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Wind rattled the shutters against the house, howling through cracks in the walls, a violent echo of Eva’s demand to know his secrets. Bram pushed to his feet, plowing his fingers through his damp hair. He couldn’t sit anymore. He was too antsy. Too ... off-center. For years, he’d kept sentry over the ghosts of past wrongs that lurked in his heart’s shadows, for those specters refused to be laid to rest. And if he let them loose now, then what?

He crouched in front of the fire, rubbing his hands together, more of a stalling tactic than a true need. He certainly wasn’t cold anymore, not with the burn of shame firing in his gut. Ah, but it was a sticky residue, this fear and uncertainty. The prospect of exposing what he’d hidden for so long waged a silent war with a hunger for connection with Eva. After all, she’d bared her soul to him. Ought he not do the same?

Yet this was entirely different. He dropped his hands, allowing them to hang between his thighs like dead weights. Eva’s confession had been naught but the misguided thoughts of a girl who’d deeply mourned the loss of her parents. His mother’s situation was nothing so innocent. It was an all-too- real, undeniably ugly truth. His jaw clenched. No, it would be better not to voice such atrocities.

He flashed a smile over his shoulder, pretending for all the world that nothing ate at him from the inside out. “You have known me all my life. If I had any secrets, you would be well aware of them.”

“That is not completely true.”

Firelight flickered over Eva’s pale skin, an eerie illumination—or maybe a reflection of the dark mood that suddenly choked him.

She pursed her lips. “It was always a mystery to me why you moved away.”

“I told you.” He turned his face back to the hearth lest she read more on his face than he intended. “My mother was about to die. She did not wish for me to witness her decline. That is no secret.”

“No, not anymore.” Fabric rustled at his back. Floorboards creaked. A light touch rested on his shoulder. “Yet I cannot help but wonder what else you may have omitted in that story. It doesn’t quite make sense. No one likes to die alone.”

A bitter laugh strangled in his throat. “My mother was unlike other women. Most other women, at any rate.”

“Which could account for your distinctiveness.”

He shot to his feet. “I hope I am nothing like my mother.” The words squeezed out like blood through a clenched fist, so tight was his jaw.

Eva blinked, gasping softly—a direct contrast to the storm raging outside and the one within him. “You sound as if you did not love her.”

Hah! How did one love someone he did not know? And yet love really had nothing to do with the strained relationship between him and his mother. “It is not that.”

“Then what is it?” Eva angled her head, the picture of a curious tot.

Suddenly far too warm, he stepped away from the question and the fire, pacing into the shadows of the empty room. How could he tell her, a woman of innocence and virtue? It seemed ungodly, somehow, to share such a naked wickedness with her.

“Bram? You need not be afraid of what I might think. As you have said, we are friends.”

Her words were a soothing balm. She was trustworthy—always had been, even as a girl. Were he to finally give voice to the dark side of his mother’s past, Eva was the only possible choice to whom he would speak of such things. He doubled back to her, hardly daring to believe he was even considering this. “I am afraid I shall need the same vow of secrecy you required of me.”

“Of course.” Her fine brows cinched tight. “I would not dream of sharing anything you tell me with anyone else. You have my word on it.”

“All right.” He sucked in a breath, retreating a step. Better to allow Eva some space to recoil or turn away altogether once she heard the full truth of his parentage. “Being a girl at the time, you may have been too young to notice such a thing, but my mother did not socialize with the other women in town. She did not join their clubs or go to teas. She could not, for they would have nothing to do with her despite her carefully crafted story. I am not sure why they did not believe her, for there was no proof otherwise, and yet I suppose a harlot’s ways can never fully be erased.”

Eva shed her blanket, folding it up as her nose scrunched. “What are you talking about?”

And here it was. The moment of truth. Once he crossed this threshold, there’d be no going back.

He stiffened like a condemned man awaiting a firing squad. “My youngest years were spent in a London brothel. The truth is, I was born out of wedlock, the whelp of any one of several men who had visited my mother. I have no memories of it— thank God. I only know so because my Uncle Pendleton told me as much.”

Her lips parted. Closed. Parted again. A fish out of water. “I...” It was more a breath than a word. “I had no idea.”

“Of course not. Such a disgrace is better left in the shadows.” He rubbed the back of his neck, his fingers digging hard into the damp fabric of his collar.

“How did you come to be in Royston?”

“My mother struck it lucky—as she said, though I prefer to think of it as God’s providence—when a well-to-do toff took a fancy to her. He kept her as his mistress, giving her a steady income and the means to advance us to a flat of our own. I could not have been more than three years of age at the time.” Disgust twisted his gut into a knot. “When the man died, he left her a substantial amount of money, enough to allow her to move to Royston to live out the rest of her life. She concocted a story of having been married to a navy man who was lost at sea.”

