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Rowden repressed a growl. It would take little questioning for Keeling to ascertain that Soph was rich.

“I do not, myself, have a personal interest in the institution, but my late husband did.” Ah, so she hastened to inform Keeling she was a widow, when Rowden had left that bit out. “Beautiful black you have there,” she added, examining Keeling’s horse.

“Got him off a retired Army officer.” Keeling lied easily. He’d won the horse at the tables at Albion, not so many nights ago. “Will I find you here again, Mrs. Hinton, perhaps at the fashionable hour of promenade?”

“If so,” she said, “I will be escorting my friend and my cousin, who are courting, and I am their chaperone, though a widow stricken in years.”

Keeling laughed at the smart rebuff and touched the brim of his hat in salute. “You, Mrs. Hinton, are not stricken in anything. I hope I meet you again. Rowden, don’t think to hide this one away. What you don’t appreciate, other men will.”

The growl emerged as Keeling turned and sauntered off, throwing one last cheeky grin at Sophronia. She rolled her eyes.

“I remember now what I detest most about London. I had thought, as a widow, I might escape that sense of being inspected like a horse at a fair.”

“Everyone inspects everyone else. It is the chief occupation of Society. Where to next?” He didn’t want to follow too closely in Keeling’s train and have the man try to engage Sophronia again.

She shrugged. “We might as well return, if you won’t race me and make a proper showing of it. There’s no satisfaction in the win if you throw the match.” She tossed him an arch look, chin lifted and turned at a piquant angle. “Are you going to throw our bet, too?”

“And let you win? Never.”

“Good.” She urged her mount into a canter. “Because I intend to win fair and square.”

She would, too, Rowden realized. It was when they returned to the house that he understood how Sophronia had outmaneuvered him before they’d even begun.

After handing their horses over to Nate to be groomed, she walked before him through the back hall toward the dining parlor, where the drapes were pulled back to shed light on a cozy scene. Aunt Dobbs sat drinking chocolate and reading the morning news, smiling now and again at Giles and Miss Westall, who sat side by side at the long mahogany table, their heads bent over a series of sketches that captured some entertaining event of the evening before. Giles looked bleary but presentable, his blond hair combed back, his cravat properly tied, the stench of the opium pipe erased.

Miss Westall was a pretty wren, slender and pliant, dressed in a white muslin gown with a demure crossed bodice and pert little puffs for sleeves. She laughed gently at something Giles said, and Rowden took the punch he deserved, for not seeing it coming.

Unless he spiked her wheels, Sophronia was going to win their wager by sheer virtue that she had installed Miss Westall in the house, giving her the advantage of Miss Kemp. Giles need do nothing but fall under her lovely spell.

He would not have it. He would not let Sophronia win and then try to palm him off on some other woman. He would not go. Because he would be the one to win their wager, and he would be the man who determined Sophronia’s next husband.

Standing in the door of the dining parlor, poleaxed by the several realizations that fell all at once, Rowden acknowledged the one imperative that stood out above all others.

Sophronia must not marry another. Rowden must win this wager because he could not allow any other man to claim her and take her away from him. Not again.

CHAPTER SIX

While she waited at the bank, Sophronia studied the massive oil painting of Henry Hinton that stood in Mr. Bint’s office, which had once belonged to Henry.

How like Henry to have a portrait of himself in his office. An even larger oil hung in the main room of the bank, so Henry, on behalf of all his ambitious ancestors, might look down in beneficent wisdom on the realm he had ruled for so long. In the larger painting, Henry had insisted he be styled like a gentleman of leisure, relaxing on his estate with the imposing lines of Hinton House behind him. He had wanted a painting in the style of Sir Joshua Reynolds that depicted him as a man in possession of ease, power, and property, though he had had to settle for a student Reynolds had trained since the great man himself was by that time losing his eyesight.

This portrait, here in his office, resembled the Henry Sophronia remembered: lofty, proud, pedantic about having things done just so, and wearing his usual black, which he felt made him somber and dignified.

The office had not changed in the months since Henry’s death. The same glassed-in case held his books and the objets d’art he felt marked him as a man of distinction, though he had never acquired an object without first consulting Sophronia or another on its quality. The inkwell was one she had gifted Henry for an early anniversary. The thick carpet and mahogany wainscoting swallowed sound in the room, creating a hushed and solemn refuge from the busy hum outside, and the thick velvet draperies over the false window were fabrics Sophronia had selected from a London warehouse. Bint had altered nothing.

He had not even removed the small pastel of Sophronia that leaned atop the bookcase in a gilded frame. Beside it stood a small wooden statue of a lion, carved of walnut in the Italian Baroque style, dark with the patina of age. Rowden had brought her that lion when his uncle had taken him and Giles for a visit to London and Sophronia, because she was a girl and not in the Baron’s charge, was not allowed to come along.

He had bought it with his own allowance, he had pretended it meant nothing, and she had displayed the lion in a place of pride in the parlor at Foxleigh, beside the other gifts Rowden had given her. She had never brought the statuette to her married home. So how had it arrived here?

She collected herself when Bint entered.

“Mrs. Hinton. How I regret making you wait.” Bint greeted her with the unctuous tone and false courtesy she had known him to display during her marriage—that was unchanged, too.

“I do appreciate your taking the time to meet with me personally, Mr. Bint.” Sophronia smiled serenely as he took his seat behind the heavy kneehole desk with its oyster veneer, a monument the first Hinton had installed in the office and which Henry had prized as a family heirloom. Bint had kept everything of Henry’s, down to the quill with a distinctive black-and-white pattern on its goose feather that had been Henry’s favorite.

“You are in good health, I hope?”

Of course he did not hope that, because if Sophronia died intestate, the bank could make a bid for all of her possessions, including her house. Visiting her solicitor was already on her list of errands for the day; Sophronia advised herself to see about making her own will during this visit.