He couldn’t breathe.
The air was sucked from his chest in a whoosh, and blackness crowded the edges of his vision. It was only through sheer force of will that Noah managed to stay on his feet, for his knees were threatening to buckle and his stomach was threatening to rebel. An icy sweat covered his skin, and nausea was rolling through him in waves. Nothing could have prepared him for the beautiful ambush that was this woman.
She was watching him silently, those hazel eyes of hers almost gold in the setting sun. She knew. She knew, she knew, she knew. It pounded through his head, echoing deep in his bones.
She knew who he was, or who he had been, though how she had discovered his identity was horrifyingly unclear. He tried to put his thoughts in order, but his mind refused to cooperate.
She reached out a hand, as if to steady him, but he jerked away from her.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, her voice seemingly coming from a great distance. “This was…” She blew out a breath. “This was not how I intended this at all.”
“No,” he managed to say, the words jumbled in his head and not making sense. He wanted to deny everything, but he couldn’t seem to form the necessary sentences.
“Just hear me out—”
“No.”
Elise looked down at her hands. “I know very well that you are Noah Ellery, heir to the duchy of Ashland. Pretending otherwise is a waste of our time.”
His breath was coming back, small sips of air that were pushing the darkness from the edges of his vision. “Not me.”
Elise sighed in obvious frustration, and with what looked like regret on her face. “You’re a terrible liar.”
He wasn’t a terrible liar. He was a brilliant liar. He had lived a lie for fifteen years, and no one had ever discovered his secret until now.
“Abigail needs you.”
He focused on those words, focused on the implications of that sentence.
Abigail needs you.
She had not made mention of his father. Or his mother. Only his sister.
The one person in his childhood who had not looked at him with pity. Or anger. The one person who had defended a small boy when no one else would. The one person who had never tried to fix him.
The urge to retch diminished slightly, though a new dread curled through him. What had happened to Abigail? Was she hurt, was she—
“She’s fine.” Elise was watching him carefully, and he hated that her blindsiding him had made him give so much away. “But she needs your help. She needs you to come home. To London.”
He stared at her before he spun, charging out of the garden into the darkening pastures. He didn’t know where he was going, but he needed to move. He could no longer simply stand still under the assault of the secrets that Elise DeVries wielded.
He wasn’t sure how far he had gone before he stumbled to a stop, the greyness of twilight making a valiant effort to stay the shadows. Somewhere closer to the river, an owl hooted, an eerie sound that echoed across the pasture. With a start he realized that Elise stood beside him. He’d not heard her, nor had he expected her to be able to keep up over the uneven ground.
“Who are you?” he asked abruptly, a welcome anger replacing the shock. Replacing the feeling of betrayal and the humiliation. He had trusted her. Let down his guard and allowed himself to believe that he felt a connection with this woman. Jesus Christ, but he had kissed her.
“I work for the firm of Chegarre and Associates in London. I was hired to find you.”
“What is Chegarre and Associates?” he snapped. “Lawyers? Investigators?” Though if they were investigators somehow tied to the Runners, he would already have been arrested.
“Not exactly. We help people find solutions to situations that are…difficult. People turn to us when regular channels of the law or society have failed them.”
That meant nothing to him. “And I’m…believe—” He stopped and concentrated on his words, letting the anger run freely, letting it crystallize his thoughts. “And I’m supposed to believe anything you say?”
He heard Elise sigh unhappily. There was a faint rustle of fabric, and she held something out to him in the palm of her hand. Something that gleamed dully in the fading light. “Abigail gave me this to give to you. So that you would know I spoke the truth when I found you.”
He recognized it instantly, though he’d never expected to see it again. He reached out and took the brooch from Elise, careful not to touch her. The steel rose was warm against his skin, the edges smooth where it lay in his hand. He remembered the day he’d had John make it for her. He wrapped his hand around it tightly and closed his eyes.
“Abigail’s husband is a smith. He recognized Mr. Barr’s work, so I came to Nottingham to find him, and hopefully, a clue to your whereabouts.” Her voice was quiet and without inflection. “I didn’t expect this. I didn’t expect you.”
