“How do I know you’d pay your side of the bargain?”

“You would have to trust me.”

From very far off she heard knocking on the front door.

Her captor grumbled and clomped down the steps. Arabella pressed her ear to the door, but the panel was thick and she could catch no sounds. Perhaps Joseph had gotten impatient. Good Lord, let him not be injured because of her naïveté. But she had not been prepared. Her mistrust of men had never extended to this sort of villainy.

Finally, footsteps sounded on the stairs, not the heavy tread of her captor, but another man’s booted steps, confident and clean. Behind those came the thunderous clomp of her captor.

She backed away from the door, her hands tight about her cloak.

The door opened. Her heart stopped.

Hands bound at his back, Luc entered. Behind him was both her captor and the old housekeeper.

“Unbind me now,” he said as calmly as though he were instructing his butler to serve dinner.

Her captor nudged him forward. A pistol glimmered in his fist. “She can do it.”

Luc walked to her and turned his back. “If you please, duchess.”

Her hands shook as she freed him. He drew his arms forward and rubbed his wrists.

“Toss the rope here,” her captor said.

She looked at Luc. He nodded. She tossed the bindings to the threshold.

“Now I’ll take that ring, milady,” he said to her with a squint.

“I—” She shook her head. “I don’t have it.”

He cocked the pistol with an ominous click. “The ring now. Or do you think his lordship would prefer if I tied him up again while I looked for that ring on you at my leisure?” He grinned. “Fine wedding present that would be, now wouldn’t it?”

Luc’s face was white.

She reached into her pocket, pulled out the ring, and crouched to roll it across the floor. It made a soft clattering sound as it rolled, coming to a stop by his feet. The housekeeper picked it up and dropped it into her pocket.

Her captor stepped back, closed the door, and the key clicked in the lock.

Beside her Luc was shaking, his jaw hard.

“I cannot begin— I don’t know how—” she stuttered. “I am so sorry. I never imagined a bishop would do this sort of thing. Why are you here? Why did you allow him to—”

He gripped her wrist. His palm was icy. “No,” he said in a peculiar rasp. He released her and went to the door. Slowly, his hand moved to the handle. He turned it and the door remained fast.

“He locked it,” she said stupidly. “I would have shouted to warn you off, but I heard nothing until you were at the top of the stairs. It is a very thick door—”

“I know,” he said in that scratchy voice. “I allowed it.” He heaved in breaths and leaned his brow against the door, his hands flattening against the panel.

She stepped forward. “What—”

He turned his head. His eye was closed, his face taut from brow to jaw. A hard shiver shook his entire frame.

“Luc?”

“I fear, little governess,” he said on another convulsive shake, “that I may shortly disgrace myself in a manner in which your former charges—the especially tiny ones—probably did quite often.”

“Luc?”

“I may be sick.”

She went around him and touched his face. His skin was cold and damp.

“You were not ill this morning. Have they— Oh, God! Have they poisoned you?”

“No,” he said tightly. “Though that might have been preferable.”

“Then what—”

“When I was ten—” He breathed hard through his nostrils, his entire body rigid.

She had never seen him ill, never anything but strong and vital. Except when he was dying.

She stroked his face, curving her hands around his cheeks. “When you were ten, after your father’s death?”

Sweat beaded on his brow.

“Fletcher brought you and your brother here to live, did he not?”

“This was my bedchamber.”

She looked behind her. It was nothing more than a cube furnished with only a small bed, a side table, and a single wooden chair. It was Spartan, and the furnishings were old, no different from the dormitory at the foundling home.

“What did he do, Luc?” she said, seeing so clearly the brick wall of the dormitory that she had been told to face each time the directress of the foundling home took a cane to her back, as if every crack, crevice, and discoloration of that brick were before her now. “Did he beat you in this chamber?”

“Nothing so pedestrian,” he said with a harsh laugh.

She grabbed his hand. His fingers clamped around hers.

“He starved us,” he said. “For days, sometimes weeks, he withheld food. He told us it was a discipline to be able to withstand extreme hunger. That men like us, who would eventually be wealthy and powerful, must learn great discipline while we were still young. He locked me into this room each night with the promise of breakfast in the morning, but only if I did not complain to his manservant or housekeeper. He promised the same to my brother—”

“Oh, Luc.”

“—but he locked himself in my brother’s room too.”

Her stomach turned and she went cold all over. “Oh, dear God.”

“He said that God would punish us if we told anyone. But I never believed him. God had made my father, after all. He had shown me what a good man could be.” A tear slid down his cheek.

She wrapped her arm around him and held him. He bent to her, sank his face against her shoulder and trembled fiercely in her embrace.

When he pulled away, his cheek was damp. She reached up to wipe the tears, but he did not allow her. He removed her hand, and his own hand shook only slightly as he swiped away the moisture.

“Did you know you would find me in danger?” she said.

He did not respond.

“What have you done?” she whispered.

“What I had to do to ensure that you would not find yourself alone with them. Admittedly, I did not quite count on being greeted at the door with a pistol, nor on becoming a quivering mess.”

She snapped her gaze up. “You should not have done this.”

“I could not have done otherwise.”

“But you—”

“Arabella, enough.”

“But after all I have done—today, and before—and what you must believe . . . Why would you do this for me?”

“I would die for you.” With a hard breath, he moved around her and across the room. “But not tonight. I am no longer a boy and this is just a house like any other.” He pushed the windowpane open, braced a foot on the sill, and stretched his arm upward through the iron bars. “That oaf made me give over my sword and pistol. Even the knife in my boot. But he could not take every weapon at my disposal.” He closed his eye and pushed on the bar against his shoulder.

“Luc.” She went toward him. “Luc, you mustn’t. You will harm—”

The bar snapped out with a scrape and a clang and fell away.

He cut her a quick, satisfied grin. “What I might have done then with the strength of a man.” He heaved his shoulder into the next bar. “But then I might have simply killed him,” he said, the veins on his neck straining as he pushed, “and ended up shipped off to Australia.” The bar broke loose and jutted out for a moment before it disappeared. “That would have been inconvenient.”

He climbed off the sill and rubbed his hands together.

“What did you do?”

“You needn’t look so flabbergasted. A man learns a few tricks after a decade spent on the sea.”

“But—”

“Poorly designed hardware.” He gestured to the iron grill, his hand trembling slightly. “I knew it then, but I was not tall enough to reach the pins or strong enough to force them loose.” He swept his gaze over her, still brittle, but he was trying to mask his fear—for her or for his pride, or perhaps both. “The drawback, of course, is that now I am rather too big to depend on the stability of the drain pipe that runs along the wall just outside.”

“I’m not.” She leaned out the window. The park was quiet and wooded, with plenty of places to hide as she ran if she managed the descent successfully. The pipe looked sturdy. She turned to him. “I will not go without you.”