“Steady, Portsman,” Nathaniel’s low drawl came, and he stepped between her and her living, breathing nightmare. “He didn’t see you,” he murmured. “He isn’t looking for you here. You were a governess to him, not a lady in the company of a duchess.”
“Em?” Camille whispered, squeezing her arm. “What’s amiss?”
“Nothing,” she blurted. “Nothing. I just … I need to go.”
Before she could move away, though, Sophia took her other arm. “If Lord Westfall troubles you,” her friend breathed, “only nod your head and we will see to it that he never does so again.”
“What? Oh, no. It’s not Nathaniel. It’s … someone else. The reason I…”
The reason I’m always afraid,
she almost said, and only stopped when she felt Nate’s hand brush the small of her back. “I saw someone from my past,” she amended. “We did not part well.”
“You’re certain?” Camille pressed.
“I promise. Nathaniel is my friend. I trust him. Truly.”
“Tantalus girl’s word?” Sophia prompted.
“Yes. Tantalus girl’s word.”
Her friends released her, and Nathaniel took her arm in turn. “The coach is here. And I promised to have you back by midnight, didn’t I? Or was that Laurie?”
“I’m going to the Society with Blackwood and Greaves,” his brother put in, with such perfect timing that Emily wondered if Westfall had rehearsed the conversation with him.
“Very well,” Nate said slowly. “But you’re to be home by two o’clock, as you’re still being punished for your ill deeds at Oxford.”
“Nate.”
Keating Blackwood laughed. “Got sent down, did you? You’re not the only one here who’s managed that.”
They all might have continued chatting together, but Emily could practically feel Ebberling somewhere out of sight behind her, and she quickly said her good-nights and tugged Nathaniel over to his coach. Only when the carriage had begun rolling back down the street did she let out the breath she’d been holding. “I think I’m going to be ill,” she managed, shuddering.
Nathaniel removed his coat and put it around her shoulders, topped by his warm, strong arm. “Nonsense. He glowered at me, but didn’t even give you a first look. Much less a second.”
“You’re certain?”
“Absolutely certain.”
Emily looked up at him, at his light green eyes behind his useless spectacles and at his serious, kissable mouth. “Why are you taking these risks for me?” she finally asked, even as she reflected that it would likely be wiser to accept the help he offered without causing either one of them to question it.
“I do have a sense of right and wrong, you know, dim though it may be.” He smiled, but the expression didn’t touch his eyes. “Ebberling killed his wife. You’ve lied about your past. Weighed one against the other, I choose to side with you.”
“And it has nothing to do with … us?” She gestured between them.
“It has a great deal to do with us. I said I knew right from wrong. I never claimed to be a saint.” This time he looked genuinely amused. “Even we sinners can see justice done, though, don’t you think?”
That one word, even in the middle of all the very nice ones, alarmed her. “‘Justice’?” she repeated. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that if you ever want to be able to walk out of doors without having to look over your shoulder, Ebberling needs to be dealt with. At this moment I don’t favor murdering him. Do you?”
“I’ve thought about it,” she admitted, leaning her head against his shoulder. How was it that he made her feel so safe? No one else had ever managed to do that. Not until this remarkable man beside her. “But that would make me no better than him. Even so, saying he’s guilty and proving it are two very different things.” She took an unsteady breath. “And either would involve me talking to people. Officially. I can’t do that.”
“I think it’s time we did some strategizing, don’t you?” He rapped his cane against the roof of the coach. “Take us to Teryl House, Sams.”
“Yes, my lord,” the driver’s voice returned dimly.
“I thought I needed to be home by midnight,” Emily commented, smiling.
“Did we say which home? I don’t recall.” He lifted her chin in his fingers, then leaned in to kiss her. “Tonight you’re mine, Portsman,” he muttered roughly, cupping her face in his hands and kissing her again.
Tonight, she wanted to be. And tomorrow, too, but one impossible miracle at a time.
* * *
It was odd to sit up in bed and see a glorious spill of red-brown hair on the pillow beside him. Even odder was the way he, always bored with the present, always looking for the next thing to occupy his mind, wanted to do nothing more than lie there and watch the unusual woman curled up next to him sleep.
