Fox refilled his glass and swirled the amber liquid. The light from the lamp lit through the brandy, the glints and highlights so like the color of Perry’s hair in the afternoon sun. It had been a near thing on the balcony. It had taken all his resolve to set her back and even more to not follow her afterwards into her mother’s bedchamber.

He tipped back the glass and let the liquid burn through him. Not a top-notch batch was this.

Scruggs had supplied it, but he’d been cagey about the source of this brandy. Smuggled, no doubt, and a man in this kind of business had to keep secrets.

He sensed something more to the man’s reluctance though. Whether Scruggs had recognized the new tenant, Mr. Goodfellow, as the man he’d met briefly all those years ago, was uncertain. It seemed likely that whatever ties and obligations the innkeeper had to Lady Shaldon’s grandfather—and his free trading connections—had died with her. He’d deemed it wise to not mention his true name or his connection to Shaldon.

The revenue officers, once they had the Kentish coast in hand, would throw more cutters this way. Scruggs had no reason to trust the new tenant at Gorse Cottage, and most certainly not this one. He had a fair handle on all the local ring’s calendars and hideaways.

He would not be able to go out tonight, though, not with Perry abed and unprotected. If Scruggs knew she was here, so would the whole district. The foolish girl.

A door snicked shut on the floor below, just loud enough to hear over the ebb of the surf. He loosened his grip on the glass and set it down.

Locked doors wouldn’t protect Perry. She needed to leave and go and find a lordling who would marry her and allow her to return to this cottage as the true owner. By that time his own job would be done, and he would be gone.

And by God, he’d finish this final commission for Lady Shaldon, if he could but bring his attention away from the girl on the floor below.

He pulled the sketchpad from the table and opened it, tracing a finger over the line his pencil had left. Putting pencil to paper had not cleared this obsession. It was his curse that he’d hold these images in his mind forever.

Sooner or later, Perry would come snooping in this room. It was a shame to destroy good work, but there it was. The sketches needed to go as well.

The hair on his neck rose. The staircase had creaked and then he heard them—footsteps, stealthy and soft, approaching his room.

His weapons lay over near the bed. There was no time to retrieve them.

The rap on his door was sharp and commanding. So, her snooping would be sooner.

He was too late in his purpose tonight. He flipped the sketchbook closed, leaned back in the chair, and poured another finger of brandy.

“The bed is fresh made,” Fox had said at the door of Perry’s bedchamber. Then she’d heard their bags touch the floor and when she’d turned, he’d disappeared.

He’d left her steaming and stewing in a hot and cold mix of emotions as tangled as the knots of her stays. It took Jenny, once she’d arrived from the kitchen, long, clucking minutes to undo the mess Perry had made of the laces.

She’d tried to breathe her way through it but every inhalation brought her mother’s scent, a light touch of lilac, with it. This room with its green-papered walls and tester bed was so like her mother’s room at Cransdall.

For years she’d shunned the countess’s rooms at all of their family homes. All of them held too much of the spirit of the woman who’d left them so suddenly, so cruelly.

Nor could she here, tonight, dodge her mother’s spirit. The pineapple carved into the mantelpiece would have made her mother smile. The apple green Bells of Ireland woven into the counterpane were so like the ones Mother had nurtured in the garden. And the painting—that was Mama’s first pony. There’d been a similar one in Mama’s dressing room at Cransdall. Mama had painted both pictures herself from memory.

And if that bed were freshly made, Fox had laid these sheets. Every part of her quaked, unsettled and restless and hot. She threw back the stifling bedclothes and paced the room barefoot. Not so much as a feather tickled her toes. The room had been kept as if waiting for Mama to return.

Mama had left Cransdall the same time as Fox.

She paced to the window and opened it. Damp fog slicked her body. She found her dressing gown, shrugged into it, and went back to the window. Here and there, the layer of moisture shifted, the iron-gray sea dappling and cresting and holding its secrets.

At the inn where she and Jenny had stayed the night before, Perry had used a false name, to throw off whatever pursuers Father might set upon her. Surely her mother had stopped there also on her secret journey ten years earlier before the last grueling leg along those cliffs.

Pain stabbed at her chest. Those cliffs.

Her mother had perished in a carriage accident, one so violent it had taken her lady’s maid and her coachman also. She’d heard whispers of a wheel falling off the carriage, not such a great catastrophe on a straight stretch of road. Yet no one had lived, not even the horses.

When word of the accident had reached Perry, she’d rushed back to Cransdall and met Bakeley and Charley escorting three coffins. Both her brothers were so closed-in with grief and grimness she’d been unable to break through. Mama and two of the servants she’d known all her life were dead, and there’d been no one to grieve with.

And then Perry had discovered that Mama’s priceless masterpiece, a colonial Spanish artist’s rendering of Saints Felicity and Perpetua before their martyrdom, had gone missing.

Fresh grief pushed her back to the edge of the bed. She wrapped her arms tightly and tried not to sob. Her mother’s death had been no accident and somehow Fox was involved. Or if he was not involved, he knew something.

He’d distracted her earlier, touching, holding, almost kissing her. He’d cooked for her, readied her bed, and steered her away from her questions.

It was a kind of seduction. She’d observed Charley, her brother, in his days as a rake bantering with widows, dodging straight answers, leading them up to the brink, luring them in. Some of the women were just as clever, if one could count such nonsense without purpose as cleverness. Perry didn’t.

But of course, Fox had a purpose. He didn’t truly care for her, he was just stirring the embers of the girlish attraction she’d felt all those years ago.

He’d had lovers among the women he’d painted. He was skilled at seduction, surely a liar, and likely knew more about her mother’s death. She found her dagger and strapped it around her arm, under her sleeve. Without Jenny’s help, it was awkward. She must get used to that awkwardness if she was to live as an independent woman.

She went up the stairs. Had he told her he was on the top floor, or was it just something she knew about him, that he would choose a high floor with the best afternoon light?

She gripped the banister. In their conversations so far, she’d let her attention jump around, let him lead her astray. She’d not paid attention to what he wasn’t saying.

At the door, she knocked firmly and heard an equally firm order to enter.