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He obliged Constance by glancing across the table at her. Ten years? Twenty years? Thirty years? When would it become love? In the lamplight she looked, as usual, pristine, magnificent, every inch the aristocrat she was. And odd, but he still wasn’t even tempted to touch her. He was no longer even curious. She had ceased being a challenge.

She was like… a court case he had won.

The aptness of the analogy panicked him. And all at once, his idle musings and his pervasive sense of unease gelled into a single coherent thought:

I may have made a horrible mistake.

He shifted uneasily in his chair. Maybe he just needed to eat an opponent alive in the courtroom; it would be lovely to return to work. It would be a great pleasure to win Madame Marceau’s case for her. Or perhaps he needed a hard run across parklands.

But then Gideon had an inspiration:
I’ll go see how Alice fares, just for a moment. And maybe… and maybe Lily. And then I’ll return
. Gideon immediately felt more cheerful.

He stood up abruptly. “Excuse me for just a moment, will you…” He almost said “dear,” thinking he may as well try it out, but the word stubbornly refused to spill from his tongue. “… Constance? I’ll return in just a few moments.”

She smiled graciously, granting him the moment away from her.

He tried not to leave with unseemly haste.

Gideon stopped in the kitchen for some lemon cakes before heading to the nursery. No doubt Alice had been plied with them more than once today, but the girl could use a little more fattening up. He stopped in the library, too, for he was certain he would be able to find a book on reptiles. Now,
reptiles…
they were sure to delight the gory tastes of a ten-year-old.

He trudged up the several flights of stairs to the nursery, his arms full of offerings.

“Little Miss Masters,” he called cheerfully as he entered the room, “I’ve a book full of monsters that you may wish to see.”

He’d expected an exuberant “hurrah!” or at the very least a “hullo, Mr. Cole!”

He was greeted with silence.

“Alice?” Gideon stepped all the way into the chamber; the bed was empty. He frowned. Was Alice sound enough, then, to move out of the nursery and back into the room she shared with Lily?

Gideon peered into the little maid’s room. He touched the narrow, austere bed; memories flooded him. Lily murmuring a single word against his heart:
Please
. The luminous beauty of her slim bare body. The exquisite friction of her breasts against his skin.

Her laughter. Her low velvet voice in his ear.

He simply could not imagine a moment when he would not want her. He wanted her now.

Gideon backed out of the room, driven by an odd sense of urgency. He would go to her now, inquire after her headache, and perhaps find Alice, too. He would spend a few moments with them.
Only a few
, he told himself sternly. And then he would return to his fiancée and all of his other… friends.

He may as well get accustomed to it, for this was to be his life: a few stolen moments with Lily, the rest with the woman who sat decoratively in the drawing room downstairs, a woman who would confer wealth and power and status and security upon him with a single vow.

And share his bed, his life, his home, for the rest of his life.

“Stop feeling my forehead,” Alice groused, pulling away from Lily’s hand. “I am quite well. Why can’t we return to Aster Park? I want Mr. Cole.”

The coach had eaten the road with astonishing speed. They were already on the outskirts of London; she knew because the smell of London, specifically the docks, had infiltrated the coach.

“Do you remember, Alice, when I told you I’d be in Mr. Cole’s employ for a short time? Well… that time has passed. It’s time for a new adventure. I’ve heard there are grand palaces in Italy, and roads made all of water…”

Alice began to cry softly, and mumbled something under her breath. It sounded like, “
Mrs. Smythe, shall I sweep the floor today
?”

Lily wanted to cry, too. But she was not one for crying. All she knew was that moving, and moving swiftly, had always helped before. When one lived from day to day, from hand to mouth, and kept moving, the future remained a pleasant stranger, and there was no time to think or suffer.

Lily’s chamber door was ever so slightly ajar, and the short hairs at the back of Gideon’s neck began to prickle in warning. He half suspected what he would find within the room; his heart thudding, he gave the door a gentle push wider to confirm it.

At first glance, nothing seemed amiss, and he allowed himself hope.

But men he glanced at her dressing table. Her books were gone. All except
Sense and Sensibility
. In their place, the necklace he had given her, his mother’s necklace, was arranged neatly.

