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“P eople do not always get what they deserve,”

Constantia reminded him quietly. “But I will tell you what I can.”

Because once she had, Ryland would know what she was, as well as who , and then he would not try to keep her here or insist on introducing her to his sisters. In fact, he would be only too glad to help her get away.

But for the moment, he was looking at her expectantly. Almost eagerly. She pulled her mantle more snugly around her throat, as if mere wool could shield her from the intensity of his dark gaze. Difficult to believe that moments before she had found the nerve to kiss him. That she now knew the feel of his mouth against hers.

Knowledge changed a person, changed the relationship between people.

Everything had changed in the last few moments.

And it was about to change again.

“My mother was the middle daughter of a marquess,” she began, dropping her eyes to lap. “He’s still alive. But he disowned her long ago. Don’t ask his name.” She paused, expecting Ryland to protest. But she was hardly foolish enough to give the name of one peer to another. She understood where loyalty lay. When he did not push for it, she let a shaky breath escape her lungs, part relief, part resignation. She had no excuse not to go on. “At seventeen, she went to London for her first Season and met a man. Not at all the sort of man her father had in mind for her—though,” she added with a humorless chuckle, “he did claim to be nobility, in exile from some obscure European principality.”

A lie, she was sure, but if such a place had ever existed, no doubt Napoleon had since wiped it from the map.

“He was an artist. She let him make her portrait. Like a fool, she posed without—without any—” She had to pause and swallow past the next word.

“In the nude,” Ryland offered quietly.

She jerked up her chin. “You’ve seen it.”

A nod, the faintest movement imaginable. “That first night. You were unconscious, and at first, I didn’t recognize you. I went through your things, searching for something that would tell me who you were.”

His voice was remarkably free of judgment. She steeled herself against it all the same. “Well, you found it, didn’t you? I’m the daughter of the sort of woman who would let a man paint a picture of her naked as the day she was born. Although perhaps that was fitting—he must have made her promises of the sort that only a baby, or a na?ve nobleman’s daughter, would expect to be kept. She ran away with him. I arrived in due course. And before I had turned three years old, he had abandoned us both.”

“Oh, my dear Miss—”

It amused her, somehow, his determination to be proper, to follow the rules of etiquette, to maintain a respectful distance between them.

“Constantia,” she corrected. “It’s a town on the Black Sea, you know. He claimed to have summered there in his youth, and regaled my mother with tales of its beauty. That’s why she chose such an outlandish name. Too distinctive—too recognizable. I hadn’t used it for years. And then, in a moment of weakness, I thought I should like to hear it again, so I told it to Lady Stalbridge and the others at the magazine...”

That had been almost as grave a mistake as giving it to him.

“But you did not reveal your surname?” he asked. “She seemed convinced the one you gave her was false.”

“Have I a real one? I’m—” A bastard, she had been going to say. But he would recoil at that, and recoil again when she laughed at him. “I’m the illegitimate daughter of a liar and a fraud. And what claim has my mother’s family on me?”

He nodded, though rather absently. She wondered whether he was considering what he might do if one of his sisters found herself in a similarly unfortunate situation. “And after? When your mother had...gone?”

“She did not die of a broken heart,” Constantia explained stubbornly. No matter what she said. “Just an ordinary fever. We lived then in London, in one of those neighborhoods where my mother’s family, and yours I’m sure, would never set foot. The woman who attended her at the end was kind enough not to drop me at an orphanage but instead sent me to her sister in Essex, who had sons but wanted a girl around the house. I rubbed along all right with the family, in spite of this.” She gestured with her left hand, its dominance a supposedly sinister sign, and then wound a red curl around her first finger. “And this.” Her hair had always been the bane of her existence, a mark of her difference, almost impossible to hide. “I was just six years old when I went to them, young enough that my memories began to fade and I forgot...forgot those dingy rooms and my mother’s stories, my mother’s face. Then one day, I was doing my chores—I was nine or so then, at an age when I was eager to please. I stood on a chair to clean the top of the enormous old wardrobe in my foster mother’s room—and I found—I found...”

“The portrait.”

It was her turn to flinch. He understood too much, the Earl of Ryland. She was right to put distance between them.