Recollection dawned on her face as she set the blanket on the floor. “I do remember that. You always said your father sailed the seas and would one day return with a walrus tusk for you.”

“So I was told. So I believed.”

“Well, at least that wealthy gent did some sort of right by your mother in giving her money when he passed on.”

“That was not all he gave her.” Bram snorted. It couldn’t be helped. And now that he was this deep into dredging through the truth, he might as well scrape out the rest of it. “He gave her the pox as well—the slow kind that rots you from the inside. Much to my shame, and hers, my mother died of the French disease.”

Rage welled, hot and thick. What sort of man did such a thing? What sort of woman allowed him to? And what sort of misbegotten aberration must Eva think him? He hung his head. “So there you have it. Now that you know, perhaps you would prefer if I sleep out in the barn with the horses. Is that what you want?”

He dared a peek at her. Her brow crinkled, not in judgment or contempt, leastwise not what he could detect as she stood with her back to the fire and her face in the shadows.

“It seems to me your situation is no different than mine,” she murmured.

“How can you possibly say that?”

“Like me, you have blamed yourself far too long for things you ought not.”

He flung his arms wide. “My mother was a strumpet, Eva. There is no getting around that.”

“Exactly. Your mother, not you. You did not have any more control over her behaviour than I did over my father’s melancholy. It was not you who caused her to take up such a lifestyle any more than I caused my mother to die or inflicted my sister’s blindness ... if, that is, I am to trust your earlier words of God’s sovereignty. Do you still stand behind that sentiment or not?”

He shook his head, hardly able to grasp that she extended such grace to him—the illegitimate child of an unknown father. “Unbelievable,” he breathed.

“What?”

“Any other woman would be aghast at what I just shared, and yet you—” His voice cracked, far too many emotions welling, and he cleared his throat. “You challenge me with the very hope I gave you.”

A lovely smile radiated on her face. “We are a pair, are we not?”

Somewhere deep, humor bubbled up and broke free. A great belly laugh roared out of him. Eva joined in until they both collapsed onto the folded blanket, clutching their stomachs. It was hard to remember that barely an hour ago they’d been frozen to the bone.

Bram glanced over at her. “No wonder they say confession is good for the soul.”

“Indeed.” Her smile faded. For a long while she said nothing, her pale blue eyes almost ethereal in the firelight. “I suspect, though, you are not quite finished confessing. There is more, is there not?”

“I have told you everything about my mother. There is no more that I know.” He narrowed his eyes. “What is it you suspect?”

She toyed with the frayed hem of the blanket, picking at strings for a while before turning back to him. “If we are being fully honest with each other here tonight—and I think that we are—then you should know I have heard you were indicted for theft from a dig site. Is it true? Did you do such a thing?”

His gut sank.

How was he to answer that?

Eva watched Bram as he rose and silently paced, clearly lost deep in thought. Was he truly a thief? And if so, how could she keep him on at the manor? She needed those relics—all the relics—to bring in money, yet it would cut deep to send Bram away. Though she hated to admit it, she’d become attached to this man over the past month and a half. Too attached for her own good, apparently.

The fire snapped, and she jumped. If—and that was a big if—Bram was behind the missing brooch, what about the other suspicious mishaps? He couldn’t be the cause of all the unfortunate incidents if his job was on the line with this dig. It just didn’t make sense.

Bram returned with an armful of broken wall slats and table legs. After dumping the pile on the floor near the mouth of the hearth, he leaned against the mantel, his face inscrutable in the shadows. “Where did you hear a tale like that?”

Her shoulders sagged. The reverend’s words must be true, or Bram would have denied the accusation.

Oh , Bram.

A chill shivered down her spine, and she scooted closer to the fire. “The Reverend Mr. Blackwood has connections at Trinity. For my sake, he inquired about you.”

She couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like Bram whispered something beneath his breath. He scrubbed a hand over his face, and when he lowered it, his head dipped as well. “Whatever he told you is likely true. I was indicted for the theft of a first-century signet ring at Verulamium—St. Albans, as you know it.” His shoulders straightened as he stepped away from the hearth. “But I was also fully acquitted as the item was never proven to be in my possession because the ring was returned. So there you have it.”

Once again he sat next to her, legs stretched out, staring into the flames as if he’d put an end to the conversation.