The sight of it could not have cut more deeply if she had dragged the diamond across his skin.

He crossed the room in three steps and flung open the wardrobe. Only the ball gowns remained, listless and gleaming dully, like wallflowers at a dance.

His hand fumbled out to touch the sea green satin dress she’d been wearing the first night they’d made love; it hung limply, crumpled beyond redemption. He took a bit of it between his fingers, as though if he longed for her just hard enough Lily would materialize inside it. He lifted it to his face; it held the ghost of her scent.

Gideon finally lowered himself to the bed and sat there, staring blindly. He felt hollow; his skin seemed to have acquired a fine coating of ice. He was distantly aware of a point of agony that seemed located at the very center of him; he didn’t know what to call it. Rage, grief, disbelief: it was all of a piece.

But she had
promised
—

No, that wasn’t true. He had coerced her into promising. Used her own desire against her.

Why shouldn’t she go? She had a pride as unbending as his own. And still she’d stood there like a bloody
hero
while Constance announced their engagement. There was only one reason
he
, with his own formidable pride, would have ever done such a thing.

He would have done it for someone he loved.

And if Lily loved him… witnessing that moment was more, he realized, than she ever should have had to bear.

He sat there on the edge of her bed feeling cold and hollow and faintly ridiculous. The things he had wanted all of his life, the things he had had been convinced would give his world meaning, security, certainty… he felt like a child now, who had craved after tin toys. None of it meant a thing when cast in the shadow of love.

Gideon rose to his feet.

To hell with all of it. He needed Lily.

Chapter Twenty-One

Compared to Mrs. Smythe’s boarding house, the Tiger’s Nest may as well have been Aster Park. Still, it was on the wrong side of savory, that was certain.

Alice had stopped crying and was intrigued, as usual, by anything new or different. Ships creaked and bobbed in the oily dark of the water, and Lily began to feel a little surge of something that felt almost like hope: each of those ships was bound for someplace new. Infested with rats as they no doubt were, staffed by ruffians and stocked with bad food… Lily could handle all of it. Could embrace it, even. As long as they kept moving.

What she couldn’t handle, apparently, was love.

“Thank you, sir,” she said primly to the driver, who touched his fingers to his hat, a gesture she had come to expect and which would have been foreign to her only a few weeks ago. She deposited a gratuity into his palm, which prodded him into a burst of generosity: He carried their trunk into the Tiger’s Nest for them and deposited it on the floor there.

“Hold my hand, Alice, and don’t let go,” she murmured to her sister.

Once upon a time she would have been inconspicuous here in the Tiger’s Nest, an urchin in tattered clothing adept at disappearing into crowds. Now she looked like a lady traveling alone with a little girl, which meant she was a target for any number of things: advances, theft.

She’d need a story.

Well,
that
shouldn’t be difficult.

The murmuring and clanking of glasses and laughter didn’t exactly stop as she entered the room, but she felt avid eyes upon her, sensed the halt of a few conversations. It would have been much easier to be unobtrusive, Lily thought, if she wasn’t wearing a fine blue wool pelisse created by Madame Marceau, designer of the Reading dress.

She paused in the doorway, her hand still tightly gripping Alice’s. And then she turned and called over her shoulder out the door.

“I told you,
dear
, no one will even notice if you bring that gun in here.” She turned to the two men sitting nearest her, who were gazing up at her warily, and raised her voice a little to include anybody else who might be eavesdropping. “Husbands,” she confided with airy exasperation. “He has a very large gun, you see, as he is an exceptionally large man, and he is shy of bringing it places. ‘It’s embarrassing, Lil,’ he says—he calls me Lil—‘I wish I could carry an ordinary gun just like everyone else’s.’ I tell him he’s fine the way he is, you see, that it doesn’t matter to
me
what size his gun is, but he just won’t believe me. I do wish, however, he’d repair the locks on it. The thing tends to go off with no warning.”

She turned to the innkeeper, who was now eyeing the front door of his establishment uneasily, anticipating the entrance of an armed behemoth.

“I’ll have a room, upstairs, if you would. My husband will be joining me in a moment.”

“Er… yes, ma’am.”