Nate turned on his side to face her, folding one arm beneath his head. This morning he didn’t need to squint and fumble for his spectacles the moment his companion’s eyes opened. He didn’t need to reach for his cane the moment he sat up. He didn’t need to search the events of the previous day or evening to remember which name he happened to be going by. He could simply be … himself.
Portsman stirred, sliding a hand along his chest, and he frowned. He couldn’t keep referring to her as Portsman any longer. It wasn’t her true name, and it didn’t feel personal enough. What to call her, though? Even if it hadn’t been dangerous to call her Rachel Newbury, that wasn’t her name, either, and he’d promised not to let Eloise or Smorkley pass his lips. Truthfully, that wasn’t who she was any longer, either. She’d made herself into someone all her own, through her own sweat and blood.
Deepest brown eyes opened, blinked sleepily, then focused on him. And she smiled. “Good morning.”
He could drown in that smile, he thought. “Good morning. I’ve been thinking.”
She sat up, running her fingers through the dishevelment of her hair and stretching deliciously enough to make his cock twitch. “You’re always thinking. What about?”
“Your name. Who are you, truly? What do you wish me to call you?”
Her brow furrowed. “That’s a complicated question for so early in the morning, isn’t it?”
“Not really.”
For a long moment she sat, looking down at her hands. Long, elegant fingers that if not for her strength of character might have been crooked and callused from washing other people’s clothes, or if not for an accident of birth might have been floating lightly across the ivory keys of the finest-made pianoforte. “Of all the people I’ve been,” she finally said, in a quiet, thoughtful tone, “I like Emily the best. So Emily.”
Nathaniel smiled. “Emily it is, then.” He sat up beside her and kissed her, tangling his fingers through her lemon- and tea-scented hair.
His bedchamber door slammed open. Emily yelped, diving beneath the rumpled covers, while Nate reached for the knife he kept beneath his pillow. Before he could pull it free, though, he opened his fingers again. “Laurie, what the devil do you think you’re doing?”
His brother sagged against the door frame, his gaze on the wriggling mound of sheets. “Have you ever been to a club called Jezebel’s?” he drawled with a loose grin.
Eyeing his brother more closely, Nathaniel frowned. His cravat was a ruin, his boots scuffed, and his eyes rimmed with red. “You’re drunk.”
“What I am, Nate, is three—no, five, at least—sheets to the wind. Greaves and Keating know all the worst places in London. It was … stupendous. Do you have any idea how spectacular it is to go about with men that everyone else practically shits at the sight of?”
Beneath the covers, Emily chuckled. Nate was fairly certain he didn’t feel that amused, himself. “Did you happen to inform these shit-inducing gentlemen that you were nineteen?”
“I may have added a year or so,” Laurie admitted with another lopsided smile. “But I was being helpful, too. Greaves doesn’t like Ebberling, at all. Says he’s so swellheaded they have to open both doors to let him into a room.”
All the rapidly fading humor in Nate vanished. “You told them about Ebberling?” he demanded, sliding to the edge of the bed and standing.
“I say, you’re naked.”
Nathaniel grabbed his brother by the shoulder. “You. Go take a cold bath, drink some damned coffee, and meet me in the breakfast room in thirty minutes. If you aren’t sober enough to tell me what the devil you talked about with your new friends, I will send you to Westfall Manor, and you can spend the rest of the Season there doing my accounts. Is that clear?”
Laurence swallowed, brushing light brown hair from his eyes. “Yes. Damnation. Yes.”
“Good.” Nate shoved him back out the door and slammed it shut. Then he cursed, in several languages.
When he turned back around, Emily was sitting up in bed, sheets gathered around her, and her expression dismayed. “How much trouble am I in?”
Still swearing, Nate grabbed for a pair of trousers and yanked them on. “I’m not certain, but more than enough if Greaves or Blackwood talk to the wrong person. Get dressed. I need to get them over here. Now.”
She didn’t like it; he could see that quite clearly. He should have known better. In the beginning this had only been a puzzle for him to solve, and perhaps a way for his brother and him to heal the chasm that had formed between them. Now the puzzle had a face—a face that had become absurdly dear to him over the past weeks, and everything had changed.
“Nate, send for their wives and for Haybury, as well, if you would. And Jenny Martine, with a change of clothes for me.”
