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“Perhaps you should lie down,” he said doubtfully.

She laughed, suddenly struck by the absurd loveliness of his care—and by how effortlessly he’d believed in her when faced with his mother’s lies.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I don’t need to?—”

Her words were cut off as he scooped her under her arms and knees and rose to his feet as if she weighed nothing at all.

“Benedict!” she exclaimed. She was no featherweight of a woman—she was tall and substantial. “Stop this! I can certainlywalk.”

“Hm,” he grunted then kept walking towards the rear staircase without putting her down.

Emily, left with little other choice, clung laughingly to his neck as he began to carry her up the stairs, ducking her head bashfully when a housemaid passed them, clearly intent on not making anything resembling eye contact.

Benedict apparently suffered from no embarrassment regarding his outlandish overprotectiveness.

“Please fetch Her Ladyship a cool compress,” he ordered the maid as they breezed past.

“Yes, My Lord,” the girl squeaked.

Emily batted his shoulder, a sure sign of her faith in his strong grip.

“Benedict, that’s for headaches,” she chided. “I amfine.”

“A compress won’t make you anylessfine,” he grumbled as he kicked open the door to his bedchamber, bypassing her rooms entirely. He placed her down atop the counterpane with the utmost delicacy which Emily might have been tempted to find apromising event, except for how he immediately turned to fuss with the pillows behind her rather than, say, ravish her furiously.

She sighed. Life was so very full of disappointments, alas.

There was one thing she could say for Benedict’s clucking and fussing, however: it cleared up her mind enough to fully process what the Dowager had said as she’d stalked away from the parlor.

She sat up with a gasp.

“Emily, I have something to tel—what are you doing?” Whatever her husband had been saying was lost in his panicked exclamation. Emily, however, was too caught up in her realization to pay him much mind.

“’Just ask Theodore,’” she said, then clarified as Benedict gave her a look that said he worried her head injury was even worse than he’d suspected. “That’s what your mother said, I mean. She said she was good at getting revenge on men and said, ‘Just ask Theodore.’”

His motions stilled, a faraway look overtaking him as he thought through this.

“I don’t—” he began, breaking off and then pausing. He blinked at Emily. “We know she paid Dowling for something.”

She nodded. “And then blackmailed him for something—the same thing? Something different?”

“But the blackmail never came to fruition, did it?” Benedict mused. “My mother didn’t reveal his perfidy to the world—the Duchess of Hawkins did, along with her husband. No, Dowling gave in to my mother’s commands. Isthatwhat he would regret?”

Emily scrunched her nose. “It seems plausible that he might regret giving in, but I’m not sure your mother would see it that way—I suspect she’d be blinded by the triumph of getting what she wanted.”

“You’re likely right about that,” her husband agreed. “She would only see Dowling as regretting somethingshesaw valuable. And hedidend up losing his life.”

A terrible, terrible idea was starting to grow within Emily. She didn’t want to speak it aloud. Didn’t want to make it real. But there was no use in burying her head in the sand—not for herself, nor for her husband.

“Losing his life,” she echoed quietly, “and being known as a murderer.”

The dreadful implication hung in the air. Was being known as a murderer the same as actually being one? Except the question was no question at all—from the late Duke of Hawkins, Andrew’s father, they knew perfectly well that reputation was not the same as reality, not in his horrible, ever-unspooling tragedy.

Benedict looked sick. “I don’t want to believe it,” he said softly. “I never thought her violent, only dramatic and self-obsessed. But today…”

Today she’d struck Emily at the slightest provocation. What would a woman like that do if she felt there was a real slight against her?

“We don’t know that she did it,” she said, instinctively avoiding labelling the act as Benedict had done.