And Thea did not feel fear. She felt…freedom. During those three years of her exile, she could have done anything, gone anywhere. But she had not. She had stayed, stuck, her mind closed to the future, seeing only the past, trying to find her way back.
How much time she had wasted! Time she could have spent making a new home. She could do that now. Her heart skipped a little, excited by the thought.
She closed her eyes. Let the noise around her fade. Let another image swim into her mind. The lawn at Brinkley End.
“Miss? Miss Knight?”
Thea opened her eyes and blinked at the coffeehouse. Gilbert stood before her, a woman—presumably Mrs. Pimm—at his side. Before they could speak, a boy came to the door. The men fell quiet and the boy yelled out the names of the ships that had arrived in the past hour and their cargo, then accepted his coins and dashed off.
Gilbert left too. Mrs. Pimm, with the unflappable efficiency of a woman who spent her days tending to men overexcited by coffee and news, put Thea and her trunk in a corner and, unasked, served her tea with bread and jam.
“Is there anything else you need, miss?” Mrs. Pimm asked, and Thea thanked her and said “No,” which was the truth, because Gilbert and Mrs. Pimm had already given her the one thing she needed most right now: a reminder that the world still held people who knew how to be kind.
When the carriage entered Mayfair, Thea assumed Gilbert had somehow convinced the housekeeper at Arabella’s house to let her stay, but the carriage did not stop outside the Larke family’s house.
This house belonged to the Earl of Luxborough.
Thea tumbled out of the carriage on weak knees, her hands jittery, a thousand butterflies in her stomach. If only those were real butterflies, and she could make wishes on them, and those wishes could come true.
But Rafe would not be here, in his London house. He would be back at Brinkley End, in his greenhouse, with his plants, and she would be forgotten.
You are never gone from my mind.
“Is his lordship in residence?” she asked, and someone said, “No.”
She had known he would not be there, and indeed he wasn’t, and she was crushed.
Because if you go, you’re gone. I won’t come after you.
She had turned him down. She could not stay here. She turned to tell Gilbert that, but the hackney cab was already moving on, and footmen were carrying her trunk inside.
So Thea let her feet carry her inside too, into that familiar hallway where Rafe had teased her about her shopping.
The usually stern butler smiled at her, with something like relief.
“We are so glad to welcome you, Miss Knight,” he said, and diplomatically avoided mentioning that he had previously addressed her as “my lady.” “We’ve had boys looking for you.”
“Looking for me?”
“Instructions from his lordship. To make sure you were safe.”
“But I—I’m not the countess.”
“His lordship wrote that Miss Knight always has a home here,” said the butler.
He didn’t explain, but only handed her off to the housekeeper, who led Thea up the stairs, talking all the while. “We’ll send up supper, only a cold tray, if that will suffice, though we can send out for something hot if you wish.”
“No, that’s fine,” Thea heard herself say.
“And you’ll be glad of a bath, all that London soot and ash on you…”
Thea let the chatter wash over her, let herself be helped out of her smoke-scented clothes and into a lavender-scented robe, to wait for her bath to be ready. The smell of smoke clung to her hair.
They were still filling the bathtub when someone pressed a letter into her hand. She had only seen his precise, bold hand once before, but it was enough to know this was from Rafe. The note was short and impersonal:
As you know, our invalid marriage gave me access to a sum of ten thousand pounds. I am making arrangements to have that sum transferred to you. Present this letter to my solicitors…
Thea folded the note and put it aside. Money. He needed that money for his business, but he’d given it to her instead. Ten thousand pounds was a fortune for anyone, let alone a woman with nothing. More than enough to start her life anew.
Yet he had given her more than money: Once more, the ground had been pulled out from under her feet, but this time, Rafe was there. She had turned him down, but still he had been ready to catch her and cushion her fall. Strong and steady and sure.
“Miss?” someone said. “Miss, your bath is ready now. Would you like me to stay and help?”
“Thank you. No,” Thea said. “Thank you.”
The door clicked shut. Thea stood alone in a room with a steaming copper tub. She slipped off the robe and stepped into the tub. She looked down. Her smoky hair fell about her face. Through the water, her ankles were indistinct white shapes.
Oh dear heaven, she had got it all wrong.
Dropping into the water, Thea sat and hugged her knees. She breathed hard, but the hot tears came anyway. She fought them, but still they came.
Because she had got it all wrong. Too late, she realized what she had done.
She had tested him.
She had wanted to be wanted, and she wanted that so badly that she had lost all chance of having it. She had tested her parents’ love, and they had failed her test. And then she had tested Rafe, and the one who failed that test was her.
All that time she’d been talking about her home in London, priding herself on forming no attachments, hiding even from herself the secret hope that he would beg her to stay. But why would he? When all she had ever said was that she wanted to leave. She liked him chasing her, but that was a game—a fun game, an erotic game, but only a game. She had played a game she didn’t understand, and she had lost.
What if she had not played this foolish game? What if she had not tested him? What if she had not run in the hope he would chase her? If she had been brave and simply told him the truth: “I love you and I want to be with you always.”
Because a direct statement demanded a direct response, and Thea was not so brave as she wished. When her dream lay before her—the dream of loving and being loved; of having a safe, loving home with a strong, caring man—she had not dared to believe in it. Instead, she had run.
In the bathtub, Thea hugged her legs and pressed her eyes to her knees, and wept. The crying made her body hot, and the sobs made her sides ache, but she could not stop. When the storm had passed, the water was cooling and her hair still smelled of smoke.
Contorting herself, she sank her head beneath the surface to wet her hair, then lathered lavender-scented soap through it. By the time she was dressed again, with her hair dry and brushed and tied in a plait, and she had eaten some food and slid into bed, she felt strangely calm.
She would soon be in possession of a fortune. The first thing she would do was hire a carriage and drive to Brinkley End.
Rafe had nothing to do but wait. Wait and roam aimlessly, haunting his own house, until he wound up in the library, where he spied the pages Thea had left behind. He sat in that big leather chair to read them, and soon found himself engrossed in her strange, funny tale of the outcast heroine taken to a castle and the cursed, half-naked man living in the lake. Thea’s voice was in every line, and, for the briefest of moments, he could fool himself that she was by his side.