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Reed’s gaze flicked to his hand, to Darley’s face, to his mother’s expression. He didn’t bother asking foolish questions. “Yes, Your Grace.”

“And Mother,” Chester added, already moving toward the doors, “should any gossip reach you about my priorities, tell them this: Wyndale cares more for the people who bake his bread than for the men who sneer over it." He left them in the echo of that in the eye of the scandal.

The Pavilion’s steps blurred under his boots. Reed had the horse waiting in the forecourt, reins in hand; the animal’s breath a white ghost in the cooler air.

“She left ten minutes ago, Your Grace. They’ve gone back to the rented house,” Reed said without preamble. “The Beaumont coach. I asked. Lady Erica means to leave for London at first light.”

“Good man.” Chester swung up into the saddle, his hand stinging as it closed around the reins. “Then I’ll be there at first light. Have my horse ready, please.” I can’t let Pepper leave without telling her how I feel.

Chapter 27

The next morning, on the way to London…

The coach lurched; Pepper’s stomach lurched with it.

Morning light seeped thin and gray around the edges of the curtains. Brighton was already shrinking behind them—the pale crescents of terraces fading into mist, the Pavilion’s fanciful domes no more than a blur. The inside of the carriage smelled of leather, damp wool, and the faint, stubborn ghost of burnt sugar that seemed determined to cling to her no matter what she wore.

Since they’d gotten to the rented house last evening, she had not come out of her room except to leave minutes ago.

As soon as they’d left the Pavillion and gotten back to the house, Pepper had shut the door on Mother’s silence, on Aunt Florence’s urgent whispering, on the careful tread of Mrs. Hart in the corridor. She had pressed her face into the pillow and cried until her eyes burned. She had swallowed sobs for the sake of the thin walls, then given up and let them come anyway.

Every time she shut her eyes the previous night, she saw him twice over: Chester on the beach, coatless and laughing, lemon on his mouth and promise in his eyes; Wyndale at the table. The two men would not stitch together neatly. They slipped and slid and scraped inside her until she felt rubbed raw. How foolish she had been, to think herself sensible and then hand her heart to the first man who made her feel seen instead of measured. How very like a Beaumont, to fall for exactly the man she shouldn’t love.

Her chest ached in a way that had nothing to do with the fall. She had thought the limp, the doctors, the ledger marks against her name were the worst the ton could do. Now she knew better. They could laugh at her foot and still covet her custard, praise her vanilla and still dismiss the woman who had presented it as though she were sugar to be used and scraped away. And he—of all men, he—had asked her to judge him by the man and not the name while hiding the very name that had been strangling her father’s ovens for years. The cruelty of it was that some traitorous part of her still believed the man in the corridor, even as the duke at the table shattered her.

Downstairs, voices had risen and sharpened. Mother’s anger, clipped and controlled and somehow louder for it. Aunt Florence’s lower, steadier replies. Once, a frayed little sound that might have been Mrs. Hart trying—and failing—to keep the peace. Words floated up between floorboards: bakery… Harley Street… prospects… duke. Pepper had dragged the coverlet over her head and pretended she could not hear any of them.

And then there had been a caller.

Hooves in the square. Harness jingling. The knock at the front door. The maid’s tentative, carrying announcement up the stairwell: “My lady, His Grace—the Duke of Wyndale—”

He had come.

The audacity of it still made her throat tighten. He had come—Chester, Wyndale, both and neither she wanted—to the house where she was trying to remember how to breathe without him.

He had asked to speak to her.

Pah!

She had stood in the middle of her room with her hands twisted in her night-rail and listened to the pause in the parlor below. The way Mother’s fury, for once, met something it did not quite know how to bite: a ducal title. Aunt Florence’s quick murmur. Mother’s brittle answer.

“Tell him my daughter is indisposed,” Mother had said, in that tone that meant there would be no argument.

“Pepper?” Mrs. Hart’s voice had come a moment later, soft but urgent through the keyhole. “He is below. If you wish to see him—”

“No,” Pepper had whispered to the empty room, because opening the door meant falling straight through it. “No.”

She had gone to the window instead. Drawn back the curtain a fraction with shaking fingers.

There he was.

He sat his horse in the square, still as though rooted—one hand on the reins, the other resting on the pommel, head tipped back to look up at the house. At her window.

Even at that distance she could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his jaw held itself too tight.

For one wild moment she had imagined throwing up the sash, calling his name. Chester, not Wyndale. Asking him why. Asking him how he could kiss her in corridors and lie to her by omission.

Instead, she had let the curtain fall.