Noah opened his eyes and stared out at the river, a silver ribbon now just beyond the trees. He knew exactly what Abigail’s husband did for a living. It had been one of the reasons why he’d chosen such a gift. But he’d never considered the possibility that the workmanship of the brooch would ever be recognized.
When news of Abigail’s defection from the ton had first broken, Noah had read the details of it in the scandal sheets in London. Each report had been vindictively exhaustive, a spiteful and malicious account of how the daughter of a duke had thrown her entire future away and soiled the Ashland name with disgrace and humiliation.
When Abigail had fled London for Derby, Noah had followed, choosing Nottingham to settle in. Close enough that he might check up on Abigail from time to time, but far enough away that an accidental encounter was improbable. Noah had never been prouder of his sister in his entire life. And he’d asked John to make her that brooch so that she might know it. It had been a risk. But he had trusted her to keep the secret of his existence to herself. And it would seem she’d kept that trust. Until now.
“Is Abigail all right? She has her health?”
“Yes, but—”
“Her husband, her children—they are well?”
“As far as I know. That’s not why—”
“Do they need money?” Noah didn’t have much compared to the Ashland fortune, but he would sell whatever he had to if she needed help.
“No. But—”
“Who else knows that you’re here?” he demanded.
“No one, of course.” Elise was looking faintly annoyed. “Chegarre and Associates deal in secret and confidential matters, and we take that very seriously. I’ve been doing this a long time, and I doubt there is anything you can tell me that I haven’t already heard. But I am uninterested in the contents of your past, aside from the few facts that relate directly to our current predicament. It is not my job to judge people, or form opinions. My job is to assist those who need it. Like Lady Abigail. Like you.”
Noah wondered exactly how much this woman really knew about his past. If she knew what he had done, what he had become.
“Your father is dead,” Elise said before he could finish that thought. “And your mother—”
“Stop.” Hatred, resentment, and the old echoes of terror—they all rose up with a strength that almost choked him. It was stupid, he knew. He should be beyond this sort of reaction, and further, he should be feeling regret or sorrow or grief. A normal person would feel such things when informed of the passing of a parent. But he couldn’t muster any of those emotions. They’d been snuffed out long ago in the hell into which he’d been cast by the two people he’d trusted most. “You came all the way from London to tell me that my father was dead?”
“Yes, but that’s not all—”
“You should have saved yourself the trouble,” he snapped. “There is nothing you can tell me about the Duke or Duchess of Ashland that I want to hear. As far as I am concerned, they both died long ago.”
Elise’s lips thinned. “Abigail said you might say that—”
“Further,” Noah gritted through clenched teeth, “know that there is nothing that will ever entice me back. Tell me, am I still assumed dead in the hallowed halls of London?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Yes.”
“I plan to stay that way, Miss DeVries. Nothing you do or say will change my mind.”
“You have a responsibility to—”
“I do not have a responsibility to anything,” he growled. “Not to my father, not to my mother. Not to Ashland’s piles of properties and strings of titles and coffers of money.”
“If you ever let me finish a sentence, I was going to say you have a responsibility to your sister.”
He resented the faint wash of guilt even as he pinched the bridge of his nose. “You have told me that Abigail is not in any danger. Or distress.”
“Perhaps, but the same cannot be said for your mother—”
Noah held up his hand. “You will return to London, or wherever it is that you came from—”
“London. Your sister is in London at the moment.”
He hadn’t known that. But it didn’t matter. “Then tell Abigail that you were unable to locate me. Or tell her whatever you need to make her understand that I can’t go back. Ever.” To London. To who I once was.
“You want me to lie to your sister?”
“You seem quite good at it. Lying, that is.” Noah saw her flinch, but he hardened his heart.
“I never lied to you.”
“You knew who I was and let me believe—” He couldn’t even say it out loud.
You let me believe that there was something between us.
He had believed that there existed a connection that he had never felt with another woman, something extraordinary. The disappointment was as humiliating as it was excruciating.
Elise looked away. “I didn’t know who you were right away. And if you are referring to what happened in the garden…that was real.” She sounded subdued. “It should never have happened, and for my lack of professionalism, I apologize. But only for that.”
