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Her curiosity was piqued. He’d never spoken of a past love before and she wanted badly to pry, but his guarded expression told her now was not the time.

“Then both of us enter into this with a clear conscience,” she said.

“And that’s the way it should stay,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“No dalliances. No affairs.”

“No dalliances. No affairs,” she repeated. Sex. Intimacy. Passion. The three things society forbade unmarried ladies to engage in would be the three things she’d have to give up when they exchanged vows.

He looked straight at the ceiling, avoiding her eyes. “I know what that’s asking of you. You deserve a full life in every way.”

“I can’t miss what I don’t know,” she said with a shrug.

“What of children?” he asked.

She scrunched up her brow in thought. Choosing her words carefully, she said, “As I never thought I would marry, I never thought I’d have children. It isn’t as though it’s necessary. There’s no entailed property to hand down to a first son or anything ghastly like that. Unless you want to have them, of course,” she added quickly.

“That would rather negate the decision not to sleep together, wouldn’t it?” he asked.

She pursed her lips and waited for him to answer for his part.

“I’ll be guided by you,” he said. “If you don’t want children, we won’t have children.”

It wasn’t a real answer. He hadn’t come down on one side of the issue or the other, but instead deferred to what she wanted. Perhaps she should’ve been happy he wasn’t demanding the thing she couldn’t deliver, but something about it made her uncomfortable. This might be a marriage of convenience, but his opinion mattered too.

“You’re sure?” she asked.

His laugh was almost bitter. “Of course not. Are you sure about anything this evening?”

“No,” she said quietly. This evening had gone from mundane to disastrous in the space of minutes. She wished that she could take a step back or even slow time a little to allow her to catch her breath, but wishes like that were foolish. They had to handle the situation they found themselves in right now.

A long, awkward silence stretched between them. Finally he lifted his head and held her gaze. “Then I suppose it’s settled.”

“Actually, there’s one more matter to take care of,” she said.

Careful of her elaborate skirts, she slid to the floor as best she could. Surrounded by a mountain of silk, she took up his hand in hers, schooled her face into an earnest expression, and asked, “Gavin Barrett, would you take my hand in marriage?”

He snorted a laugh. “I thought you’d never ask.”

Chapter Four

“WHAT THE HELL happened tonight?” Gavin asked his empty hansom cab as it rumbled away from Mrs. Sullivan’s.

What had promised to be an utterly ordinary evening had turned completely on its head, and now he was engaged to be married. To Ina. His Ina.

“I’m marrying Ina,” he murmured as the cab jolted and clattered along the cobblestones of Cumberland Street before making a left on Howe Street and rounding the Royal Circus. He was far too wound up to go home to his bachelor rooms on St. Giles Street. Instead, he was headed for a large stone building where he knew at least two of the city’s hard-working citizens would still be awake.

When the hansom pulled up in front of the offices of the Lothian Herald-Times on High Street, Gavin paid the driver and leapt down. He let himself into the building, for he knew that knocking would do no good. The giant steam-powered presses were going with such speed that the din could be heard out on the street.

Crossing the entryway of the newspaper office, Gavin nodded to one of the press operators who’d come out of the print room for a cigarette. With a hand on the smooth banister, he ascended the three flights of stairs to the office of the owner and editor in chief, Jonathan Moray.

Just as he’d expected, Gavin found his friend leaning over a mocked-up broadsheet, jacket cast aside and sleeves rolled up to expose his forearms. A pencil stuck behind Moray’s ear looked dangerously close to falling from its perch.

Next to him stood Eva Wilis, the paper’s managing editor, with whom Moray shared the office.

“You can’t cut that graf, Moray,” she said, pointing to a section of print as her glasses slipped down her long, straight nose. “That’s the very heart of the story.”