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“You should have told me when there was still time for it to change how I saw you,” she said. “Honesty is not something you only bring out when the heart has safely been given.”

He wanted to reach for her. Instead he tightened his grip on the window frame until his fingers hurt.

“I love you,” he said, because there was nothing left to do but set that truth between them like an offering. No title. No charm. Just the bare, terrifying word. “Pepper. Barbara. All of you. I have loved you in my mother’s drawing room and your father’s bakery and on that damned strip of sand. I will never be able to look at the sea again without seeing you running there, barefoot and laughing.”

She squeezed her eyes shut as if the sound of it was a blow. When she opened them again, the hurt there was worse than hatred.

“You do not get to say that,” she whispered. “Not when you put ‘Wyndale’ between us like a wall and waited for me to run into it in public.”

“I didn’t want it between us at all.” His voice cracked on the last word. “I have spent my whole life being taught that the title comes first. You were the first person who ever looked straight at me and saw the man beneath it. I held on to that like a coward.”

“And in the meantime,” she said, “your mother and Darley stood behind a curtain and measured me like livestock. A limp today, perhaps no heirs tomorrow. Did you hear them, Your Grace? I did.”

He had. Every word. He’d wanted to drag the whole corridor down around their ears.

“You were nearly lost as a child,” he said. The coach jolted over another rut; the jolt cut his words in half and rattled straight up his spine. “Only nearly. I don’t want to lose you now.”

“It is not the caution that hurts,” Pepper said, catching the leather strap above her head as the wheels bit into a groove. The window frame shuddered between them. “It is the world that looks at a girl who survived and says, ‘faulty goods.’” The coach swayed; she swallowed, steadied. “It is your Dowager in my ear while I am trying to stand upright. I will not marry into that and spend every day wondering if my body passes inspection.”

He didn’t need her to say the rest. You were the only man who ever told me I was not less. The reproach of it was loud enough.

“I am not my mother,” he said, forcing the words out between his teeth as his horse danced sideways from the spray of gravel. His hand hovered a breath from the door, not daring to grip it for fear he’d drag her off with him. “I am not Darley. I am the man who has just filled the nursery she papered with lambs for heirs with three orphaned girls no one else wanted. I don’t care if my house is full of my blood or borrowed hearts, so long as they are safe.”

Her eyes flickered—there, for a heartbeat, was Pepper, the woman who would have smiled at that in any other world. A tiny crack in the hurt. He reached for it like a drowning man.

Then her chin lifted; the curtain of Lady Barbara dropped back into place.

“Those girls,” she said, voice thinner now over the clatter of the wheels, “are fortunate. But I will not be your experiment in defying your mother.”

“I want you to be my wife,” he rasped.

The words hit him harder than his fist had hit Darley.

Even the horses whined when a flock of birds flew above and the coachman snapped the whip; the team surged. The coach lurched forward from resentful trot to something nearer a run. Chester’s horse stumbled, then rallied, but the window was already sliding away from him.

“Pepper!” he shouted.

She flinched—but she didn’t answer. The curtain fell and the voices were muffled, but Chester’s horse was fast and he kept up.

“I will not climb into a life that will always be asking whether I am worth the risk to a title,” she finished. “I thought if I married a kind man called Chester, I might manage. I might make two worlds fit.” Her breath shook. “But I cannot marry Wyndale, who chose his silence over my dignity.”

The road dipped; the coach swayed. His horse blundered, then recovered.

“Pepper—Barbara—please,” he said, desperate now. “Give me time. Give me anger. Punish me however you like. But let me make this right. I will stand before your father and explain. I will stand before the Board and tear my own circular down in the new bill I’ve drafted if I must. Just do not…do not ride away and shut the hope on me entirely.”

She peeked out from behind the curtain but looked past him, to where the road ran ahead in a long gray line toward London. When she spoke, her voice was very low and very clear.

“I gave you my truth,” she said. “You gave me a mask. I will not spend the rest of my life guessing which one I am kissing.”

She turned her face toward the interior of the coach. “Drive on,” she said to the coachman.

“Miss—my lady—” the man stammered.

“Drive,” she repeated. “Please.”

The please landed like a nail. The coachman snapped the reins. The team surged, the wheels throwing mud and gravel.

For a few wrenching yards, Chester kept pace. His horse stretched again, lungs sawing, foam flinging from its bit. He could force it. Another furlong. Two. He had spent his life learning how to wring the last inch from anything that bore his name.