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She did not bear his name.

He sat there in the middle of the road, chest heaving as hard as the horse’s, watching the woman he loved vanish toward London.

“I won’t hunt her like a debtor,” he said. His voice didn’t sound like his own. “She told me to let her go. The least I can do is honor one thing properly.”

He had tried to win her as a man and lost her as a duke. If he wanted any hope of bringing those halves together again, it would not be enough to beg at her window.

He would have to change what Wyndale meant.

Not just for her. For every small kitchen that had ever stiffened at the sight of his seal.

Chester drew a breath that scraped like gravel and turned his horse back toward Brighton.

“You may shut your window against me today,” he said under his breath, as the dust settled where her wheels had been, “but I will make a world where you don’t have to.”

Chapter 29

Cloverdale House, upon Pepper’s return to London…

Pepper had not meant to cry in front of the doctor.

She managed not to, at least until the door closed and shut out her mother’s brisk concern, Aunt Florence’s fluttering shawl, and Mrs. Hart’s steadying hand.

“Three days,” she told them. “Please. I only need a few days.”

It ought to have felt like a surrender. Cloverdale House was exactly the sort of place she’d sworn she would never enter: quiet, respectable, full of women with careful faces and doctors who spoke in measured tones about female constitutions. For years, whenever Mother uttered the name—Dr. Fernando might be able to advise—Pepper had dug in her heels.

“I will not be packed off to some institution,” she had said more than once. “I am not a faulty carriage to be sent back to the maker.”

That had been before Brighton. Before the Pavilion, before the fall, before Wyndale.

“Heartbreak,” Mother had snorted. “Is not a reason to consult a physician.”

Mrs. Hart had given Pepper one look and nudged Mother and Aunt Florence toward the stairs. “We will have tea in the front parlor,” she’d said firmly. “You will have privacy. That is the bargain.”

Now the latch clicked; their footsteps faded. Cloverdale House’s treatment room with Dr. Fernando’s name on it was suddenly very quiet.

Dr. Fernando laid a clean sheet of paper on his desk as if preparing to face an exam. “Lady Barbara,” he said, formal but not unkind. “What may I do for you?”

She’d taken the walnut chair opposite him. The wood was smooth under her palms; the rest of her felt scraped raw. “I have some questions about my health,” Pepper said. “Ones I have never…quite dared to speak aloud.”

“About the apoplexy in your childhood?” he asked gently. “Your mother mentioned the limp.”

“It’s…about the rest of it,” she said. “The repercussions. Or the lasting damage. I don’t know which.”

He set the pen down. That, somehow, steadied her more than any scribbling could have.

“If you are to be my patient,” he said, leaning slightly forward, “I must hear from you, not your mother. What troubles you now?”

“That’s just it,” Pepper said. “I don’t know.” I’ve never cared much but I do now.

His brows drew together. “What do you mean? You have no…symptoms?”

She twisted her fingers together. “That is what I was hoping you would tell me,” she said. “Which symptoms ought there be?”

For a heartbeat, something like amusement flickered behind his dark eyes; he suppressed it. “You wish to know whether your concern should be your ankle,” he said, “or something else entirely.”

“I plan to be fitted for new footwear,” Pepper said. “On the beach in Brighton I ran—properly ran—and did not limp at all.”