“Yes,” she confessed after a moment. “It was wrapped up in paper and tied with string. My name—my Christian name—was written on the outside, in what I later learned was my mother’s hand. At first, I didn’t even realize it was in reference to me. In that house, I had only ever been known as Connie, you see. But it stirred something in some corner of my memory. I had to know, so naturally, I unwrapped the package. There was a letter, too, from my mother—perhaps you read the part of it I kept?” His answering nod was sharp, chagrined. “A bit maudlin, but I suppose she wrote it on her deathbed. I was still trying to make sense of it when my foster-mother came in and caught me, my hands full, still standing on that rickety chair. It’s a wonder I didn’t fall,” she recalled with a wry laugh. “I can’t believe she didn’t have her suspicions about my origins before that day. But the picture was too much for her. Proof of my degenerate nature far more damning than left-handedness and unruly red hair. She sent me packing that very hour.”

A sound escaped him them. Pity, or very near it. It plucked at something deep inside her and made an ache in her chest. But of course, children endured worse all the time. She had endured worse.

“She kindly gave me half a crown,” she reassured him. “I walked to Cambridge and, from there, posted myself to Sheffield.”

“So far! Why Sheffield?”

“I’d read a story where the heroine was said to have ‘a spine of Sheffield steel.’ I didn’t understand it was a metaphor, and I’m quite sure now that it wasn’t intended as a compliment, but I was determined to get myself one. Figured it would help me survive.”

The bedchamber window showed nothing but the night sky, and the only light came from the lamp in the sitting room. She couldn’t easily read Lord Ryland’s face, which was in shadow. But she saw his hand twitch, almost as if he wanted to reach for her, to console her.

“I succeeded, you know,” she said warningly. “The steel. The spine.”

He turned his head, and when the little bit of light struck his profile, she watched wry amusement slide across his features. “Of that, Constantia, I’m certain. What happened next?”

“I found a girls’ school, concocted a story almost as unbelievable as the truth, persuaded them to let me take classes in exchange for housework. The other pupils... tolerated me, I suppose you could say.” She smoothed her hands over her knees, wishing unpleasant memories could be brushed away as easily as wrinkles in wool. “Anyway, I stayed for six years and I learned two things, one of which was that I had inherited my father’s artistic gift.”

“And the other?”

“That the portrait frame has a hidden compartment, into which my mother had tucked a pair of earbobs. When it became necessary to leave that place, I hocked one and lived off the money until I could hone my skills enough to live by my art.”

Even in the dimness, she could see his eyes widen. “I take it there has been more to your career than sketching mocking cartoons for a ladies’ magazine.”

In spite of herself, a smile tugged at one corner of her mouth. “A bit. But the work Lady Stalbridge had me do was of a piece. I draw and paint to suit my patrons, not myself. It’s the rare artist who can afford to do otherwise.”

Let him think what he would of the drawings she had made of him. They had paid her rent. She refused to speak of them, or of the watercolor she had entered in the exhibition, the only art she had made in recent memory that was solely hers.

“So, you claim that for”—his eyes traveled over her, assessing, and then he lifted one shoulder—“ten years, more or less, you have been moving from place to place, working under a variety of assumed names, drawing and painting whatever others will pay you to produce, and keeping the real you hidden away.”

He finished with another sweep of his dark gaze, recalling her to the fact that she had sneaked into his rooms in her nightgown. He had held her, just for a moment, in his arms, and she had pressed her lips to his. Awareness prickled over her skin and raised gooseflesh.

“I have done what I had to do, told whatever lies would serve, in order to keep myself safe.”

If he had any sense at all, he would take those words as a warning.

“Forgive me, but given your...unassuming history,” he asked, “why should someone mean you harm? Did you paint an unflattering portrait, perhaps?”

She leaped up and stepped toward the bedchamber. “Mock me if you must. I suppose I deserve that.” She had meant, after all, to mock him and everything he stood for with all those cartoons and sketches.

Though she had never dreamed that he cared.

“No.” He, too, had got to his feet, and he came to stand beside her, head tilted so she could not easily avoid his eyes. “I apologize. That remark was unworthy of both of us.”

Oddly, she believed him—not just that he was sorry, but that he thought her worthy of some respect, in spite of her parentage and the tale she had told. She dipped her chin in acknowledgment, and to her relief, he took a step back.

“It was the earring,” she explained, when her head had stopped swimming from the sudden rush of standing up too quickly, or her too acute awareness of his proximity. “It was more valuable than I expected. And evidently more important. I sold it when I first came to London, and even after all the time that had passed, I think someone must have recognized it and alerted my grandfather. That was when I first became aware of being followed, and when odd little incidents started to occur.

“So I began to move about regularly, changed my name, stayed vigilant. It worked well enough for a while,” she insisted. “It’s not difficult to hide in the hustle and bustle of Town. Sometimes months would go by with no trouble. Most recently, I enjoyed the better part of a year free from harassment. But now the Magazine for Misses has attracted unwelcome attention. Someone has discovered the identity of every contributor, even Mrs. Goode, and intends to expose us. I couldn’t stay and find out what might happen to everyone else. I—I ran.”

