He had made a mistake. Yet another mistake with her. She was too proud to be cajoled. But what the woman wanted from him he could not fathom. He had never met a female who didn’t turn sweet over jewels. Or seduction. Apologies hadn’t even worked.

He took the letters. “Coffee. Pack. Traveling coach. In that order.”

“I have taken the liberty of instructing the butler to instruct the cook to prepare another breakfast for you and several of your guests who have arisen late due to the festivities last night. Before she departed, her grace—”

“The comtesse.”

“—and her royal highness breakfasted—”

“Departed?” Luc’s head snapped up.

His neat little man milliner of a valet—dressed to the nines, starched and pressed as impeccably as he’d always been when playing cabin steward on Luc’s ships—turned his nose into the air.

“Her grace wished to pay a call on the mantua maker in the village. I assured her that the woman would come to her, but she expressed a keen desire to be away from the house, where it seems she is the object of considerable scrutiny today among your guests—my lord Bedwyr and his and her royal highnesses excepted, of course.”

Luc rubbed his sore neck. Sleeping upright never bothered him unless he slept particularly hard. But his troubles were not truly physical. She had exhausted his body while leaving the rest of him a confounded mess. She was passion and courage all bound up in fiery audacity that he now knew masked tender uncertainty. With each touch and each word she made him need her more.

She might fight it, but she had no choice in the matter. She was his.

He flipped over the letter in his hand and snapped apart the wax seal. “The mantua maker?”

“Her grace wishes to purchase a traveling gown.”

“Mm hm.” The letter was short and to the point. The archbishop would not accept the validity of the wedding ceremony performed by a priest of the Roman confession under uncertain circumstances and without benefit of the proper banns being read. Lord Westfall was urged to make haste in returning home and securing a license to wed Miss Caulfield with the full sanction of the Church of England or risk the danger of placing his mortal soul in peril through the sin of fornication.

Luc stuffed the letters into his pocket.

Damn prelates. It was a mere inconvenience. If she conceived a child now, however, it could prove a problem if it were born short of nine months from the valid wedding date. He would take her home to England swiftly and the issue would be moot.

He stood up and Miles stepped back for him to exit the boathouse. He had not returned to his bedchamber after visiting hers. After she rejected his gift again, he had come here without thought. Only close to water did he sleep well. His ancestor who purchased Saint-Reveé-des-Beaux might have had him in mind.

Miles trailed after him, his Louis XIV heels clicking along the dock beneath the arched tunnel.

“Will we be departing soon for England, your grace?”

“Today. And stop calling me your grace. It’s disrespectful and not a little ghastly.”

“Very well, your grace. And shall I instruct Monsieur Brissot to place the household under her grace’s authority when she returns?”

“From the dress shop?”

Miles’s pencil thin brows rose. “Do forgive me, your grace, but I assumed her grace would return here from Paris. But perhaps she will continue on to join you in England afterward.”

“After what? What in the devil are you talking about, Miles?”

“Monsieur Brissot informed me that her grace intended to depart for Paris today directly from the modiste’s.”

Luc halted and closed his eye. He should have known. She had told him. He was a complete fool. Worse, he was blind. And he was coming to see his little governess’s character in a whole new light.

“When did she leave for the village, Miles?”

“Not a quarter of an hour ago.”

“Make the arrangements for our departure today. We will spend the night at Guer and wherever else necessary en route to Saint-Malo. And inform Lord Bedwyr that I will be leaving within the hour. If he wishes to join me and my wife, he should be prepared to depart then.”

He strode across the dock and into the bottom level of the house where the clean, alive scent of the river mingled with aromas from the kitchen of baking bread. He would find her at the dress shop and then . . . He didn’t know what. She was irrationally resistant. What woman did not wish to be a comtesse and next in line to be a duchess, for God’s sake?

She wanted him; that was obvious enough. He need only maintain a steady course until he came within range of her guns. Then, as the more experienced of them, he would outmaneuver her. As he had already tried to do several times without any success.

Perhaps if he got himself stabbed in the belly again she would come to him willingly. He must keep that in mind.

Striding to the stable, he pulled the letter from Combe’s land steward from his pocket. Parsons had nothing good to report. The estate was producing well enough; its income had not decreased. But the tenants were suffering. The famine was over, yet the farmers seemed to be less prosperous than ever, laboring hard yet with nothing to show for their struggles. And now Parsons was begging him to see to it. The estate could not wait until the matter of the title was settled. The steward was calling on him to return as swiftly as he could.

He must, and not only because the estate was in dire straits. Parsons’s letter confirmed it: Theodore had named his old friend and Adina’s brother, Absalom Fletcher, principal trustee should Adina’s child be a boy. Luc had been named second. In two months time the Bishop of Barris could be de facto master of Combe for the next two decades.

Luc needed no further urging. He was eager to return to England. As eager as he was to know who it was that wished him dead.

The men who attacked him on the beach had not done so in retaliation for their companion killed in the alleyway. That she had come upon them first was sheer unlucky coincidence. Or perhaps they knew she had come off his ship and meant to use her to draw him out. But the sailor Mundy continued to insist that he had been hired in Paris without any notion of what he was to do with the poison once he acquired it. Tony and his lieutenant both believed him.

In England he would find answers.

Cam found Luc in the stable as he led his horse into the yard.

“I understand that your lovely comtesse has gone shopping for gowns.” He leaned a shoulder into the door and crossed his gleaming Hessians. “How you could convince her to do so when I could not, I confess I am in astonishment.”

“Perhaps my powers of persuasion are greater than yours.”

“I doubt that.”

Luc adjusted the stirrup and ran his hand along the animal’s sleek withers. “You are not dressed for the road.”

“I regret that you must make this journey without me, cousin.” He glanced across the drive to where Princess Jacqueline rode with a groom. “I have interests I must see to here before returning home.”

Luc frowned. “She is an innocent, Cam. And, I needn’t add, she is also our friend Reiner’s sister.”

“Then why did you add it?” He grinned lazily. “But that is not the sort of interest I have in her, so be at ease, oh ye stalwart defender of ladies’ virtue. Excepting one lady’s virtue, of course.”

“Take care how you speak of my wife,” Luc grumbled.

His cousin accepted the reins of a great white horse from a groom.

“Perhaps it is you who should take care, Lucien, or despite the effort I have gone to on your behalf, you will lose her.”

“I will take that under advisement.” He put his foot in the stirrup and hauled himself up, biting back on the pain.

“I see we are not yet entirely ourselves again, are we?” Cam said. “Are you certain you wish to set out quite yet?”