A tiny fragment of hope twisted in his gut, and he hated himself for it. He knew better. “You need to go.” She couldn’t stay here.
“No.” She turned back to him, gazing at him steadily. “I will not leave here without you.”
“You will.” It was a command.
“Your cousin, Francis Ellery, knows you are alive.” She said it with no warning.
“What?” For the second time, it was as if she had gut-punched him.
“The letter you sent to your sister with that brooch was stolen from her home very recently. I believe it was taken by Mr. Ellery, or individuals working at his behest. Further…er, investigation on my part has also indicated that Francis Ellery has hired two assassins to find you and make sure that your death is not just an erroneous rumor.”
“Assassins.” He had never heard anything so utterly ludicrous in his entire life. Especially in light of the fact that she said assassins the same way others said tax collectors. “You can’t honestly expect me to believe that.”
Elise cocked her head. “You should. You sent that letter to Abigail via the regular post. And while it certainly arrived anonymously, that letter bore a Nottingham postmark that will inevitably lead these men here, if it hasn’t already.”
Noah threw up his hands in a show of exasperation, ignoring the uncertainty that was gnawing at him.
Elise frowned. “I don’t think you truly understand what is at stake here. How much wealth. How much power. And the lengths your cousin will go to to ensure he becomes the next Duke of Ashland. I cannot—will not—leave here when your safety may be at risk.”
“First, Miss DeVries, I am perfectly capable of looking after myself. I do not need you to tend me like a nursemaid. Second, my cousin, like everyone else, believes me dead. There is no reason for him to be looting my sister’s house looking for evidence of my existence or hiring assassins.” He sounded like an idiot saying that out loud. It was preposterous.
Elise shook her head. “Unfortunately not. The reason Abigail returned to London—the reason she hired me is because, upon the death of your father, your mother made the mistake of publicly insisting that you were alive.”
Noah felt his stomach drop again. “How…mother…” He couldn’t find the words.
Elise winced. “Abigail told her. She regrets it now. But perhaps you can understand the dilemma I’m faced with. I will not leave you unprotected.”
Noah laughed, a sound that was dry and humorless, thinking of the rifle that now leaned against the wall in Elise’s room. He no longer doubted for a second that she knew how to use it. “How do I know you’re not an assassin?”
She was quiet for the space of two heartbeats. “I’m not an assassin.” She sounded strange. “If I were, you’d already be dead.”
“Jesus.” He rubbed his hands over his face. He felt as if he’d stepped into the pages of a story where reality had been discarded in favor of fancy and farce. He didn’t know what to believe. “I don’t want the title,” he said, pretending, just for a moment, that everything Elise had told him was true. “Go back to London and tell Francis he can have it with my compliments.”
“He’s in the process of murdering your mother.”
“What?”
“Since her public claim of your existence, Mr. Ellery has had your mother committed to Bedlam to discredit those claims. And the duchess will be dead within a month unless you can prove her right.”
He thought he’d heard her wrong. “Bedlam,” he repeated slowly.
“That is correct. Last I saw her, she was shackled and in an opiated haze.” Elise was watching him intently again.
“Abigail wants me to return to London to rescue my mother from Bedlam.” The irony was too much, and Noah found himself laughing, great heaving breaths that bordered on hysterical. There was no humor in his laughter, and after a few seconds, it faded as fast as it had risen, leaving nothing but a great yawning pit of…nothingness. After everything—the years of terror and despair and pain—he should have taken an unnatural satisfaction in such a predicament. But it was all he could do to keep his own memories of that hell from becoming completely unleashed and crippling his ability to think.
It had been his father who had woken him in the dead of night, cajoling his sleepy son from the warmth of his bed with murmurs of new puppies in the stables to see, leading him out of the house to where Noah had found not pups but grim-faced men with unforgiving strength. His father had given his captors a brisk nod, ordered Noah to behave, and left him struggling as the men locked Noah into a barred carriage as though he were a dangerous beast. He’d pressed his face up against those bars, terror coursing through his small body, and seen his mother watching from an upstairs window. And as the carriage had bumped and jarred its way to the top of the drive, she’d simply let the curtain drop.