“Into the street. In front of my house.” His voice was steady and even—alarmingly so. He sounded almost bored. “Were you being chased?”

“I don’t know. That’s the only part of my past that truly is a blank.”

A pause ensued while he paced twice across the room and back. Evidently it required some effort to take in everything she had told him. “It doesn’t quite add up. All this trouble over an earring?”

She shrugged. “An heirloom, I suppose. Although I have wondered...”

“Yes?”

“Whether my mother’s family knows about the picture. And if so, how far might they go to be rid of the only evidence, the last reminder of her indiscretion?”

But of course, if that were the case, why stop at the portrait? Constantia hadn’t realized or remembered until she saw it how remarkably similar in appearance she was to the woman who had brought her into the world. More recently, she had begun to consider how awkward it would be to cross paths with someone to whom her face was eerily familiar.

She knew nothing more of her grandfather’s character than that he was a nobleman, and thus powerful. It was terrible to think he might be the sort of man to use his power to make absolutely certain such a meeting could never happen. But once the idea had occurred to her, she could not shake it.

By the light from the sitting room, she saw Lord Ryland’s eyes narrow. An expression of disbelief. His gaze did not meet hers.

But then he said, “When I first saw the Unfashionable Plates, I supposed that you didn’t like men very much. Now I understand that it is not really a matter of dislike. You do not trust them—and with good reason, it would seem.”

She fought the impulse to recoil from the insight within those words.

Then he lifted his dark eyes to her face, their expression as earnest as his voice. “Thank you for trusting me.”

It must have been the knock on her head. Because he was right, of course. She didn’t trust anyone, especially men. Yet she had trusted him— reluctantly , she wanted to defend herself. When I had no other choice.

“What now?” he asked after a moment, glancing at the money still scattered at their feet.

“I intend to sell the other earring and use the proceeds to leave England for good.”

He dropped onto one knee. “May I suggest an alternative plan?”

Her heart gave a frightful lurch—a reaction, to her chagrin, not made up entirely of dismay. “You can’t mean—” she began and then bit off the rest when she realized he had only stooped to gather the spilled coins.

She was in danger of ending up no better than her mother, imagining a gauzy, rose-tinted world of romance, forgetting how the sharp, jagged edges of reality could wound.

“I’ve seen no indication that we’re being followed,” he said, perfectly steadily, as if the earth had not ground to a halt, momentarily knocking her off-balance, and then resumed spinning before she had fully recovered. “But I did offer you protection, Miss—Constantia. No, that won’t do. Creevey is to be, now?”

“Cooper will be fine,” she told him. What proof did she even have that anyone was presently on her heels? Ridiculous, really, for her to imagine that a common surname would be the clue that revealed too much.

“All right, then,” he agreed, rising. “Miss Cooper.” He gave one of his stiff bows, as if they were being introduced for the first time. “Come to Rylemoor as we planned. Recover fully from your injuries. And in a few weeks, after the Christmas holidays perhaps, you can go to Bristol, where my Aunt Josephine lives, and use this”—here, he tucked the still-hefty purse into her hand—“to sail away from all your troubles. Save the bauble and sell it in some far-off land where no one will be the wiser.”

It sounded so perfect, so easy. She wanted quite desperately for all of it to happen just as he said.

But in her whole life, nothing had ever been easy.

“You’re certain Rylemoor Abbey is secure?” she demanded, trying to find the flaw in the plan. “Fitted out with wrought iron fences and high stone walls and massive doors to keep the world at bay?”

“After a fashion,” he agreed, though there was a certain wryness in his expression. “Most important, there’s nothing but bleak moorland for miles about, nothing a stranger in his right mind—or even out of it—would try to cross this time of year.”

She had revealed herself to be the daughter of a fallen woman and a rogue; she had confessed to lurking on the outskirts of good society all her life. If the Earl of Ryland were the stodgy moralizer she had drawn him to be, he would have sent her away empty-handed. If he were a secret scoundrel, as she’d always assumed, he would have tried to seduce her and justified his behavior with her presumably easy virtue. Instead of doing either, he had offered to help her. He had invited her to his home.

She had been waiting, muscles tensed, fully expecting him to betray the trust she’d placed in him. She’d misjudged him terribly.

Perhaps, in future, she ought to place less trust in herself.

Unsure what other gesture of acceptance to make, she curtsied. “Th-thank you. How can I ever hope to repay you?”

At the same time, waving a hand toward the bed, he said, “You should stay here tonight.”