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“It was only a little broken, and none of this is going to distract me from killing Lord Michael, if that’s what you’re after.”

He extended an arm for her to precede him into the office, a room that might have felt cozy were it not for the furniture competing for space. Her father’s old desk, now hers, commanded the center, with two chairs positioned before it and a tall bookcase against one wall. Harry’s smaller desk had been tucked nearer the window overlooking the yard.

“Only trying to delay the inevitable. Is it working?”

She lifted her chin. “No.”

Once seated, her gaze drifted over the familiar clutter of her office—the ledgers stacked beside her inkpot, the overflowing bookshelves, the ship drawings tucked between older sketches and plans—before inevitably falling to the drawer that held her correspondence. Just the sight of it, even closed tight and entirely innocuous, made her palms sweat.

It was unfortunate that the situation with Lord Michael had progressed to the point where she would need to confess to Harry what, in hindsight, looked uncomfortably close to deception. Especially when Harry had never given her a single cause to distrust him. Harry had known her since the day she was born and, no matter her choices, he’d never pressed his will upon her, never bullied or superimposed his dreams atop her own as though his were superior simply because he was a man.

It’s going to be a hell of a storm, Wyn.

Let me have the boys reinforce that scaffolding first.

Please let me call the surgeon, cariad.

And then he’d let her go. Let her sail, and climb, and suffer the consequences of her pride. Just as her father had done… right up until he’d ignored her wishes and shoved her into marriage.

Well, there was nothing for it now. She would have to tell Harry everything.

Reaching into her pocket, Gwen retrieved Lord Michael’s most recent letter and laid it on the desk between them. Harry picked it up. Unlike her, Harry didn’t dither. She watched his eyes dart back and forth across the parchment, his lips pressed into a thin line. While she waited, Gwen fidgeted in her father’s chair—leaning back, then scooting forward when her feet dangled. She shifted again and again in search of some position that didn’t leave her feeling like a child who’d snuck into her father’s office while he was away. What she wouldn’t give to have her da stride through the door to fix everything that had slowly run to ruin in his absence. Or, if she could not have her father back, then to at least return to the days directly after Walter’s death, when it had only been their dreary financial situation keeping her awake at night—before she’d gone and made everything a thousand times worse by provoking Lord Michael.

And there was the crux of the matter, the source of the horrid churning in her gut. Lord Michael was just another rich, mercenary nob. It was she who’d put Llanelli and its eighty-four employees in peril. Men and women she’d known her entire life, who trusted her to make thoughtful, prudent decisions for the yard.

There had been nothing of thought or prudence in her response to his goading, only the self-indulgent need to prove herself more clever and capable than he.

She stood, her gaze sweeping the room in search of somewhere, anywhere, besides Harry to land. It settled on the miniature wooden ship she’d constructed as a child. It had held pride of place on her fathers desk when he was alive, and was there once more. Walter had shoved it in the bottom of a desk drawer. The bowsprit had splintered, the hull cracked, crushed beneath a pile of dusty ledgers and a whisky bottle. Rescuing it, repairing that physical reminder of better days, had felt deeply important after Walter’s death. Absurd to cry over a toy when the yard itself was every bit as broken, but Harry hadn’t thought her absurd.

He’d come to the office that first night, and found her there, limp and hollowed out, not from grief but from the sudden weight of all that had been pitched onto her shoulders. She’d been prepared to run her father’s company, was raised at his side for that very role. But she hadn’t been prepared to glue together a crumbling shipyard, one that had been equally crushed beneath poorly kept ledgers and a whisky bottle.

Harry had stayed with her, a silent sentinel, while she’d repaired the toy ship. Then, together, they’d walked out onto the docks to watch the sun creep over the horizon, its first light revealing half-finished hulls left too long on their stocks, ironwork scattered without care, and tools gone dull with neglect. A yard where attention had simply drifted away.

She’d felt less overwhelmed with Harry by her side. He was very like her father in that way, Neither man had ever made her feel that a passing doubt ought to outweigh a lifetime of proving herself capable.

No, she should not have kept this from Harry.

“Gwen,” Harry looked up from the letter at last. He folded the paper, then again a second time before tapping the edge against his thigh. “It sounds as though you two have been hissing and spitting like cats for quite some time. Last week wasn’t your first run-in with him, was it?”

In that particular instance, Lord Michael had quietly purchased the shipment of lumber intended for Llanelli, offering the mill higher rates and the promise of future business, so long as they prioritized his orders. The resulting delay caused a mad dash to find an alternative. In the end, she’d secured an immediate shipment of timber from a smaller, new mill, in exchange for repairs to the family’s fishing boats. She’d even negotiated a discount. What ought to have been a right mess had instead proved something of a boon. Only after she found a solution in the final hour did she confess it to Harry, explaining what had occurred—or at least the pertinent parts. The pertinent part being that an upstart by the name of Lord Michael had ventured into the business world, where he’d set about making a nuisance of himself with admirable enthusiasm.

Harry set the paper, ever so gently, back onto the desk. “Have I got it wrong?”

Gwen wiped her damp palms on her skirts, then shook her head, feeling every bit the recalcitrant child. “Our correspondence… such as it is… began some months ago.”

She shrugged a shoulder. “First came his solicitor, writing on his behalf, offering to purchase Llanelli. It seems he has made something of a reputation for himself—buying up companies where the potential is greater than the profit, with a particular eye for modest shipyards. He takes what is already there, builds upon it, and turns them into marine and metalworks enterprises. Naturally, I declined. A week later, I received another letter, this time from Lord Michael himself, attempting to reopen the matter and offer a higher price, under the rather mistaken belief that there exists some sum of money large enough to persuade me to sell Llanelli.”

Reaching into the drawer, she pulled out the stack of letters, handing him the topmost one.

“It is possible,” she said as he slid the paper from between her fingers,“that my word choice… the vehemence of my response… might have elicited a rather primitive contest of wills.”

When Harry finished reading, he waggled his fingers for the next correspondence, which she reluctantly surrendered.

“The man is a bully and a brute,” she said. “He practically beat his chest in the margins when met with the word ‘no,’ he did.”

Chewing her lower lip, she consigned herself to watching Harry’s expressive eyebrows arc and furrow dramatically as he read, cramming a dictionary’s worth of unspoken exclamations into the silence. At one point he even shut his eyes as if to delay the ending of a particularly grim fairytale.

“Cariad, this is bad. I don’t even know what three of these words mean! The quality of his parchment alone is a bloody threat!” He shook his head, then raised a hand to massage his temples. “I take it the jewelry you pawned… your mother’s jewelry… had something to do with this.”