It had made a duchess of the eldest, why not a future duchess of the youngest?

Well, she had chosen the wrong mark.

She’d landed herself here, buying off a footman, surviving the carriage ride. Sophie Talbot was no simpering wallflower, whatever her reputation. He knew little about the girl—only that she was the most serious of the five Talbot sisters—not a difficult task considering the tittering vanity and disdain for propriety that marked the others in the family.

Her actions did not bear out her seriousness, however. Indeed, they made her seem positively foolish.

Well. She might be a fool, but he wasn’t.

He wasn’t getting anywhere near her.

She wasn’t his problem.

She’d found her way here; she could find her way home.

He had other things to worry about. Like finding his way back to Cumbria before his father made good on his promise and died. King drank again, unable to wrap his head around the idea of his father dying. Dying was for creatures with beating hearts, after all, and the Duke of Lyne was too stern and unmoving to have blood in his veins. Surely.

Come quickly. Your father ails.

A simple missive, in the neat script of Agnes Graycote, housekeeper of Lyne Castle since King was a child. The woman had served the duke for decades without hesitation. She’d stayed on after King left, after the duke had stopped traveling to London, after he’d given up his attempts to reconcile with King.

As though reconciliation might ever be possible. As though he hadn’t ruined King’s life with his bitter aristocratic pride. As though King hadn’t replied to every request for audience with the same five words—the only honest punishment he could mete out.

King almost hadn’t heeded Agnes’s call.

Almost.

But here he was, at an inn on the Great North Road, thirty miles from London, headed to the Scottish border, to look his dying father in the eye and say the words aloud.

The line ends with me.

He cursed again in the darkness before finishing the scotch, setting the glass on the windowsill and returning to bed, closing his eyes and willing himself to sleep. Instead of heavy slumber; however, King found the cacophony of his mind. He resisted thoughts of his childhood and his father, knowing that they would take him down a dark path he had no interest in exploring, and instead turned to a safer memory. The day. The race. His win. And the ruination of that win.

No.

He tried not to think of her. Of her request earlier in the day, of her appearance. Of the way she filled out the livery in all the wrong ways—trousers too tight, the buttons on her jacket pulling tight across her ample breasts, and the lovely swell of her midriff. Christ. She was still wearing silk slippers.

His footman’s boots hadn’t been included in his price, clearly.

He rolled to his back, one large hand coming to rest on his bare chest. Why hadn’t she been wearing proper footwear? And how was it that his coachman hadn’t noticed the ridiculous yellow slippers?

His coachman was a fool as well, obviously.

Not that King cared about the improper footwear. Indeed, she deserved that, didn’t she? She was the one who had left him with only one boot.

Her feet must hurt.

Her feet, like the woman herself, were not his problem.

Neither was the bed where she slept.

Not his problem.

If she was sleeping. In a hayloft. Surrounded by all manner of men, at least some of who would notice immediately that their companion was decidedly not a man.

If the men were sleeping.

Emotion threaded through him, sharp and unwelcome.

Guilt. Fear. Panic.

“Goddammit.” He came to his feet, reaching for his leather breeches before the echo of the curse disappeared from the room.

She might not be his problem, but he couldn’t stand by and allow her to suffer God knew what at the hands of God knew whom. He pulled his shirt on, leaving the hem untucked and the laces untied as he tore open the door to the chamber and went searching for the girl.

The inn was quiet, kitchens dark, taps dry, fires in the main room banked. His gaze fell on a clock at the far end of the room. Two in the morning—an hour that brought nothing but trouble for those awake to witness it.

He exited the inn, the eerie silence of the English countryside at night unsettling him as he made his way to the nearby stables, imagining all the ways the hour could be bringing trouble down upon Sophie Talbot.

He entered the building at a near run when he heard the men. A half dozen of them, if the myriad voices were any indication, laughter and shouting and jeers—he stopped just beyond a fall of golden light, listening, attempting to get his bearings and make out the words.

As though the universe knew just what he was listening for, he heard her first, the words clear and curious over the cacophony of sound. “I just, take it down?”

King went utterly still as a man replied. “Exactly.”

“It doesn’t look like it would taste very good.”

Christ.

“You’d be surprised,” the man coaxed. “Take all of it. All at once. You’ll like it.”

“If you say so,” she said, and the skepticism in her voice was drowned out by a chorus of raucous cheers that set King in motion, no longer caring that one-on-six were terrible odds, particularly when the six in question were drunk and sex-starved.

“Step away from the lady,” he instructed, all menacing, as he stepped into the main room of the stables, shocking the hell out of not only the group of drunk but hardly nefarious-looking men sitting at a table at the center of the long corridor between the stalls, but also the lady in question, who was still wearing her livery.