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For three days Harry Clare had been absent from London, or at least from those gatherings where Lucy was to cast her net for a husband. She had a chance to consult her little book. It made her laugh. It revealed much of the society around her, but it did not explain the perplexing behavior of her own heart. She had now received compliments from a handsome young baron, a brilliant inventor, and several dashing, if untitled, gentlemen. It remained a puzzle how a man who had, at best, a few words for her at the end of an evening, always words about her absent friend or her missing cat, framed as a military field report, could be so necessary to her pleasure at an evening’s entertainment. Only once when he’d found her in the woods had she thought him interested her. The intensity in his gaze said he wanted what she wanted.

* * * *

She had said the event was a musicale. Harry thought it more like one of the mass gatherings of protestors the army had been called upon to quell at the end of the war. And he would have spent hours searching for her except for the Fawkener sisters’ habit of dressing so completely alike that every footman had noted their passing from the grand salon of the house into a smaller room with a less famous musician. It helped that Harry knew the house. He’d once courted a girl here.

He’d changed since then. The army had been good for him even if he had had to give up being the boy he had been. He had liked the army, but hated that he was expected as an officer to despise his men, to regard them as the scum of the earth. He could not disrespect a man willing at a given moment to face fire and give his life for another man. Nor could he despise the man who kept his gear and himself in order, willing to march twenty miles in a day and fight the next. Finally, he had been unable to lead British troops against British subjects on British soil, so he’d left the army.

Lucy Holbrook now wore the disguise contrived by her friends for battle of a different sort with the Miss Throckmortons of the world. When he’d first seen her standing on the gnarled root ball of a hollow tree, he had thought her altered beyond recognition. His practical princess had changed her wool dress and pinny for an elegant silk gown for a picnic in the woods. She had spoken of his touch, and he’d thought at once of what lay under those silks. The sisters must have supplied her with a lady’s maid, who could lace her stays. The sensible front-closing corset would lie in a drawer until her return to the inn, if she did return. But when she spoke, she was the innkeeper’s daughter, the woman who patiently held an old man’s hand, fed a cat, and didn’t hesitate to do the work she asked of others. The relief of it had been profound.

Three days without a glimpse of her had been quite enough. The delay with the case frustrated him. He had resisted Lucy Holbrook as long as duty required, but he did not think he could resist any longer. He had shed one uniform. He was ready to shed another.

He didn’t know what to tell her about the missing cat.

* * * *

The column at Lucy’s back was exquisite, and the music was sublime, by turns lilting and soaring, but she was in danger of succumbing to the heat of the room and the length of the composition. She raised a hand to cover her mouth, when her wrist was seized in a firm grip, and she was drawn behind the column through the anteroom door and brought face-to-face with Harry Clare. She put out her free hand to check her momentum and pressed against wool and silk and male.

“Hello,” he said, teasing lights in his eyes. “Waiting for someone?”

“I was engrossed in the music,” she said. She was firmly on her feet now and should withdraw her hand, but the hard strength of him was so satisfying to the touch.

He laughed. “Confess. I caught you in a yawn.”

“Only because of the heat of the room and the lateness of the hour. You know I am not yet accustomed to London ways.”

One brow rose. “Aren’t you? You know how to avoid your chaperones to have a private moment with a gentleman.”

“Unfair. You pulled me away when I was simply trying to catch what little movement of air there is in such crowded rooms.” She curled her fingers closed and let her hand fall away from his chest.

“Is it air you want?”

“Yes.”

“Sure?”

“Air,” she said firmly.

“Come with me, then.” He tucked her arm in his and led her out of the anteroom into a long shadowy corridor. At its end they took a flight of steps and then another until Lucy was breathless. He paused only to open a door that looked to be a closet, but which concealed a narrow unlit wooden stairway.

“Hold on,” he advised.

There was no chance that she was letting go. They went more slowly until he opened a door and cool night air met them. He helped her out onto the roof of the grand mansion. The lights of Mayfair glimmered in the darkness below, the soft circles of carriage lamps, the flare of torches to light the mansion steps, and candles in windows across the square.

“You know your way around this place.” She leaned against the parapet and shivered at the contact with cold stone, and he shed his coat and wrapped it around her shoulders.

He leaned next to her. “I was here once before. I came home from the Peninsula after Fuentes de Oroño to recover from a wound.”

“And brought a young lady to the rooftop?”

“I did,” he admitted.

“And did she like the view?”

“Yes, but not the idea of marrying me.”

“You made an offer of marriage to a lady on this rooftop?”

“She refused me.”