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There.

The glint of sun on a gold button.

A man waited, crouched on the roof of the vicarage. Waited for him. For them? For Clara?

Like hell.

Was it one of the marquis’s men watching the cottage? Why? It didn’t matter. He would not get even a glimpse of Clara. Bram would burn the village down first. And Eastbourne Hall. The fields all the way to sea that lay some distance from Hampshire.

It was bad enough that she was walking through the house, ignoring the snide remarks of people who did not deserve to stand in her shadow. He had made that clear, at the very least. Clear enough that Lord Faltingham had remembered a prior engagement.

In Ireland.

Bram had not sent him there personally in a leaky rowboat, for which he definitely deserved a medal. Never mind his naval gold medal. This was even more important.

He could not fathom why everyone was so blind to the real Clara peeking out behind the plain dresses and the stoic expressions. A devil hid within the spinster. One who was incongruously comfortable chatting with a courtesan, curious and surprisingly accepting. She had a sense of humor, a keen eye. Resolve.

She had even giggled.

He’d never felt prouder than in that moment. She had lowered her shields in front of him. Just a little. But he would not lower his. Not for a single second. The Devil’s Night was bad enough. It attracted all kinds of powerful people with more money than principles. The marquis was something worse.

Clara was in danger every second she was inside that house. It ate at him. But she was no safer here.

“Out the back,” he ordered, ushering her past the kitchen table and the narrow bed to a window. He yanked it open, sweeping for danger. It would have been more effective from the bird’s nest of his ship, but he would make do. A muddy lane, three white geese waddling happily, a privy at the end of the garden.

Clara tilted her head. “You want to climb out the window?”

“I want you to climb out the window,” he corrected her. “Quickly.”

She frowned as if getting ready to argue, saw something in his face, thank Christ, and relented. “Very well.”

“When you get your feet on the ground, you run as fast as you can for that little copse of trees there, understand?”

She nodded, bending to knot her skirts between her knees, like a set of makeshift trousers. He caught a glimpse of ankle, strong calves.

If only there was time to linger. He would have done so for hours.

Even if she was not for him. An earl’s daughter and a captain a decade her senior with more scars than social graces. He still felt the swell of the waves under his feet, even landlocked for the past year. He didn’t dance. He’d never driven a barouche. His cravats weren’t starched.

Not that any of it mattered. All that mattered was getting her away from here.

Clara swung her leg nimbly over the sill, using the chair to boost herself up. “Why am I always crawling through windows around you?”

As if he needed reminding of the abject terror that had seized him watching her clinging to the side of a Mayfair townhouse in the freezing sleet, with no one to help her.

He still woke up sweating over it.

“Ready?” he asked, dividing his focus between the front door and the window.

She wriggled out, dropping to the ground with a little huff of an exclamation. He ducked down to watch her run, his dagger in his hand. The gray of her dress helped hide her in the trees. He exhaled when she was safely ensconced.

And then he turned back to the front door, marching outside with a certain violence in his heart.

*

Clara did not need a flock of black doves carved into the walls to know there was a problem.

She also knew that this was a most inappropriate time to sigh over the clench of a man’s jaw or the glint of cold determination in his eye. The contradiction of that with the gentle way he touched her, making sure she would not catch herself on a stray nail or another jagged sliver of wood—it made her brain stutter. Her insides flutter.