“You’re engaged?” Titus asked the next morning.

Then he laughed.

And kept laughing.

Max gritted his teeth. He’d waited to tell Titus until they were far enough away from Maidenstone that no one would hear Titus’s reaction. If Max really were Titus’s employer, he would have fired the groom for such inappropriate excitement.

He should fire him anyway. “Are you done yet?”

Titus reined in his horse. He held his gelding at a standstill as he took a few deep breaths and wiped the tears from his eyes. “I’m done. But you’re engaged. To a lady.”

He started laughing again.

Max sighed. It was far too early for fashionable gentlemen to be out of bed. But they kept country hours at Maidenstone. And anyway, Max had never grown accustomed to the luxury of sleeping late. He couldn’t laze about in bed — he had work to do.

That work involved getting Titus’s impressions of the servants before Max had to make an appearance in front of the other guests. But if Titus wouldn’t stop laughing, it would be hard to get his opinion.

“I don’t intend to marry her,” Max said.

That cut Titus off short. “Why wouldn’t you? She’s got a dowry or something, don’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Then we can take that,” Titus pointed out.

“I can’t marry her and run away with her dowry. I still have some ethics. And she’s made it clear that she never wants to leave Maidenstone. Hard to run off to the Caribbean or New Orleans with a wife who won’t go.”

“Once she’s your wife, she’ll go where you tell her to.”

Max shook his head. “Lucy doesn’t strike me as the most biddable sort.”

“So it’s Lucy now?” Titus said shrewdly. “You’ve made quick work of her, Max. How in the devil did you seduce her this quickly? And why did you change the plan?”

“I didn’t seduce her,” Max said.

But it had been a near thing. He usually had no problem keeping his work separate from his other affairs. Lucretia Briarley should have been no different. But there was something about how forthright she was, and how courageously she came to him, and how determined she was to win Maidenstone….

She intrigued him. And it didn’t hurt that she was lovely, with enough warmth in her gaze to light a fire in him. She never would have looked twice at a man like him in London. But last night, she’d seemed incapable of looking away.

And their kiss hadn’t been nearly long enough for his tastes. He’d wanted to pull her back into his arms and see which woman she really was: the cool, proper lady who had greeted him in the receiving room or the daring woman who was willing to bargain life, body, and soul in order to win Maidenstone.

Lucy was a powerful temptation.

And he was a fool to spend even a moment longer than he needed to in her company.

Titus looked skeptical. “Your face says you thought about seducing her.”

“Our engagement wasn’t based on that. It’s a business deal. And she’s the one who offered it.”

He filled Titus in on the main details — that Lucy would help Max prove that he was the Earl of Maidenstone, in exchange for him marrying her and letting her stay at Maidenstone Abbey. When he was done, Titus gave a low whistle.

“You came to steal jewels, but you might steal a whole house. Two houses. And an earldom.” Titus gave the lowest bow possible while seated on a horse. “You are the best thief who’s ever lived.”

They were in a meadow on the edge of Maidenstone Wood, and Max hadn’t seen anyone nearby, but he still shushed his brother. “That’s still not the plan. We’re going to take whatever we can carry and leave on schedule, as we agreed.”

Titus’s face was too expressive for subterfuge — it was part of why he was playing a groom. And the expression now said that he thought Max had gone completely off his head.

“No one ever has the opportunity to steal a bloody earldom. You have to.”

Max shook his head. “There will be no stealing the earldom once the Duke of Rothwell investigates our papers. Your forgeries are good….”

“My forgeries are masterful,” Titus interjected.

“Masterful,” Max amended. “But they’re still forgeries. And I won’t see you executed for them because I got too greedy. We’ll steal the jewels, leave before we’re caught, and be satisfied with that.”

“But this Lucy…she wants to help you? Why would she do that?”

That question had kept Max up the night before, staring into the dark bedchamber of a man whose property he intended to steal. Lucy was well-born, well-bred, and quite capable of marrying well. She didn’t need a man like Max — at least, not for any of the reasons she’d given him.

If he were any more besotted, he might have convinced himself that she wanted him. But he wasn’t a fool. And even if he was a fool, his siblings’ lives were at stake — he couldn’t make the wrong decision just because Lucretia Briarley asked him to.

“I have no idea why she would help me,” he said. “Which is another reason why I can’t actually marry her. There has to be some trick to what she’s proposing.”

“But the aristocrats have rules,” Titus pointed out. “If you jilt her, isn’t that a problem?”

“I told her we should keep our arrangement a secret for a few days, in case she changes her mind.”

“And if someone finds out about the engagement? What will you do then?”

Max shrugged. His uneasiness seemed to disturb his horse — the beast shuffled sideways, making gentle huffing sounds. Max knew how to ride, but it wasn’t his favorite activity. There weren’t many opportunities to ride prime horseflesh as a boy on the streets, unless one worked as a groom. And Max had wanted to shovel manure less than he had wanted to ride a horse, so that had left him without a lot of experience in the saddle.

Titus, however, had worked as a stableboy for several years before being discovered by the man who mentored him in forgeries — and before Max had found him again. He sat easily in the saddle, eyeing Max’s form critically. “You need more practice if you’re going to be the earl,” Titus said. “It’s all fox hunts and races to Newmarket.”

“I’m not going to be the earl,” Max said sharply. “Lucy is not going to be my countess. That’s the end of the discussion.”

Titus wasn’t his servant, and he wasn’t subservient; they’d reunited five years earlier, when Max was twenty-three and Titus was nineteen, and the intervening years had meant that Titus no longer deferred to Max as a younger brother might. But then, Max never asked him to.

