Page 88

The coach crept closer, inch by stubborn inch. A hired coach—dark body, dust-caked wheels, harness jingling. No crest.

“Come on,” he murmured to the horse.

Now close enough to see the coachman hunched on the box, collar high against the wind, one gloved hand tight on the reins, Chester watched the man glance back, see the rider bearing down, and swear. Chester saw his mouth shape the words—Your Grace?—across the distance.

“Do not stop! Keep going!” came a woman’s voice from inside the coach—Pepper’s, sharp with panic.

“Obey her,” Chester called as he drew level. “Keep going—just ease them enough for me to ride beside.”

He brought his own horse alongside the door, close enough that his boot almost brushed the wheel. The small window above the door was curtained. For a moment he saw nothing but green damask and his own furious reflection in the glass.

Then the curtain twitched.

A pale face appeared at the edge: eyes reddened, lashes spiked, cheeks blotched—no cool Lady Barbara now, just Pepper. The sight of her hit him harder than the wind.

She didn’t jerk; she had felt him there before she saw him, his horse a dark shadow at the edge of her vision, keeping pace no matter how she’d told the driver to go on. Her fingers tightened in her lap. Her mouth parted, as if some old habit wanted to say his name, then pressed into a line instead. For a heartbeat, hurt burned through the careful mask on her face. Then her jaw tightened, and he watched her rebuild herself behind her features, layer by layer, until the girl who had kissed him on a beach was gone and the lady in the window looked as though she were merely tolerating an inconvenience in the road.

Lady Florence, who had clearly sold her soul for entertainment, snapped the window open.

Chester leaned closer, one hand braced on his horse’s neck.

“Barbara—Pepper—”

“Which name is it to be, Your Grace?” she cut in. Her voice was low but clear, riding the clatter of wheels. “I seem to have misplaced the honest one for you entirely.”

The title on her tongue hurt more than the “your” ever had.

“The honest one is Chester. It always was. Wyndale is…what the rest of the world sees first.”

“And the one you kept for me to find last,” she said.

The horse stumbled on a rut; he steadied it with his knees, knuckles white on the window frame. He was half riding, half hanging on to her coach and altogether too close to danger’s edge.

“Pepper!” He made himself say the name her mother would expect. “Please. Let me explain. Let me—”

“What needs explaining?” she demanded, loud enough for the wind to carry. “That you argued with me about Wyndale’s circular when you were him? That you stood in my father’s shop and let me call him the Flour Duke who strangled our credit and never said, ‘That’s me, actually’? That you kissed me—” her breath broke on the word, but she forced it out “—behind a curtain and on a beach and in a corridor and never once gave me the truth of your name?”

He flinched as surely as if she’d struck him. He deserved every syllable.

“I meant to,” he said hoarsely, leaning low over his horse’s neck to keep level with her. Dust stung his eyes; he blinked it away. “I swear to you, I meant to. Every time I saw you, I told myself, ‘This time.’ And then you looked at me as if Chester were enough and I…” He swallowed. “I stole one more moment.”

The coach lurched; she caught the strap above her head, knuckles white, but her gaze never left his.

“You stood at the beach and told me not to let Pepper or Barbara define me,” she threw back. “You asked to see the part of me no one else sees. And all the while, you kept the one name that defines you to everyone else tucked neatly away.”

Her words chased the coach wheels; he had to push his horse harder just to stay beside the wound he’d made.

Inside, someone murmured. He heard Lady Erica’s sharper voice: “Barbara, this is most improper.” Lady Florence’s drier one: “Let her speak, Erica, or she’ll explode and take the coach with her.”

Pepper didn’t look away from him. “You made a mockery of your own promise,” she said. “You said we were more than names and titles. And then you let yours knock me flat in front of the best of Brighton.”

He swallowed. The memory seared: her foot catching on the carpet, the room’s first ripple of laughter, the way she’d torn herself free of his outstretched hand as if his touch burned.

“I am sorry,” he said. Three small words, useless against the damage and still the only ones he had that felt honest.

“No,” she said. Tears brimmed again, slipped, streaking clean tracks down her cheeks. “You are Wyndale. You sign proclamations and apologize later. You spend ink and then regret.”

“I’ve spent months trying to undo that bill,” he said, the words roughened by more than the wind. “The circular that stands now is not the one you wrote about. I’ve fought for noon payments, for oversight at the docks—”