Page 56 of Ten Rules for Loving the Wrong Rake

She sat there for a while. The sun moved across the floor.

He would go. She'd known it since the cellar, since the cuffs closed on Reeve's wrists, since the duke's carriage rolled away. Without fear there was no reason for him to stay. He was a man who'd lived on ships and in tunnels and in other people's houses, a man whose feet knew roads the way hers knew drawing rooms. Silverton was a crumbling pile in the middle of nowhere with a lame woman in it and a kitchen that still couldn't keep a fire lit overnight. What was that against the whole open world? What was she against it?

If he came back between voyages she'd take it. If he sent letters she'd keep them. If all she had of him was the bread recipe and the memory of his hands in the dark, she could live on that. She'd lived on less. Women lived on less every day and called it plenty, and she could learn to call it plenty too.

But God, she did not want to.

Downstairs, distantly, his boots struck the floor.

He was coming back. For now.

Chapter twenty-two

Asking

Kit

The tunnel was empty. The captain's men were gone, the passage swept clean of everything but the smell of sweat and iron and the dark stain on the stone where Spit had bled. He walked it slowly, his boots echoing off the vaulting, and nothing answered.

At the far end the oak door stood open on the orchard. Grey light, wet grass, fallen apples.

He pulled the door shut. Fitted the lock. Turned the key. Tested the handle. Solid.

He stood with his hand on the oak and breathed. Cool air, clean, carrying October through the cracks in the frame. Not Reeve's breath. Not the cellar. Not the grave. Just stone and timber and the faint smell of rain.

He was free.

The word sat in his chest the way a new scar sits in skin, tender, unfamiliar, not yet part of him. He'd carried the other words so long—owned, leashed, branded, kept—that the absence felt like a missing tooth. A space where a thing had been, and the tongue kept returning to it.

He closed his eyes.

He did not pray often and did not know who he was praying to. But the gratitude was too large for his own ribs, and it needed somewhere to go.

Thank you. For the tunnel and the fight and the captain and the duke and the cuffs on his wrists. For Marian who pulled me out of the dark and Audrey who kept me out of it.

He opened his eyes. Pocketed the key.

Marry her.

The thought was not new. It had been sitting in him for days, weeks, pressed flat beneath the weight of everything else, waiting for a moment when the weight lifted and it could stand up. The weight had lifted. The thought stood.

Then the rest of it, arriving uninvited: a smuggler's son sold for the price of a bar tab. No family name. No title. No fortune. No lineage that didn't end in shame. She was a lady. He was a man the law hadn't caught yet. The gap between her station and his was the width of the English Channel and twice as cold, and any vicar in the country would look at the pair of them and see a woman settling for wreckage.

He could hear Reeve in his head, faint and fading. The cheapest lad. Your father sold you for less than his tab at the inn.

He climbed the ladder. Pulled himself through into the scullery. Walked through to the drawing room.

She was on her knees with a wet cloth, scrubbing quicklime from the floorboards. Sleeves rolled to her elbows, her hair falling loose from its pins, the hem of her dress dark with water. She looked up when he came in and her hand stilled on the cloth and she studied his face.

Whatever she saw there, she read it wrong.

The colour left her cheeks. She stood slowly, the cloth falling from her hand. Her eyes filled and her hand went to her mouth. As though confirming a verdict she'd been expecting, she nodded, once.

"I knew this day would come," she said. Her voice was thick. She pressed her fingers harder against her lips. "I knew once you had your freedom back, you'd want to leave."

"Audrey—"

"You should. You should go. See the world. Live your life as a free man without—" Her breath caught and she pressed through it. "Without me standing in your way."