“I don’t know him. He’s only come to the house that one time, and he was in a hurry so I didn’t get a good sense of him, but, like I said, he seems nice enough.”
“W-when did he come to the house?” Harry held his breath.
“Uh . . .” Joshua scrunched up his face as he thought about the question. “A few days after you came, I think.” He paused. “Early on, though; you were still sleeping most of the time.”
“And he came to meet with Lady Sabrina?”
Saying her name shut down Joshua’s willingness like a gate, as though making him aware that he was discussing his mistress’s personal business. His face closed, and he nodded. He turned back to the window but glanced sideways at Harry, who had the presence of mind to go back to his knitting so it would look as though that was what held his attention now.
His whole body began to tingle, and he fumbled through his stitches, stopping to unpick a solid dozen.
Lord Damion was Lady Sabrina.
Lady Sabrina was Lord Damion.
She had been the person on the other side of the slide that day at The Lost Tartan.
She was the “nobleman” who wanted to hide her philanthropy toward dissolute men from the ton.
How had he not made the connection before? But he knew why—because it had seemed impossible. One did not wonder if perhaps there were fields of pink grass somewhere in the world, because grass being green was an irrefutable fact. One did not verify each morning that foxes ran along the ground and falcons flew on the wind, rather than the other way around. Harry had not woken up expecting his leg to be healed because he knew it wouldn’t be. Just like he knew that Lord Damion was a man and Lady Sabrina was a woman and they were two separate parts of his life that did not touch.
It wasn’t just details of her former marriage that Lady Sabrina had hidden from him—it was Lord Damion. Which meant everything Lord Damion knew about Harry, she also knew. Which meant that last night when he’d pushed her away because she didn’t know just how horrible a man he’d been, she had known.
He had still done the right thing in refusing the advances, and he was sure she agreed with him in the light of morning, but she’d made those advances with a full understanding of the man he’d been. Because she believed that men could change, and she saw the changes he had made. It was not a stretch of his imagination to think that she’d held herself against the building tension between them, that she’d tried to tell him it was normal for men and women not attracted to one another to still be friends.
The bubble of hope he felt amid this remarkable discovery displaced any anger or hurt he might otherwise have felt at discovering her lies. During their conversations, she’d all but told him why a woman would pose as a man in this world. Lord Damion’s motivation was to change the world, one man at a time, but only another man could do such a thing. The young men she rescued would not respect or trust a female benefactor. Yet in that one thing, Harry believed she had been wrong.
Lord Damion had saved Harry by paying off his debts and giving him another chance to make a life worth living, no doubt about it, but Lady Sabrina had been the stronger influence encouraging him to make personal changes in the weeks since. It was Lady Sabrina who’d helped him see his course ahead. Lady Sabrina who had given him confidence that he could rise above the pain of his childhood. Lady Sabrina had been the standard he had set for his improvement: to be as good a man as Lady Sabrina was a woman, to be the sort of man a woman like Lady Sabrina would one day trust enough to share a life with.
Oh, if not for this meeting with Malcolm he would turn this carriage around immediately and kiss her breathless. If she could be persuaded to tell him everything she hadn’t told him already—about her marriage and Lord Damion and whatever other secrets she’d kept careful and safe—they would both know each other better than anyone in the world knew them. That was a connection that would surpass status and money and past mistakes.