Page 120 of The Earl She Once Saved

“I am not asking you to say anything.” Her laugh was soft. “Good heavens, you look as though I have placed a pistol upon the table.”

He almost looked for one.

She continued before he could speak. “Mama is giving a small dinner on Thursday. The Ashbournes will come, and perhaps the Lennoxes. You must join us.”

“I do not know what business may require me at Edgeworth.”

She beamed at him. “You are not permitted to refuse before considering it.”

Rafe remembered Verity’s face when he said Celestine’s name. He should refuse.

“Yes,” he said, forcing himself toward the woman and also, the future he did not want.

Celestine brightened. “Yes, you will consider it?”

“Yes, I shall come.”

The promise seemed to please her more than it should have done. For the remainder of the visit, Celestine made plans around him: where he would sit, whom he had to meet again, which assemblies they might attend when the season began. She spoke as though the future had only waited for his return before arranging itself.

Rafe answered when silence required it. He could think of nothing but Verity, the wounded astonishment in her voice when she said he had remembered her, and the way she had looked at the drawings before he taught her to be ashamed of what they revealed.

By the time he took his leave, the afternoon had begun to fail. Clouds gathered along the horizon, turning the sinking sun to tarnished copper. Rafe rode home beneath a sky streaked with red. Cool air moved across the fields, carrying the distant smell of rain.

Edgeworth appeared as the last light left the hills. A carriage stood before the steps. It was not Mr. Ellison’s. This one was dark, expensively made and powdered with road dust. A groom held the horses, though no servant had yet begun unloading the luggage strapped behind it. Two men waited beneath the portico.

Rafe slowed his horse. The first figure stood with careless elegance, with one gloved hand resting upon the silver head of his cane. Even at a distance, the posture was unmistakable.

Roland.

The second man was broader, dressed in black, with heavy shoulders and a face Rafe had last seen across a table covered in unpaid notes.

Silas Crote.

The lie Rafe had ridden out to make true no longer mattered. His brother had come to Edgeworth and he had brought his creditor with him.

Chapter 19

Verity could not stop thinking of the portrait. She returned to her room after leaving Rafe, but the younger version of herself followed her. She saw the girl beneath the surgeon’s lamp each time she closed her eyes: hair falling from its pins, weariness beneath her eyes, one hand resting upon a wounded soldier’s brow.

Rafe had remembered details Verity herself had forgotten. No man spent such care upon a woman he had forgotten.

Verity stood before the looking glass and touched the pendant at her throat. The blue stone shifted beneath her fingers, catching the afternoon light.

She tried to understand what the drawings meant. Gratitude, perhaps, a soldier’s attachment to the person who had tended him through fever. He had been young, wounded and far from home. A man might turn one act of kindness into something larger when he needed it to survive.

But the pictures had not ended when the war did. He carried her into sunlight, forests and rooms she had never seen. He had redrawn the shape of her mouth when memory failed him. He preserved her face with a tenderness he denied even while she held the proof of it in her hands.

Then he told her he meant to call upon Celestine Marchmont.

Verity’s fingers tightened around the pendant. Whatever the portraits meant, they belonged to the past, to a wounded soldier and a surgeon’s daughter who had met for one rain-soaked night beneath canvas. Celestine belonged to his present. Verity could not afford to make the mistake of confusing the two.

At that moment, a hurried knock came at the door. Win entered before Verity answered. All the color had left her face.

“My lady.”

Verity turned. “What is it?”

“A carriage has arrived.”