In this case, though, Titus seemed to recognize that he would be better served by staying quiet. He nodded. “Let’s ride on — you need more practice even if you aren’t going to be an earl.”

They nudged their mounts into a trot, then a canter, then a gallop. By the time they’d exercised the horses, a half hour had gone by — mostly without talk. But on their way back to the stables, Max reined in again. “Have you learned anything yet?”

“Anything other than how I shouldn’t have let you piss off your riding lessons in London?”

“When we’re done with this job, you can give me riding lessons and I’ll give you grammar lessons,” Max said. “What’s your report?”

Titus looked toward Maidenstone Abbey. In bright sunshine, the place already looked like something out of a daydream — but with that day’s overcast skies, the Gothic spire seemed vaguely menacing. Formal gardens stretched out around the house, and the effect was pretty enough — but it was also a proclamation of power, cultivated over generations.

They were both silent for a moment. Max didn’t know if Titus shared his thoughts — maybe Titus was thinking about forgeries, or horses, or women. But the silence felt powerful, too — as though neither of them could quite bring themselves to speak of plots against Maidenstone when Maidenstone seemed to watch them.

It was superstition. It had to be.

Titus shifted in his saddle. “I haven’t talked to everyone — grooms, mostly. The visiting grooms are bored stiff. Some of the gents go riding, but they mostly spend their time drinking through the earl’s wine cellar. The ladies ride, too, but not all that often. And the earl’s stables didn’t have much in the way of horseflesh before the guests arrived. The guests haven’t added a lot of horses either — mostly carriage horses, not riding stock.”

“We’re not here to steal horses,” Max interjected.

Titus rolled his eyes. “Horses tell you more than you might think, all-knowing one. Namely, who has money and who’s pretending to have it.”

“And what’s your estimation of that?”

“Not good,” Titus said flatly. “Which is not to say they won’t have jewels and other things we might walk away with. But most of the guests are here because they are desperate for the chance to win Maidenstone Abbey. They’re not the richest people in the land.”

“Maidenstone surely holds enough treasures even without raiding the guests’ rooms.”

A bit of wind gusted around them as he said that, and Max pulled his hat lower over his eyes. Titus looked at the house again. “I hope so. Would be a shame if all those documents I forged came out to nothing.”

It would be more than a shame — it would be a death knell for their hopes of escaping England. They’d have to run without any money to support them, which meant finding a new city where they could blend in and start thieving immediately. And that, Max knew, wasn’t so simple.

“What do the local servants say?” Max asked.

“Well, that’s the thing,” Titus said. He rubbed the back of his neck absently, frowning as he continued to watch the house. “They don’t say anything at all.”

“Nothing?”

“Oh, they’ll say they’re pleased to meet you, etc., etc. Nice enough, I suppose. But they won’t say a word about Miss Briarley or Lady Maidenstone. They won’t say much about the previous earls, either, although they’re happy to talk about how bloodthirsty the first Briarleys were. Seems like the whole neighborhood wishes that the Briarleys would go back to murdering each other — must have been entertaining, if you weren’t caught in the middle of it.”

It had been the same when they were reconnoitering before their official arrival at Maidenstone. Exeter was far enough from Maidenstone that people there were willing to talk about it, but none of them had relevant stories. But as they got closer to Maidenstone, they hadn’t found anyone at all who would tell them about the Briarleys.

He’d attributed it to bad luck earlier — but if all the servants at Maidenstone were that tight-lipped, there was something strange at work.

“What are they hiding?” he asked.

It was mostly rhetorical — he didn’t expect Titus to have an answer. Titus shrugged. “Can’t say. I’ll keep digging. There’s a scullery maid who looks like she might want some passing amusement from a London groom. Maybe she’ll whisper secrets in my ear along with sweet nothings.”

Max snorted. “Careful if you start talking about jewels around her — she might think you intend to marry her.”

“I’m not the one who stumbled into a secret engagement,” Titus said smugly. “But I agree that they must be hiding something. No servants are this discreet, no matter what their masters would like to believe about their loyalty.”

Max nodded. Servants were often loyal, to a degree — but gossip usually won out over discretion. Titus should have already found half a dozen servants who were eager to trade stories for ale.

They rode toward the stables. Max needed to prepare himself for the day ahead — and for the meeting with the Duke of Rothwell that would settle whether they could stay for another few days or whether it would be better to escape immediately.

But it wasn’t Rothwell he was thinking about, even though it would have been smarter to focus on that foe first. Lucy kept strolling, unbidden, into his thoughts.

She was beautiful. She was direct. She knew what she wanted. And for some reason, she’d decided that he was what she needed.

She couldn’t think that he was actually her best chance of inheriting Maidenstone. Marrying a total stranger, especially one whom she believed to be a charlatan, made no sense at all. And whatever Lucy’s faults were, he doubted that she was a nonsensical woman.

Which meant, of course, that she was hiding something. Titus’s reports only confirmed it.

He shouldn’t care. He should steal the jewels and leave. But he needed to get close enough to her to find out where the jewels were — and if he was going to get that close, he needed to ensure that her secrets wouldn’t impact his mission.

So that left only one option.

“We have to learn what is really going on here,” Max said.

“I can ask some more questions,” Titus said.

“No — I think the local servants will be suspicious if you ask too many questions. Start with the scullery maid and see if she volunteers anything. But otherwise, focus on finding out whatever you can about the other attendees at the party and whether they have anything we might want.”

“And what will you do?” Titus asked. “Plan your nuptials?”

Max threw him a look. “No nuptials. But I think it’s time to find out what my fiancée is hiding from me.”