Page 35 of The Lady Makes Her Mark

She fought the impulse to recoil from the insight within those words.

Then he lifted his dark eyes to her face, their expression as earnest as his voice. “Thank you for trusting me.”

It must have been the knock on her head. Because he was right, of course. She didn’t trust anyone, especially men. Yet she had trusted him—reluctantly, she wanted to defend herself. When I had no other choice.

“What now?” he asked after a moment, glancing at the money still scattered at their feet.

“I intend to sell the other earring and use the proceeds to leave England for good.”

He dropped onto one knee. “May I suggest an alternative plan?”

Her heart gave a frightful lurch—a reaction, to her chagrin, not made up entirely of dismay. “You can’t mean—” she began and then bit off the rest when she realized he had only stooped to gather the spilled coins.

She was in danger of ending up no better than her mother, imagining a gauzy, rose-tinted world of romance, forgetting how the sharp, jagged edges of reality could wound.

“I’ve seen no indication that we’re being followed,” he said, perfectly steadily, as if the earth had not ground to a halt, momentarily knocking her off-balance, and then resumed spinning before she had fully recovered. “But I did offer you protection, Miss—Constantia. No, that won’t do. Creevey is to be, now?”

“Cooper will be fine,” she told him. What proof did she even have that anyone was presently on her heels? Ridiculous, really, for her to imagine that a common surname would be the clue that revealed too much.

“All right, then,” he agreed, rising. “Miss Cooper.” He gave one of his stiff bows, as if they were being introduced for the first time. “Come to Rylemoor as we planned. Recover fully from your injuries. And in a few weeks, after the Christmas holidays perhaps, you can go to Bristol, where my Aunt Josephine lives, and use this”—here, he tucked the still-hefty purse into her hand—“to sail away from all your troubles. Save the bauble and sell it in some far-off land where no one will be the wiser.”

It sounded so perfect, so easy. She wanted quite desperately for all of it to happen just as he said.

But in her whole life, nothing had ever been easy.

“You’re certain Rylemoor Abbey is secure?” she demanded, trying to find the flaw in the plan. “Fitted out with wrought iron fences and high stone walls and massive doors to keep the world at bay?”

“After a fashion,” he agreed, though there was a certain wryness in his expression. “Most important, there’s nothing but bleak moorland for miles about, nothing a stranger in his right mind—or even out of it—would try to cross this time of year.”

She had revealed herself to be the daughter of a fallen woman and a rogue; she had confessed to lurking on the outskirts of good society all her life. If the Earl of Ryland were the stodgy moralizer she had drawn him to be, he would have sent her away empty-handed. If he were a secret scoundrel, as she’d always assumed, he would have tried to seduce her and justified his behavior with her presumably easy virtue. Instead of doing either, he had offered to help her. He had invited her to his home.

She had been waiting, muscles tensed, fully expecting him to betray the trust she’d placed in him. She’d misjudged him terribly.

Perhaps, in future, she ought to place less trust in herself.

Unsure what other gesture of acceptance to make, she curtsied. “Th-thank you. How can I ever hope to repay you?”

At the same time, waving a hand toward the bed, he said, “You should stay here tonight.”