He handed her the slice of bread when he was satisfied.

“Don’t wait for me,” he told her and speared another piece of bread.

She wished she could be polite enough to demur, but she was too ravenous to think. Instead, she broke off a piece and put it in her mouth. The cheese was the perfect temperature—hot enough to be glorious, barely managing to escape burning the top of her mouth. The bread crunched between her teeth, soft in the middle, toasted to a crisp on the edges. She almost let out a moan.

“I know,” Robert said beside her. “I’ve had toast for breakfast made ingloriously on the racks of the kitchen oven. That’s just browned bread. It’s not really toast if it hasn’t been cooked over an open flame.”

“Mmm.”

A cup of tea was put into her hand. She took a sip—liquid that was sweet and milky and bitter all at once filled her mouth.

“How often does the Duke of Clermont make himself dinner?” she asked.

“Not very often,” he replied. “Maybe once every month or so, the family gets out the toasting forks and I do my best to wrangle up toast and cheese.”

“Mmm.” She wished she could say more, but her mouth was full again.

He poured himself a cup of tea one-handed, juggling the fork skillfully. “The trick,” he said, “to getting good toast is to try not to be too perfect. You won’t want to brown it too evenly, or to avoid singeing it. You don’t want to cut the bread too perfectly, either. It’s better if it has lots of jagged edges to blacken nicely.”

“That’s the problem I always have, too,” Free said. “I have to try so hard not to be perfect.”

He grinned at her.

His cheese was beginning to bubble, and he was eyeing the piece with a hungry look. And that was when they heard a noise in the hall.

They turned. A door was opening; voices murmured in the distance. For a moment, Free had the wildest idea that Edward—no, she couldn’t think of him that way—Viscount Claridge was here. He’d hunted her down. He was going to apologize, tell her how badly he’d treated her, and she was going to…

She had no idea what she was going to do. Her tea sloshed onto her skirt, and she realized her hand had begun to tremble.

But the figure who came into the room was a woman—the Duchess of Clermont, no less. She didn’t blink at the sight of her husband sitting before the fire. She didn’t ask what Free was doing here. She simply came into the room and took off her gloves.

“Oh, good,” she said. “A toast and cheese night. I need one of those.”

Her husband looked longingly at the slice on his toasting fork, but he didn’t even hesitate. He handed the bread to his wife.

She slid down to sit on the floor beside him. “Want half?”

“God, yes.”

Maybe it was the toast, managed in so perfectly imperfect a fashion. Maybe it was the companionable silence. Maybe it was the fact that she’d expected to be treated like some distant, grasping relation, and now she was sitting on the floor with the duke and duchess, eating burned bread and dripping cheese. Maybe that was what prompted her to finally speak.

“I got married,” she confessed.

Robert’s hands stilled. He looked up at her, his eyes widening.

“It was…it was a whim,” she said, speaking faster. “Or more than a whim. I don’t know what it was. We’ve corresponded for months. Maybe I was feeling reckless.” Maybe she’d thought herself in love. She didn’t say that, though. She shut her eyes. “I got married yesterday night.”

Across from her, the duchess took a genteel bite of toast and looked down. “You married by special license, then?”

“I should have asked how he’d obtained one so quickly.” Her hands were trembling again, so she set down her teacup. “I knew he was a scoundrel, you see. I knew that. But he had always been there for me. I thought I could trust him.”

She felt sick to her stomach.

“And then I went to the demonstration, and was arrested, and he…he…”

Neither the duke nor the duchess spoke. They just watched her intently.

“I was arrested,” she repeated. “As I’d known I would be. We were all crammed into the station. He came to get me out.”

It didn’t sound awful when she told the story. It sounded sweet. Almost romantic.

“But he didn’t forge papers falsifying my release.” And oh, there was a complaint for the ages. There wasn’t a wife in England today complaining about her husband’s failure to commit crimes. “He told me he was Edward Clark.”

The duchess twitched at that name, her eyebrows lifting. She turned to her husband, but he set a quelling hand on her knee.

“He told me he was a scoundrel and a metalworker,” Free said. “He’s a forger. I’ve seen him do it myself. But he didn’t tell me everything. He was…” She gulped.

“Edward Delacey,” Robert said, his voice low.

Beside him, the duchess let out a long, slow breath. “Huh. I was right.”

“No.” Free’s hands balled into fists. “He doesn’t want to be called Delacey.” That much, at least, they agreed upon. “But he’s Viscount Claridge.”

The duchess tilted her head to the side, to contemplate the ceiling, not quite looking at her husband. “There should be a rule somewhere that lords ought to act like lords. When they engage in forgery or, ah, general skulduggery, it can be very confusing to the rest of us.”

Free nodded vigorously.

“You start to think of them as normal people,” the duchess said. “And then the next thing you know, they’re being introduced.”

“Hmph.” Robert snorted beside her.

“And all you can think is, surprise! A lord!” She shook her head and patted Free on the shoulder. “I hate it when that happens.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

EDWARD FOUND THE LITTLE FARM at the end of the road. After he’d looked for Free last night—looked for her everywhere, with no hope and a feeling of sinking dread—he’d purchased a ticket out here. He’d spent the night in a tiny inn, and then come out in search of… Well, he wasn’t sure what he had hoped to find.

Fields of lavender waved purple heads in the wind, wafting a delicious scent around. A kitchen garden closer to the house was coming up cabbages. Daisies planted at the edge of the path lifted their heads into the morning sun as if they had no thought but to rejoice in the moment. Foolish flowers; someone would come along to cut them down before long. Even if they didn’t, winter would freeze them out, leaf and root alike.

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