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That evening, the whist table stood ready.

As promised, Damian did not come out of the study.

Eventually the mothers went up. Ophelia remained in the chair facing the door, her father’s old pack in her hands. She shuffled, cut, and dealt from habit.

Two hands.

She stared at the thirteen cards lying face-down across from her.

Then she gathered them back into the pack.

She laid out patience instead. It seemed she would be playing only herself this evening.

CHAPTER 12

The weather settled warm over Hartleigh. The park browned at the edges, the afternoons hung heavy over the fields, and the frost that had settled over the house did not belong to the weather at all.

Ophelia made two bids she refused to call attempts. An attempt admitted she might lose. She did not sit down to games she meant to lose.

The first she laid out with care. She waited until the tea things had gone down the passage and Mama and Lady Archer had settled to their needlework. Then she walked the corridor to the study with the little pack warm in her palm. She squared it twice on the way and hated herself for it. Fidgeting. A tell.

She knocked.

The door opened six inches. Candlelight. Ink and sealing wax. The dark bulk of him filling the gap, ledgers stacked behind him like a fortress. She the siege.

“Madam.”

Courteous. Apologetic, even. He could make regret look like good manners. She would grant him that. His gaze dropped to the cards and slid off them again, the way a man looked away from a debt he did not mean to pay.

“You find me buried. The estate accounts. Perhaps another evening.”

“Perhaps,” she said pleasantly, because pleasant was the only stake left to her.

The door closed. It did not slam. It shut on a considered click, a matter finalized, and she stood in the corridor knowing a slam would have been kinder. A man who slammed doors was still in the game. Heat meant something. This was a player laying his cards face down and pushing back his chair to leave the game.

Two evenings later she laid the table as it ought to be laid. Card table drawn to the drawing-room fire. Green cloth brushed. Two branches of new wax candles. The pack squared at the center, an invitation no gentleman could pretend not to read. She dealt for two-handed whist, set his cards face down before the empty chair, and sent a footman up with her compliments and word that she awaited his lordship at whist.

The footman was gone a long while. Long enough for her to sit as if nothing at all rode on the answer. When he came back, his face was as smooth as only a good servant’s could be.

“His lordship’s apologies, milady.”

“Thank you. That will be all.”

She played his hand for him, since he would not. She played it rather better than he did. He led trumps too early, always, a soldier’s habit, straight up the middle. The thought had bite because she had loved finding that out about him.

The candles burned down while she sat. Wax slid and pooled. The wicks drowned one by one. She laid the last trick in a dimming room with her hand over her belly, over the tiny stake that made every other stake matter.

In the morning she put her father’s pack in the dressing-table drawer and shut it. All day her reticule hung wrong. Too light. A sharper’s sleeve with nothing in it. There was no use walking about armed if the other player would not come to the table. Her father would have played on. Her father, she reminded herself, was in the Americas.

It was an untamed colt that broke the week open.

She had taken to walking before breakfast. For her health, she told Mama, and that much was true. Her route ran past the stable yard as surely as a marked deck, because the yard was where his lordship might still be found and seen, if no longer spoken to. She was honest with herself on that point. She missed him.

Frost smoked off the cobbles. A groom led out the young chestnut, green as spring wheat, all legs and white-rimmed eyes. Damian stood at the rail with his back to her, bareheaded, saying something to the head groom. The colt was quiet. The yard was quiet. Nothing moved that she could see. No bird went up. No cloth flapped. No gate banged.

The colt went mad at nothing.

Faster than sense could follow. The chestnut screaming backward. The groom hauled off his feet. The full weight of a panicked horse slewed sideways. Damian turned and was simply in the path of it. The colt’s shoulder took him full on and drove him into the rail, and the rail cracked. She heard it clean across the yard, a flat splitting report like a chair going under a drunken man. Her own cry was out of her before she knew she had made one.