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Lavinia was saying something about Parisian chocolates, and Yardley was nodding benignly. Anthony shifted in his chair. One day—soon—he’d make a bonfire of all this furniture.

That sound came again. Squeak-squeak-squeak-squeak.

Was an unusually large rodent tearing helter-skelter through the house?

“Papa says she has gone to the Riviera, so I won’t see her, which makes me feel wretched,” Lavinia whined. “It has been such a terribly long time. But mother is a tyrant. I’ll be trapped in Paris the whole two weeks getting stuck with pins by dressmakers.”

Anthony looked at Lavinia, meeting her eyes for the first time. They were round and blue, like her father’s, but without his mildness of expression. Her eyes accused him. High spots of color burned on her alabaster cheeks. She was quite cognizant of his distraction, and not a little put out. She was a lively girl, dressed for more appreciative company in a gown shimmering green, fussy with lace panels. He’d known her from the cradle. As a little child, she’d been a favorite playmate of his sister. She deserved better from him, but he lacked, at least at the present moment, the capacity to worry about her feelings.

“Effie?” he asked roughly.

“Of course, Effie,” said Lavinia, sulking now that she had his attention. “She’s in Cassis, isn’t she? I know I’d prefer Cassis to Paris, but I don’t get a say in anything. I hope she’s not so very ill anymore. Have you heard how she finds the resort?”

“She is enjoying the sea bathing,” interjected Yardley.

Anthony drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair, ignoring Yardley’s warning glance.

“I have not heard,” he said. But he went no further.

This explanation of Effie’s whereabouts remained universally accepted, a fact that alarmed him. She herself had kept her love affair, and subsequent elopement, a secret. Only he had known of it, and his father, who condemned it. And Yardley. But why, once she’d found herself abandoned by her husband, disowned by her family, hadn’t she confided in a friend, if not Lavinia, then Rose Ponsonby or Cora Ashbee? Why hadn’t she gone to someone for help? Why had she disappeared, leaving Yardley to maintain her reputation with bland lies as to her whereabouts?

Anthony had questioned everyone with whom she’d ever shared the least tie of affection. He’d broken the rules that bound him and sent Humphreys to Leicester Square with a message for his aunt Helen. The reply brought back bore out the claims of the others.

No one had had the least word from her.

“As soon as Papa gives me her address, I will write and see if she’s well enough to meet me in Paris.” Lavinia tapped her father’s arm reprovingly.

“I keep forgetting.” Yardley crossed his legs, then uncrossed them to lean forward and lift his teacup.

It came again, the squeaking. And now pounding footsteps.

Suddenly, a voice rang out in the hallway, a husky female voice, roughened further with indignation.

“Don’t flap me about! I’m not a bed linen.”

In an instant, Anthony had flung the door open. The sight that greeted him made his chin hit his chest. He closed his mouth with difficulty.

Miss Coover stood dripping in the hallway, looking angry as a wet cat. Her shoulders were up around her ears, and she’d tucked her chin like a boxer. She was glaring at the footmen ringed around her. By the way one of them had just leapt back, Anthony had the distinct impression she’d stamped his toes.

“Miss Coover,” he said, and she turned to flash Collins a look of triumph. The butler was standing outside the ring of footmen, motionless and deadly calm. If Miss Coover thought she could provoke Collins, she was sorely mistaken. He had the composure of a clockwork automaton.

“Your Grace.” As she spoke, Collins’s eyes rotated until they centered on Anthony.

She had promised silence on their acquaintanceship, and yet she had turned up on his doorstep, rain soaked and mud spattered. Worse, if he read the situation right, she had charged past Collins and led the footmen on a merry chase, and, in the process, she had startled him into revealing that they had some connection.

The fact that he had fantasized about seeing her again added vinegar to the wound.

All the proofs of probity Anthony had displayed over the past months—Miss Coover’s arrival had given them the lie.

He could feel Lavinia and Yardley stirring in the room behind him. How to contain the damage?

“It was good of you to come,” he said, surprising her, surprising himself. “I feared the weather would dissuade you.”

A puddle had formed on the marble beneath Miss Coover’s feet.

She narrowed her long eyes at him, golden-brown in the gaslight. He met her gaze steadily. He didn’t know what caprice had directed her thus far. Now she would follow his lead, or she would regret it keenly.

He hoped his own eyes made this very, very clear.