepped over the threshold into the cold but spacious room. She tried her best to ignore the bed that stood in the middle of it, and instead walked around to the little table near the empty fireplace. The boy who’d carried their bags up set them down as she shrugged off her heavy, wet coat.

Lord Hollings cleared his throat. When she looked up, she realized that he’d hung back in the doorway.

“I’ll find a maid to light the fire,” he said.

She nodded and focused her attention on folding her coat. She heard the door close behind her, and then she was alone.

She pressed a hand to her stomach and tried her best to settle her nerves. This would be fine. It would all work out, and soon she’d be back on her way to Yorkshire, Lady Margaret in tow.

There was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” she called as a girl shuffled in hauling a coal scuttle.

The maid moved with impressive efficiency, and in no time there was a fire glowing in the grate and two more lamps lit.

When she was alone, Jane swiftly unbuttoned her dress and pulled out her change of clothes.

The soft, dry cotton against her skin was as sinful as silk, and finally she began to feel a little more like herself again. She did up the back of her dress with her little hook but left her boots off to dry next to the fire, stuffing them full of newspaper that the maid had left behind. She reached up to unpin her hat that had done absolutely nothing to protect her hair from the rain—not that it had done too much damage to the style. She’d always settled for simple knots because no one ever noticed what the governess looked like as long as she was neat and tidy.

But as she smoothed a few strands away from her forehead and twisted them behind her ear, she dared hope that at least one man would notice just a little bit.

Chapter Four