“You’re certain you trust all of them?”
Emily cleared her throat. “I trust myself, and I trust you. But I have friends, now, and I’m … I’m so tired of lying. Sophia and Camille are my sisters, and so even is Diane. So I suppose their husbands must be worthy of my trust, as well.”
He nodded, slipping back out the door and down the stairs for paper and ink and Garvey the butler. He could claim that it was his old caution as a spy that so disliked anyone else knowing what he was about, but it wasn’t that. Not entirely. The fact was, he liked the idea that this had been between him and Emily. That she trusted him, and that he would somehow ride to her rescue and save her from the evil marquis who wanted her silenced, everyone else be damned.
Whether that was the wisest way to approach this conundrum, he didn’t know. Not yet. But that path had been tromped all over by Laurie last night, anyway, and so he would make do with what he’d been given. All that mattered was that Emily be protected. His own heroic role was mere stupidity. He’d given up on the idea of ever being a hero when he’d agreed to work as a spy.
Once the messages were sent out he returned upstairs to finish dressing. Emily had moved over to the chair beside the window to gaze out over his garden, and he took a deep breath and walked over to sit on the sill beside her. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I should never have told Laurie. In my own defense, when I first did so, I didn’t know anything more than what Ebberling had told me. I didn’t know you were the one he was after.”
She met his gaze. “Oddly enough,” she returned in the same, soft tone, “when you went scrambling out of the door, I sat there in your bed for a moment because I realized that something was missing.”
“‘Missing’?” he repeated.
“Yes. And it took me a good minute to realize what it was. I wasn’t afraid, Nate.” She reached out and gripped his hand. “A few weeks ago if I’d learned that someone else might know of a connection between Ebberling and myself, I would have been packing my things and booking passage on the next ship out of England. I probably should be now, even so.”
He turned his hand up, twining his fingers with hers. “No, you shouldn’t be.” The idea of letting her slip away from him because of his own stupidity … It was utterly unacceptable.
“The thing is, I suddenly realized that I’m not alone in the world. Not any longer. I do have friends. I have people who … care what happens to me. If I disappeared, someone would notice.” A tear ran down her cheek, and he brushed it away with his free thumb. “Don’t you think someone would notice?”
“I would notice.” He leaned forward and kissed her.
The way she’d said it … He couldn’t count how many times he’d had that same thought over the years, that if he failed at whatever his current task happened to be, if he died at it because he’d misjudged someone, would anyone notice his absence? And for a time he hadn’t been able to answer that question.
“I would notice,” he repeated fiercely, kissing her again and again, sliding to the floor with her slender, sheet-wrapped form in his arms. “I would notice.”
She began sobbing, and for a long time he simply sat on the floor beneath the window, holding her. And she’d said they weren’t alike. Christ. One day, he would tell her. Not now, because they had other things to worry about. But one day, he would tell her that this was the moment he’d realized that he loved her.
* * *
Nate told them everything. Well, not everything, because he left out the fact that she was a washerwoman’s daughter from Derbyshire, but he told them all the bits about her being Rachel Newbury and witnessing Ebberling kill his wife, Katherine.
Camille had been out having breakfast with her sisters, but Sophia came with her husband, and Jenny was there, as well. If Nathaniel was surprised that she’d asked the club’s manager to join them, he didn’t show it, but then he wouldn’t. Or perhaps by now he’d figured out that Genevieve was her source for information about him—she certainly wouldn’t have put it past him.
When he finished, Sophia was staring at her, and Emily scooted her chair closer to her friend. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I should have told you ages ago, but I didn’t know how.”
The pretty redhead kissed her on the cheek. “I always thought you’d changed your name and run away because some old, wrinkly lord at your previous employment had been after you. I had no idea.” She squared her shoulders. “For heaven’s sake, how would you have told me? I’m not angry. Well, not at you. Ebberling is another matter, entirely. He’s a monster.”
“He may be a monster,” the Duke of Greaves took up with a fond glance at his wife, “but he’s a cunning one. And a wealthy one, which is nearly as dangerous. People overlook the sins of rich men much more easily than they do the sins of poor ones.” Steel-gray eyes glanced at Nate’s brother. “You need to learn to watch your tongue, whelp.”