Page 51 of The Companion’s Secret

“Precisely.”

A quarter of an hour later, Gabriel’s coach rolled to a stop and he reached up to help Camellia down. “Your room awaits you, Cousin,” he said, gesturing with his free hand for a servant to carry up her things.

She looked the picture of icy respectability, her long braid now wound beneath her bonnet and the ragged sheaf of papers nowhere in evidence, presumably tucked into the valise she was at that moment reluctantly surrendering to the innkeeper’s son. Even her missing gloves had been replaced. “How kind of you.” Cool green eyes looked him up and down. “Cousin.”

“I’ll join you for supper in half an hour, if I may?” An exercise in frustration. She had no real need of his company, and he was a damned fool for wanting hers.

She dipped her head and was gone, leaving him to carry his own things to the stable loft. The accommodations there were spare but clean, though he suspected he still smelled of horse when he returned to the inn to dine.

He found her in a room hardly deserving of the name of parlor; a table and four chairs nearly filled it. Small windows on two sides overlooked the stable and inn yard, while the other two walls boasted doors: one through which he had entered, and one through which he could just glimpse a narrow bed. When she rose and gestured him to a chair, he saw that she had changed into a fresh dress. Her braid once more swung freely across her back as she moved.

“Your room is satisfactory?”

“Yes, thank you. But—” Her gaze darted to the window.

So, she had watched him come from the stables. Before he could offer any explanation, a red-faced young woman backed through the door carrying a laden tray. He very nearly had to step into the bedchamber to make room for her to enter.

An indifferent dinner of roast chicken, underdone potatoes, and wilted greens was accompanied by a bottle of surprisingly good white wine, and by the time he had poured his third glass, and Camellia’s second, he had managed to persuade himself the silence that had loomed over them throughout the meal was more companionable than stony. When he poked suspiciously at the wobbly custard that had been sent up for dessert, she covered her mouth with her napkin—hiding a smile, he felt certain.

“Do you know,” he said, taking up his glass, “I think I’d rather have another chapter of The Wild Irish Rose instead.”

She hiccupped, her expression still half-hidden by the square of linen. “Now?”

“Why not?” The last of the day’s light was fading from the sky, but the room glowed with the light from a brace of candles.

“I should think the better question would be why.”

“I thought, my dear, you wished to show me the error of my ways,” he said with a mocking smile. “Consider me your test case, the skeptical Englishman to be taught to regard Ireland in a more positive light. Though I must confess I’ve really given the country very little thought, either good or bad. Until recently.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Intolerance is a great ill, certainly. But indifference is worse.”

“Well, then…” He eased back in his chair, resting the foot of his wineglass against his waistcoat. “Do your best to correct me.”

With an expression he would not exactly call obliging, she rose and went into the other room. When she returned, she was carrying just a few pages—the chapter he had requested and nothing more, signaling that tonight, he ought not to expect carte blanche from her. He applauded her resolve, yet the scoundrel in him warmed to the challenge it represented.

She settled into her chair with the papers in her lap, then took a drink to wet her lips before picking up the topmost sheet. He gestured with the wine bottle for her to begin as he tipped the last of its contents into her glass.

“Róisín had never seen the likes of Belfast,” she read. “The city hummed and thrummed with the beats of ten thousand Irish hearts and the notes of a thousand Irish harps. In her ears buzzed the varied accents of her countrymen, who hailed, as Cathal had predicted, from all the four kingdoms. To her great surprise, though, not every voice was Irish. Travelers had come from far and wide to take in the spectacle, and as she pushed through the crowd to the Assembly Room, where the harpists were to convene, she heard an Englishman say to his friends, ‘There is the one who will triumph.’

“He was not speaking of her, of course. Rather, the ancient blind bard, Donnchadh Ó hAmhsaigh, had just passed, and a hush had fallen over the crowd, else the Englishman’s voice would have gone unheard. Hear it she did, though, and she turned toward the speaker, whose eye had likewise been caught by her flaming red hair.”

At last, the arrival of the long-awaited villain.

Gabriel sat up a little straighter in his chair, awaiting the catalog of his own features. But it never came. The man whom Róisín glimpsed above the heads of the other festivalgoers had golden hair and blue eyes. All boyish good looks and charm.

A strange sort of unease settled somewhere behind Gabriel’s ribs.

“As the man stood between her and the doorway through which she wished to enter,” Camellia read, “Róisín could not avoid his scrutiny. Nor did it occur to her that she ought to avoid it, for though her lips had sung many a song about treachery in the guise of love, she had not lived enough to know that she might be its victim.”

Now, suspicion began to prickle along his spine. Difficult as it was to imagine the quick-witted and sharp-spoken Camellia being duped by a rogue, it seemed clear someone else had plied the author of this portrait with seductive wiles. Was it possible she had once been as naïve as her heroine? Had she fallen prey to the same sort of man?

Or, more accurately, had she fallen prey to the wrong sort of man twice?

For the first time, the memory of Camellia’s body beneath his produced a twinge he might have called regret. The knowledge that some other scoundrel had been the one to take Camellia’s innocence offered no salve to his conscience. Twisting the stem of his wineglass between his fingers, he forced himself to return his attention to the story.

“‘Do you play?’ the man asked as she passed, for he could guess the direction of her steps.

“She paused. ‘That I do, sir.’