“Charlotte, I didn’t mean — ”

He turned so abruptly that she automatically took a step backwards, even though there were several feet between them. He turned so abruptly that he forgot about the letter in his hand that hadn’t quite made it all the way into his sleeve.

She could see her name — or at least the half of it that wasn’t hidden beneath the lace edged cuff of his shirt — on the top fold. It was a heavy cream paper, subscribed in a bold, masculine hand, sealed with a blob of midnight blue wax. Charlotte didn’t need to break the seal to know who had written it.

Amazed at her own boldness, she tapped Robert smartly on the arm before the note could disappear entirely into his sleeve. “I’ll take that.”

Robert made no move to hand it to her. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

Was there nothing about him that was true? So that was why he had come back — not because he couldn’t stay away from her, or for an illusory snuffbox, but to intercept any correspondence from Medmenham. His mission this morning having failed, he had decided to try a surer way.

Tipping her head back, Charlotte regarded him accusingly. “There never was any snuffbox, was there?”

Before Robert could even open his mouth to respond, a surprisingly heavy tread announced the reappearance of Henrietta’s butler. Having heard Stwyth move as softly as a cat when he felt like it, Charlotte was sure the interruption was quite deliberate.

Stone-faced, Stwyth extended a small, octagonal object covered with panels of painted porcelain. “Your snuffbox, sir.”

“Thank you — Stwyth, is it?” Robert raised an altogether too smug eyebrow in Charlotte’s general direction. “You were saying?”

“Enjoy your snuff,” said Charlotte tartly. She hoped he choked on it.

Tucking the snuffbox neatly away in his waistcoat pocket, he retrieved his hat and gloves from Stwyth. Hat in hand, he smiled ruefully down at Charlotte. “I don’t believe I will. It isn’t really to my taste.”

“Then why take it?”

“Call it penance. Good evening, Charlotte.”

Clapping his hat on his head, Robert turned on his heel. But he paused before he reached the door. Stwyth, who had scurried to open it, hastily pushed it closed again against the arctic air.

Tripping over his own words, he said, “I can’t promise our paths won’t cross. But I won’t come here again if you don’t want me to. You see, what you want is of some consequence after all. At least to me. Good night.”

It took Stwyth a moment to open the door. He studied Robert quite suspiciously before he would consent to do so, as though suspecting him of intending another abortive exit that would require more false openings and closings. But this time, Robert had clearly said all he intended to stay. He all but collided with the door panel in his haste to leave. And Charlotte, perversely, having wished him gone, found herself wanting him to stay.

It wasn’t until Stwyth had triumphantly and with great finality shut the great door behind him that Charlotte realized that Robert had successfully made off with Medmenham’s note.

Chapter Eighteen

Medmenham’s letter crinkled reassuringly in Robert’s waistcoat pocket as he trudged down the stairs of Loring House.

“Did the old snuffbox dodge work?” A dark shape detached itself from the corner of the house, falling in step beside him. They were already late for an appointment at an exclusive gentlemen’s club on St. James Street.

“Beautifully. I owe you one.” Robert made the mistake of looking back. Through one of the long windows, he could still see Charlotte, in silhouette, standing where he had left her.

Grabbing his arm, his companion tugged him to one side, narrowly saving him from collision with a decidedly unfriendly lamppost.

“By my count, you owe me about two hundred. Including that one. But what are a few favors between friends?” said Tommy airily. “Did you get Medmenham’s note?”

Robert patted his waistcoat pocket. “Safely tucked away.”

“And the lady?”

Robert kicked at a bit of loose paving, sending pebbles scattering down the street. “Still thinks I’m lower than dirt.”

Tommy was unsympathetic. “You did rather do that to yourself, you know.”

“For good reasons!”

Tommy stuck his hands in his pockets and tilted his head back to stare at the sky. “You just keep telling that to yourself.”

“They seemed like good reasons at the time,” Robert mumbled. Even to his own ears, he didn’t sound anywhere near convincing.