“Oh, and if you would… our trunk?” Lily said sweetly.

“Of course.” The innkeeper swept it up in his thick arms and practically scurried up the stairs, Lily and Alice following.

“That was a bit much,” Alice whispered.

Lily squeezed her hand to shush her.

“Laurie, may I have a word with you?”

Kilmartin looked up from his hand of cards. “Of course, old man.” He waited expectantly for Gideon to speak, while Lady Anne smiled at him over the top of her cards.

Gideon glared significance at him, and comprehension finally lit Kilmartin’s face. He pushed his chair back and followed Gideon’s long stormy strides into the adjacent drawing room.

And once there, Gideon began pacing madly, his hand raking up through his hair. “She’s gone, Laurie. Gone. Lily and Alice are gone.”

“Yes. I know.”

“I went up to see Alice and—”

Kilmartin’s words finally registered. Gideon went rigid, like a man who has been shot before he drops to the ground. And then he pivoted very, very slowly to face his friend.

“You know,” he repeated flatly.

Kilmartin nodded sadly.

Gideon squeezed his eyes closed, opened them again. “Laurie… how… why… ?”

“Gideon… she was deeply unhappy. She came to me today to ask for help. And… well, I helped.”

Gideon’s mouth worked, but no sound came out.

“I care for Lily, too, Gideon. Not, of course, in the way that I care for Lady Anne Clapham,” Kilmartin added quickly. “But I’m not blind, you know, my friend. I saw how things were with… with the two of you. I was growing more and more concerned for you both. So when she asked, I gave her money and sent a note to the coaching inn. They sent a driver for her an hour ago.”

“An
hour
—” Gideon gave a choked laugh and abruptly sank down onto the settee.

They didn’t speak for a time. Someone in the other room laughed a tinkling laugh.

“It’s just… I care for her, Laurie.” The words so insufficiently described what Gideon felt that they might as well have been a bald lie.

Kilmartin lowered himself into the seat across from Gideon and leaned forward. “You know I care for you, Gideon. God knows why,” he added wryly. “But Lily wanted very much to leave as soon as possible, to spare you, and Alice, too, a good-bye. She felt she’d accomplished her mission and paid off her debt. I’m terribly sorry—if I’d known…”

“You could not have known, Laurie.
I
didn’t quite know.”

“If you had seen her face, Gideon…” Kilmartin continued despairingly. “I promise you, you could not have said no to her, either. And then when you announced your engagement… well, I thought it might be for the best.”

“Laurie.” Gideon’s voice sounded faint; he felt ill. “She could even now be carrying my child.”

Kilmartin’s face went gray, as though someone had punched the air from him. “God, Gideon.” His voice was faint, too. “I didn’t know it had come to that.”

“Oh,” Gideon said bitterly. “It came to that.”

Kilmartin sat very still, wordlessly absorbing this.

“Are you ashamed of me?” Gideon asked desperately.

After a moment, Kilmartin shook his head. “Imagine that. Gideon Cole is human. You’ve behaved like a real member of the nobility, you know.” He tried a smile.

“I’ve made rather a mess of things, haven’t I?”

Kilmartin paused. “It rather looks that way, yes.”

Gideon looked up sharply, but Kilmartin, bless him, was smiling ruefully.

“You’re a good friend, Laurie. I cannot thank you enough for all you have done. And yet…” Gideon paused.

“And yet… ?” Kilmartin prompted softly.

Gideon was in hell. “I love her, Laurie. I
need
her.”

Kilmartin’s eyes went wide; he sat straight up and took a deep breath, and men released it. They were silent together for a moment; more laughter floated in from the next room.

“Well, Gideon,” Kilmartin asked gently, “does this change your Master Plan?”

Gideon closed his eyes again. He’d worked his entire life… only to discover that Lily Masters
was
his Master Plan. “Yes. Yes, God help me, but it does.” He thought of Helen; he would find a way… there had to be a way. But that way
had
to include Lily.

Kilmartin inhaled sharply and stood, and did a little pacing of his own. And men he turned to face Gideon again. “You
do
understand what tins could mean for you? What it could do to your career as a barrister, any future political career, your position in the
ton
?”