Only he had been blind.
* * * *
Cami clung stubbornly to the last fragments of sleep. Yawning, she stretched. Her muscles felt stiff and sore, as though she had slept the whole night through without stirring once. She also was not wearing a nightgown.
The previous night’s activities came back to her in a rush, and she clutched the sheet to her chest. But when she at last opened her eyes, she discovered the room was empty. Passing a hand over her hair, she found Gabriel’s cravat still tangled in it. Deftly, she twisted the strip of linen to keep her unkempt locks out of her face. As she moved, a silvery gleam caught her eye. Her spectacles lay on the table beside the bed. He had found them. With fingers that fumbled in their eagerness, she unfolded them and put them on.
Suddenly all was in sharp relief. The faded floral paper on the walls of the shabby but clean room. Steam rising from the pitcher of water on the washbasin. On the chair in the corner someone had laid out her clothes; her dress had been brushed, the linen was fresh. Her eyes traveled to the place where her bag and writing desk had sat, but someone must already have carried them down to the coach. When had Gabriel risen? Just how long had she been asleep?
She stepped out of bed with caution, but her ankle gave her very little pain. After she had splashed water on her face, dressed, and arranged her hair as best she could, she made her way down to the public room of the inn and found him seated at breakfast. The aromas of toast and coffee and other good things wafted from the table. Yesterday afternoon’s meat pie was no more than a distant memory, and she approached the repast with an eager, slightly embarrassed smile.
Gabriel rose. He was handsome as ever in his well-tailored clothes, with his crisp linen, his freshly shaved jaw, and…a look in his eyes she had never seen before. She had not realized how warm their hazel-brown depths had always seemed to her, until she saw their cool, wary expression now.
Suddenly nervous, she dropped her gaze to the table and saw what she had not noticed from across the room. At her place lay the thick stack of paper that made up her life’s work, neatly tied with red silk ribbon. Her stomach, which had been growling keenly over the other contents of the table, performed a poorly executed somersault and landed somewhere in the vicinity of the floor.
“Please sit down,” he said, as if he suspected how her knees wobbled beneath her skirts. “I regret to say that your writing desk was another casualty of yesterday’s fall.” The explanation was offered in a voice as distant as his eyes as he resumed his seat opposite. “It was resting atop my valise. I did not realize that the hinge holding the front panel in place had broken. When I picked up the desk to set it aside, everything spilled out. Including that.” He gestured toward the stack of bound pages.
She fought the impulse to snatch it up and clutch it protectively to her chest.
“Did you—did you read it?” she managed to whisper.
The wait for his answer was torture, and after last night, she suspected he enjoyed keeping her on edge. “No,” he admitted at last. “But I gathered from Mr. Dawkins’s letter it is a novel, one in which my own likeness features rather prominently.”
She nodded, but hidden beneath the table, she twisted her fingers in her lap. “Are you…are you angry with me?”
“Angry?” His expression of wide-eyed surprise was tinged with mockery. “Why, Miss Burke! What would there be to anger me in your tale? I trust you’ve told only the truth. Say rather, flattered,” he corrected, pausing to take a sip of coffee. “Not every villain can hope for the lasting infamy of print.”
No, he wasn’t angry. That much was true. He was… She raked her eyes over his face as her mind flailed for a word. Resigned. Yes, that was it. Resigned to being thought a villain. At the discovery of what she’d done, he’d slipped back into his comfortable role, donned once more the familiar mask.
She’d gone to bed with Gabriel, and woken up to Lord Ash.
He pushed away from the table, as if preparing to rise. Did he intend to punish her presumption by abandoning her in—in—? Why, she didn’t even know the name of the village. Almost every coin she’d had to her name had been spent on a ticket for the public stage. She hadn’t enough now to return to London, to say nothing of getting home. Her heart rattled in her chest.
Time for a gamble of her own.
“Is there anything more calculated to bring on a bout of ennui than driving through the Midlands?” she asked. He hesitated, and a shadow of confusion flickered across his gaze. After a moment, he gave a cautious nod in acknowledgment of the truth of her observation. “Miles and miles of nothing but fields and sheep. Hours and hours with nothing to amuse the traveler. Fortunately,”—she lifted her hands and laid them, palms down, on her manuscript—“I have had the foresight to bring a book.” Now, his dark brow arced. “And so, I wish to make a proposal.”
Though he said nothing, she knew from his posture she had his
