The silence stretched between them, heavy with everything they were not saying.
“I should return to the ballroom,” Caroline said.
“Of course.” He stepped back. “Forgive me for detaining you.”
She walked past him, close enough that her sleeve brushed his arm, and the contact sent a shock through her entire body.
She did not look back.
But she felt his eyes on her until she turned the corner, and even then—even after she rejoined Esther and smiled at Powell’sattempt at conversation, she felt the ghost of his presence like a bruise she could not stop pressing.
“He’s here, Your Grace.”
The butler’s voice came from the doorway of Anthony’s study, measured and careful in the way that meant the visitor was not the usual sort. Anthony looked up from the correspondence he had been failing to read for the past twenty minutes and found his butler standing in the threshold with an expression that communicated both discretion and urgency.
“Who?”
“The man you hired to look into Lord Powell.” The butler kept his voice low. “And he’s brought someone with him. A woman.”
Anthony set the letter down. His hand was steady, which was good, because nothing else felt particularly steady at the moment. He had been waiting for this. He had paid for this. And now that it was here, sitting in his entrance hall with its implications and its evidence, he found himself wishing, with the kind of sharp, irrational clarity that arrived too late, that he had never started looking at all.
Because once he knew, he would have to act.
And acting would put him in the same room as Lewis and Powell and Caroline, and he would have to look at her and pretend he did not feel as though something vital had been excised from his chest without anesthetic. He would have to watch Powell sit beside her and smile at her and touch her arm in that easy, proprietary way that men like Powell used when they believed a thing was theirs.
And he would have to do nothing. Say nothing. Feel nothing.
Except he felt everything.
He had felt everything since the night he had sent her away. Since he had looked at her face in the candlelight and realized, with the kind of cold, absolute certainty that could not be reasoned with or dismissed, that he was in love with her. That he had been in love with her for weeks. Possibly longer. Possibly since the moment she had tumbled out of that boxing match in stolen breeches with her chin lifted and her eyes blazing, and he had thought,well. This is going to be a problem.
He had been right about that, at least.
And now she was likely seated at Lewis’s table with a man who would hurt her. Who would break her. Who would take everything bright and fierce about her and crush it beneath the weight of his fists and his debts and his cruelty until there was nothing left but the shell of the woman she had been.
Not while he still breathed.
“Send them in,” he said.
The man entered first. He was efficient, discreet, and had the particular quality of someone who moved through London’s underside with the ease of long practice. Anthony had used him before, for other matters, and had found him reliable. He was followed by a woman in a plain brown dress, her hands folded at her waist, her face pale beneath the brim of a modest bonnet.
Anthony stood.
“Miss,” he said, inclining his head slightly. “Thank you for coming.”
She looked at him, then at the man who had brought her, then back at Anthony. Her fingers tightened briefly on the fabric of her skirt. She was nervous, which was understandable. Men in Anthony’s position did not typically invite women in hers to their studies for conversation.
“Your Grace.” Her voice was low, controlled. “I was told you wanted to know about Lord Powell.”
“I do.” Anthony gestured to the chair near the fire. “Please. Sit.”
She did, carefully, and the investigator remained standing near the door. The butler had already withdrawn, closing the door with the quiet click of someone who knew when discretion was required.
Anthony sat across from her and waited. He had learned, over the years, that silence was often more effective than questioning. People filled the silence. They could not help themselves.
She drew a breath. “He comes to the house where I work. St. James’s. Not one of the nicer establishments, but clean enough.” She paused. “He has…particular tastes.”
Anthony kept his expression neutral. “Go on.”