Which was absurd. More questions than ever sprang to her tongue. She shifted on the blanket, facing him instead of the hearth, the side of her body away from the heat feeling the chill of the old house. “Surely whoever returned the ring must have been the one to have stolen it.”

“Possibly, but no one knows who replaced it.”

She pressed her fingers to her temple, the slight throb of a headache beginning. “Why were you under suspicion? And why do I feel as if you are only giving enough information to appease me so I stop asking questions?” She searched his profile, for he had yet to face her. “I would have the truth, Bram, and I would have it now.”

A muscle jumped on his jawline, several times, as if he chewed on a bite of gristle he’d rather spit out. For a long while only the fire spoke in pops and crackles. The wind yet howled, not as forcefully, but strong enough to make her lean toward Bram when he finally opened his mouth.

“It was not me who took the ring. It was my uncle.”

“Professor Pendleton!” She leaned back on the blanket, planting her hands on the icy floorboards behind her. “I find it hard to believe that dear old man is a thief.”

“He is not.” Bram sighed and finally faced her, though she doubted he saw her. He was somewhere in the past, out of this storm, away from this house, reliving an event that clearly distressed him, such were the lines on his brow.

“It was a busy afternoon, that day,” he began. “My uncle was the site director, and anything that could go wrong did. He had been working on cleaning the signet ring when he was called away for an emergency. I found out later that one of the support structures had collapsed, trapping two students. One of them broke his leg, not that it matters now. At any rate, my uncle shoved the ring into his pocket and tended to the emergency, then promptly forgot he had done so. The ring had already been documented, so it was reported as missing.”

“That was a simple oversight, not a theft.”

His gaze sharpened on her. “Any missing antiquity on a proper dig site is considered stolen unless proven otherwise.”

“Your uncle could have proven it. All he had to do was take the ring out of his pocket and explain the situation.”

“He did not remember it was there.” Bram flailed his hand in the air. “And being I was the last one left in the work tent, the blame fell on me. The college has a strict policy that the person nearest an artifact at the time of its disappearance is the responsible party. I became the scapegoat, with charges brought against me.”

“How unfair!” Eva sat upright, incensed at such an injustice. “So what happened? You said you were acquitted.”

“My uncle and I were scheduled to go before the disciplinary board, and wishing us both to be in fine form, I retrieved my uncle’s suit coat in order to brush it clean, make sure no buttons were missing, and the like. That is when I discovered the ring in his pocket. Before the board met, I simply snuck in and restored the relic to the collection.” His lips twisted wryly. “The board had no choice but to drop the charges once my uncle discovered the lost had been found.”

“And you never told him it was his oversight for which you took the blame?”

“No. He sacrificed so much by taking me in and making a respectable man of me that I couldn’t expose his mistake. Some burdens are worth bearing.”

“At the cost of your reputation?”

“Yes.” Bram rose, offering his hand to pull her to her feet as well.

She wrapped her fingers around his, all the while mulling on what sort of man would take the blame—still took it, in fact—for the sake of another. “Have you always been so noble, and I just did not recognize it?”

“Of course.” He shook out the blanket, then folded it into a bedroll. “Hopefully we can get an early start in the morn. It sounds like the wind is taming down a bit, leastwise there is less snow drifting through that crack in the door. How about you bed down?” He swept his hand toward the blanket. “I will manage the fire.”

“When will you sleep?”

“I am a college professor. I go without sleep during final exams every semester.”

She lowered to the scratchy wool, a thin barrier to the cold floor, but at least the fabric was mostly dry now. Closing her eyes, she willed sleep to come, but all she could think about was an innocent man bearing the censure for a crime he didn’t commit, and the old dear who didn’t have a clue such a mercy had been extended to him. And now that she thought on it, there were other things Bram’s uncle didn’t seem to be aware of either, like the constant misplacing of his satchel, his many lost tools, or the time he’d come in for breakfast and was surprised to see eggs in a dish instead of dinner.

Eva pushed up on one elbow. “Bram?”

“Hmm?” He glanced over his shoulder from where he sat by the fire.

“About your uncle ... that pocketing of the signet ring was not the only time he has overlooked something, is it? I have noticed he is quite absent-minded.”

“Have you?”

“Is there something more serious going on with him?”

He gazed at her a moment longer, firelight playing over the far side of his face, the other half-hidden in shadows. Without a word, he picked up another piece of wood and swiveled back to the hearth.

Her heart squeezed. She’d had a great-aunt who slowly yet steadily lost her faculties, declining so much that one day she’d ended up lost in the woods ... only to be found after she’d breathed her last. Eva laid her head in the crook of her arm, deeply troubled.

Would to God such a thing might never happen to Bram’s uncle.