Page 89 of The Siren of Sussex

“I haven’t done anything yet.”

“You have.” Her voice was husky with sincerity. “You’ve offered to help me. And . . . you’ve listened to me. It’s for that I’m grateful. For everything you’ve . . .”

Her words trailed away as he finally did what he’d been wanting to do all morning.

He brushed the stray curl from her cheek, tucking it gently behind the delicate curve of her ear. The action was as impulsive as the question that followed it. “May I call you Evelyn?”

Her eyes were riveted to his. She looked adorably flustered. “If you like.”

His pulse thrummed.

Evelyn.

He hadn’t intended to ask for the privilege. But he’d wanted to.

By God, how he’d wanted to.

He forced himself to drop his hand from her face. His fingers had lingered long enough. Any longer and he wouldn’t be able to pass it off as a meaningless gesture. A simple adjustment to her coiffure—the sort of thing a dressmaker might do.

Any longer and it would be a caress. A touch that spoke more of tenderness than of fashion.

He’d no sooner withdrawn from her than her horse swung his head back over the door, coming between them as surely as any chaperone.

Evelyn cradled the great beast’s nose, giving him an absent pet. “What shall I call you?”

“Anything you want,” Ahmad said.

“I wish to use your Christian name.”

His mouth hitched. “I can’t vouch for its Christianness.”

“You know what I mean. I wish—that is, I should very much like to call you Ahmad. If you don’t object to—”

“I don’t object.”

She looked into his eyes, her gaze uncertain. He had the sense that she was as much out to sea as he was himself. “It doesn’t have to mean anything,” she said softly.

“No,” he agreed. And yet . . .

He very much feared that it did.

Eighteen

Ahmad. Come in and have a seat.” Tom Finchley stood from behind the barrier of his desk to welcome Ahmad into his office in Fleet Street. The walls behind him were lined with bookcases filled with neat rows of leather-bound law books, locked securely behind glass.

Ahmad availed himself of one of the upholstered chairs opposite the desk.

It wasn’t his first time facing Finchley in this manner.

He’d been here before, in the aftermath of the incident at Mrs. Pritchard’s. Then, Ahmad had been confronting the very real prospect of transportation. Finchley had saved him from such a fate. And then he’d saved him again by offering him employment as a manservant to his future wife, Jenny Holloway.

“That will be all, Poole,” Finchley said, dismissing the weedy-looking clerk who had escorted Ahmad upstairs.

Bowing, the young man withdrew, shutting the door after him.

Finchley resumed his seat. His cravat and waistcoat were rumpled, and his hair was mussed as if he’d been pushing his fingers through it. He was plainly in the midst of one of his cases. Teetering stacks of paper littered the surface of his desk in company with heaps of rolled documents tied with ribbon. “I’d offer you tea, but I’m afraid I can spare you no more than ten minutes. I’m due in court.”

“This won’t take long.”