Page 115 of The Earl She Once Saved

“No emergency, sir.”

“Then it must be delight.”

Footsteps approached. Rafe said something too low for Verity to hear. Win laughed. Win never laughed in a passage while carrying no tray and performing no task.

A warning.

Verity gathered the drawings, but her hands had begun to shake. The pages slipped against one another. One fell facedown upon the carpet. Sergeant rose.

“Stay,” she whispered.

His ears lifted. Rafe’s voice came again, nearer now. Sergeant went to the door. His tail began to move, striking the frame with soft, eager thumps.

He knew that voice and was glad of it. He did not growl. He never had at Rafe.

Verity stared at the dog. She trusted Sergeant’s judgment when he disliked every stranger who entered Edgeworth. He only failed that test with Rafe, upon his return. She watched him place his great body between her and any man who raised his voice. Yet from the beginning, he had gone willingly to Rafe’s hand.

The handle turned. Verity could not move. The door opened. Rafe stood upon the threshold. Win was behind him, her face pale, with Ezra farther along the passage.

Rafe looked first at Verity kneeling beside his open chest. Then his gaze lowered to the portrait in her hands. Her own younger face stared up between them.

No one spoke. Verity remained in the middle of his room, surrounded by years of herself, while Rafe looked at her and understood exactly what she had found.

Chapter 18

Rafe stood in the doorway and saw his whole self laid open in Verity’s hands.

She knelt beside the campaign chest. Drawings covered the carpet around her, the yellowed sheets overlapping one another. Upon each was the same face.

Hers.

It was Verity beneath the light of a surgeon’s lamp, Verity in profile, Verity as he had imagined her beside roads she had never walked and beneath trees she had never seen … years of a face he had never been able to put down.

Her fingers held the first portrait carefully by its edges. A tear had left a dark mark near one corner.

Rafe could not breathe. He carried those drawings through Spain and France. He hid them beneath shirts, maps, and military papers. Men searched his tent for brandy and cards without finding them. Ezra had seen one during the retreat and possessed enough loyalty never to ask. Now Verity held them all.

His first instinct was the same one that seized him beneath artillery fire: find cover, close the opening, survive what came through it.

Rafe stepped into the room. “Leave us.”

Win’s face was pale. “My lord, I—”

“Please.”

Ezra stood farther along the passage. His gaze passed over the scattered sheets and settled upon Rafe. He understood too much, as usual.

Ezra placed one hand lightly at Win’s back and guided her away. Rafe closed the door. The click of the latch sounded terribly final. Sergeant sat beside Verity, his tail no longer moving. His dark eyes traveled from one of them to the other. Rafe forced himself farther into the room.

Verity rose slowly, still holding the portrait. “I can explain.”

“There is nothing to explain.”

Her eyes lifted to his. Rafe did not look away. He had no wish to hide what she had discovered, not when the truth lay scattered at her feet in charcoal and ink. Giving it words seemed absurd when it was already so plain. Worse, a declaration might sound like a plea for an answer, and he would not make his feelings another obligation for her to bear.

“It is an old sketch,” he finally said. “One of a hundred.”

Verity looked down at the pages spread across the carpet.