Noah wondered, not for the first time, if Abigail had ever known where he’d been sent. If she’d known the torture he’d been subjected to at the hands of mad-doctors who had told him that they would fix him. Promised that they would have him speaking like an Eton grad within a few months, their treatments guaranteed to work. He wondered if Abigail had known of the cruelty and callousness of the stewards and keepers, who had viewed the patients as less than vermin.
Noah had spent those first months praying that his mother would intervene and save him from Bedlam. But the summer had turned into fall, and then winter, and the cold winds had howled through the cracks in the walls. The keepers continued their torture, and other patients around him fell ill and died from dysentery and cholera and things Noah couldn’t name. And he’d stopped praying. Stopped hoping. He’d accepted that no one would ever come to save him.
And no one ever had.
“You’re the only one who can have her released,” Elise was saying. “Well, there are other avenues I can explore, but I fear they will take too much time and will not save your mother.”
“No.” He turned away from her and started back in the direction of the garden. Miss DeVries had no idea what she was asking him to do. “Like I said, both my mother and father died a long time ago.”
She was suddenly in front of him, as silent and quick as she had been earlier, and her ability to navigate in the darkness was unnerving. Her expression was hard to read in the failing light. “How many times has Lady Abigail asked you for help?” Her voice was deceptively neutral, but the barb jabbed deep, and the wound bled guilt.
Never. Not once.
“I thought so.” She must have read the answer in his silence, and her voice now had a brittle edge. “If you maintain your refusal to help, then at least have the decency to face your sister and tell her that yourself.”
“I can’t. You don’t understand.”
“You might be surprised,” she said, and it wasn’t unkind.
“No.”
“Then I fear, Your Grace, we are at an impasse.”
Noah froze before reflexively glancing around. “Don’t…me…” He stopped. “Don’t address me as such. Ever.”
Elise was silent for a long moment. “No one else here knows who you really are, do they?” she asked abruptly.
A bead of cold sweat ran down his back as it dawned on him the power this woman now held over him. Yet he could answer her with nothing less than the truth. “No.”
She was watching him again, her eyes glittering in the last of the light. “What about John Barr?”
Noah shook his head. There was little point in lying, and the last thing he needed was for her to pose the same question to John. “He knows I am not Noah Lawson. That is all,” he said hoarsely.
“And he’s never asked?”
“No.”
“Mmm.” He thought he detected a note of approval in her mumbled response. “Tell me why you won’t return to London. The real reason.”
He took a steadying breath. He felt a tiny measure of relief that she didn’t know all of it. She didn’t know the truth. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I rather think it does.” There was a gentleness to her words that he couldn’t bear.
Noah stepped around her and kept walking. There was nothing in this world that would ever entice him to speak more about his past to a woman who already knew too many of his secrets. “Get your things. I will drive you into town.”
“And tell your housekeeper what?”
He stumbled before stopping. “Are you threatening me?”
Elise heaved a sigh. “No, I’m not threatening you. But the thing with secrets and lies, Mr. Lawson, is that they have a habit of becoming complicated very quickly. They pile up, they become twisted and convoluted, until you can’t remember what is real anymore.”
Noah could feel the threads of the life he had carefully woven starting to unravel, row by row, stitch by stitch, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. His emotions were churning wildly, a mess of things he couldn’t begin to sort out. He couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t put his words into the right order to verbalize any of what he was thinking.
In the semidarkness Elise put her hand on his arm. “Don’t say anything right now,” she told him, and he wondered, again, how he was so transparent in front of this woman. He pulled away from her, hating how logical she sounded. He heard the compassion, yet the steely strength that lay beneath it was unmistakable.
“Know that whatever secrets of yours I hold will remain just that. You have my word. I will never use them against you. But no matter your decision, you owe your sister an explanation. And it will come from you, not from me. Whether you elect to return to London as Mr. Lawson or the Duke of Ashland is your choice.” She paused. “But I will not leave you unprotected. And I will not leave this farm without you.”