she stuffed it down and made another insubstantial move, talking the whole time. His sincere desire to learn from her seemed to have led him to listening so hard that he did not see his own folly.
He moved his rook on his next turn, thank goodness, but now he’d left himself open on the other side. Gracious. She moved another pawn and saw straightaway that she’d left her own hole on the board.
Harry’s lips turned up in a slow, tremor-inducing grin as he moved his knight into the space she had opened. “Check,” he said, triumphant.
Sabrina pretended to be frustrated and made a move that looked like she was trying to get out of the mess she was in, but she didn’t try very hard.
Three moves later, Harry had captured her king. He picked up the piece and balanced it on his open palm. “I won this game fair and square, Lady Sabrina, you know that, right?”
Breathe. Let it out. She nodded in surrender.
“So, then, from here forward you will call me Harry.”
She attempted a weak protest. “I do not think that is a good idea.”
“You agreed to the terms,” he reminded her. “And it is not such a hard thing for friends to address one another more comfortably.”
Sabrina stood, knowing she needed to leave. Everything was too much tonight. She smiled, though she could feel the tightness of it. He was watching her with an eager grin. She finally nodded, taking heart in the fact that it wasn’t a poem that might compare her to a sunset or a flower.
“All right,” she conceded. “You won. Now I shall bid you good night.”
“You must call me by my name before you leave,” Harry teased, still grinning as though this was just another game. Which it was . . . to him. “I want to hear my name on your fine lips.”
Fine lips? She swallowed and met his gaze. “Good night . . . Harry.”
He kept smiling, and she felt every particle of it. Then it softened like a light being dimmed, and she felt his eyes taking her in, moving over her like physical touch. She could not breathe by the time he met her eyes again.
“Good night, Sabrina.”
Sabrina was lingering over breakfast and yesterday’s papers the next morning when she received a letter from Mr. Gordon asking that she come to his office as soon as possible. They were scheduled to meet for her monthly meeting on Friday; his summoning her two days early was cause for concern. She was tempted to look in on Mr. Stillman—Harry—before she left, but could not come up with a reasonable excuse. After last night, she needed to be more cautious than ever. She needed distance from . . . Harry. Perhaps a trip to London was exactly in order.
Were she a stronger woman, she would stay in London until Harry was no longer in Wimbledon, but she did not have such fortitude, and the plans for when he would be ready to travel had not been confirmed. She would stay in London tonight, however, regather her defenses, and then proceed with more caution during the next week and a half he would be at Rose Haven. She had suffered through greater discomfort than this before; she just needed to keep her wits about her.
She arrived at Mr. Gordon’s office at one o’clock in the afternoon, having taken Molly to her mother’s workhouse on the way because Molly had received a message two days earlier that her mother was failing quickly.
Mr. Gordon was standing behind his desk when Sabrina entered, and he sat as soon as she took her place across from him.
“What has gone wrong?” she asked immediately.
“Malcolm will still not accept the payoff. I have tried every possible way to change his mind—even offered an additional fifty pounds to the fifty you suggested. He insists that either Mr. Stillman or Lord Damion must pay the full amount in person.”
Sabrina startled. “Lord Damion?”
Mr. Gordon nodded slowly. “He offered that option yesterday, which is why I asked that you and I meet today. Obviously Lord Damion cannot meet him, which means Mr. Stillman must meet with him in person and pay off the debt himself so we might be done with this.”
Sabrina slumped in her chair and stared at the tips of her shoes poking out beneath the hem of her lavender walking dress. It was difficult to think of Mr. Stillman as just another one of their foxes, and the idea of