How had be managed to make such a monumental muddle of things? Fresh from the Hellfire Caves, the stench of brimstone still scouring his nostrils, it had all seemed so simple. In a fine glow of self-abnegation, he resolved to take the noble and lonely path, sacrificing his own happiness to keep his princess safe in her tower. For “noble,” substitute . . . “misguided,” Robert decided, ignoring the various riper adjectives Tommy had suggested, among the milder of which were “pig-headed,” “addlepated,” and “just plain stupid.”

“Seems my friend,” said Tommy wisely, “is a very dangerous creature. Like a tiger, only with even more spots. Great big spotty spots.”

Robert reminded himself that there was nothing to be gained by throttling his closest friend, even if he was asking for it. “There’s no need to belabor the point.”

“Or the spots? All right, all right. I’ll leave you to make yourself miserable in your own way.”

“What happened to pots and kettles?” demanded Robert, stung beyond endurance. “How many times have you proposed to Penelope Deveraux in the past week?”

Some of the mirth faded from his friend’s face. Tommy managed to shrug without taking his hands out of his pocket. “Ten at last count. I try to get in at least one proposal before lunch and another after supper. But she won’t have me. She says she won’t drag me down with her.”

“Then why do you keep trying?”

“Why in the hell did you leave that damned snuffbox?”

Robert wasn’t sure he would call it quite the same thing, but Tommy had made his point.

“Fair enough,” he said brusquely. “We’re both besotted fools.”

“The difference,” said Tommy, delicately scratching the side of his nose, “is that you still have a chance.”

He might have had a chance once, but he had trodden it beneath his horse’s hooves on that hasty midnight ride from Girdings, trampling it away in the slush and the mud. However good his intentions might have been, there was no going back, no wiping the slate clean, any more than one could turn slush back into snow.

Irritation made him sharp. “Because ‘I never want to speak to you again’ so often means ‘I love you.’ No, Tommy. It’s just not on.”

“There is a very simple solution,” Tommy pointed out. “Tell her the truth.”

“Before or after our next drunken orgy?” asked Robert sarcastically.

“Just because you go doesn’t mean you participate.”

“Brilliant,” said Robert, ducking out of the way of a very rapidly moving sedan chair. “I’ll just tell her I was surrounded by drugged smoke but I didn’t inhale.”

“Well, when you put it that way . . .”

Robert rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes, knowing that he was being deliberately difficult and wondering if maybe, just maybe, Tommy might have a fragment of a point. His grand and noble gesture had been a colossal failure. What would Charlotte say if he plunked himself down in her parlor and said — what in the hell would he say? “Everything I told you the other day was a lie?” “Sorry to break your heart, but I was only trying to protect you?”

He had meant to protect her. Protect her and keep her safe for the sort of man she ought to marry. Someone whose education had come out of more than the odd book scrounged from other peoples’ libraries. Someone who didn’t wake in the night with sheets soaked with the sweat of memories of horses writhing and men screaming and flies lighting on the open eyes of the dead and dying and black powder smoke drifting over it all as though driven by the devil’s own bellows. Someone who would protect her and cherish her and never be anything other than she expected him to be.

After a month moving through Charlotte’s world, he began to wonder if he hadn’t been the naïve one. In the hard scrabble of his youth, he had always imagined his peers — the ones whose fathers hadn’t burned through their inheritances, who hadn’t been disowned by their families, who didn’t eke out a life lurching from town to town a week ahead of their creditors — leading lives of awe-inspiring gentility, with tutors to tend their minds and servants their bodies. Their food would be taken off china plates, from platters proffered by silent servants, not slopped into tin. Conversation would be conducted at a level scarcely louder than the genteel click of silver against porcelain. No shouting, no banging, no waving drumsticks to emphasize a point, no loud demonstrations of bodily functions. That was the sort of man Charlotte ought to marry, polished to a fine sheen of civilization.

Such creatures didn’t seem to exist. Over the past month he had met bruising sportsmen who smelled of the stable even in evening clothes, professional toadies who simpered even in their sleep, and dedicated roués whose encyclopedic knowledge of sin would put a St. Giles slum-lord to shame. These men, these polished, powdered, pampered men, with their Etonian inflections and towering confections of neckwear, might have cleaner linen than the louts he had known growing up, but underneath they were as coarse, as self-serving, and a good deal less honest.