Page 63 of Better Off Wed

Millrose shrugged. “Yet, when you got that letter, you rushed here to warn him.”

In the midst of the frustration and fear warring inside Jeremy rose a flicker of possibility. The colonel was right. Laura had come searching for him this time. And, being inordinately clever, she had found him.

Could he be clever enough to keep from losing her again?

Laura stood and handed the note she’d written to Millrose. “I’ve also written down the name and address of my wigmaker—for the lady upstairs. If she’s in need of a disguise, as seems to be the case, she deserves a better one.”

Amusement twitched at the corner of Millrose’s mouth. “Thank you, Lady Sterling.”

“Right, then. Let’s go,” Jeremy said, stepping to her side. When she laid her fingers on his arm, he had to tamp down a surge of selfish regret that she no longer needed him to gather her into his arms. “We need to get to Fulham before Thornton does.”

Chapter 18

Laura collapsed onto the seat of what appeared to be an ordinary hackney, although she suspected it wasn’t. Her injured ankle, which had been hardly noticeable at the start of the day, was beginning to ache again after all the hurrying up and down stairs and along corridors and into carriages.

Jeremy climbed in a moment later, holding out her aunt’s walking stick. “You nearly forgot this.”

She wrapped her fingers around the knob. “Thank you.”

He sat down beside her but said nothing more as the carriage rolled into motion. The view sliding past the windows was largely unfamiliar to her as streets tightly packed with houses gradually gave way to more open spaces. At its fringes, London could have passed for a country village.

“Did you grow up in Fulham?” she asked.

“No, I was raised in Oxfordshire. When I—when General Scott brought me to London, I wanted a place for my mother and sister that would be near to me, but still remind them of home,” he said, as if their destination required some explanation. “Of course, I think Julia would have preferred somewhere livelier.”

He was not looking at her but out the window, and the midday light behind him, although not brilliant, still cast his profile in sharp relief. Not for the first time, she was struck by something familiar about that profile, the perfect angles of his cheekbones and nose. “Julia,” she echoed, thoughtful.

“My sister, yes.”

“The one who enjoys the theater.” He had spoken of her many times at Thornton Hall, but Laura could recall hearing him speak her name only once before. “I wonder…does she also, perhaps, enjoy the entertainments at Vauxhall?”

He snapped around to face her. She had no doubt he knew why she had asked. “On occasion, yes,” he admitted after a moment.

“My God. It was you. That night.” She shivered, her scalp tingling at the recollection of Penhurst’s remorseless grasp, the rest of her tingling at the memory of Jeremy’s hold on her arm and her relief at his unexpected decision to release her. “Had you been sent there to find me?”

“No. That encounter was merely a—” One corner of his mouth lifted. “Merely a coincidence, I was going to say. It wasn’t until the next morning that General Scott told me that he wanted Lady Sterling found and I was the agent he had selected for the task. Because the coincidence of our names amused him, he said, and I thought to myself—” His gaze grew distant, his expression more wry. “I didn’t believe in coincidences. But when I spoke with Penhurst not an hour later, I realized you and I had already met.”

“Coincidence or no, you must have cursed your luck. You had me, and you let me go.”

His eyes searched hers, and in their blue depths she glimpsed a strange welter of emotions. “I did, didn’t I? Foolish. Are you angry with me for not telling you sooner?”

She thought perhaps that she ought to be. But she wasn’t.

For a week, she had been baffled by her own willingness to trust a stranger, only now to discover that she had known him all along. Known the sort of man he was, at least. In the darkness of Vauxhall’s unlit alleys, where for all he knew he had nabbed a whore and a thief, he had not sided with Penhurst and all those who assumed such a woman deserved whatever she got. Jeremy had set her free. And when they had met again in Kent, some part of her—a sentimental, dramatic sort of woman would have been tempted to call it her heart—had recognized him and had known she was safe in his arms.

Maybe her choice of an alias hadn’t been a coincidence but something stronger. Maybe it had been fate.

“I could pretend to be angry with you, if you’d like,” she teased.

He smiled and held up one hand, palm outward, as if pleading for clemency. “On no account. I am still scarred by your performance at Thornton Hall.”

“I did try to make it up to you,” she reminded him with a sly, sidelong glance.

His reaction did not disappoint. He called her Laura, in that voice that could not make up its mind whether to be scandalized or scolding, tempered with the hint of a smile and streaks of color across his chiseled cheekbones.

Relenting for the moment, she turned the conversation. “Do you also live at Briar Cottage?”

“I have a room there. I visit when I can. Lately, I’ve spent far more time in the Underground—that’s what the men call the quarters beneath the tobacco shop.”