"What?"
For a moment, Eloise wasn't sure she'd heard him correctly. They had been discussing a deserter—a very real, very dangerous deserter—and somehow the conversation had arrived at *I'll escort you home every evening.*
"Wait. What exactly are you proposing?"
"The preparations for the summer ball aren't finished. And I've accumulated far more questions than I can resolve on my own."
"That's true, but—"
"Writing is useful, certainly. But as today demonstrated, an hour of conversation in person accomplishes what a month of letters couldn't. If we'd tried to settle the merchants' dispute and the seating arrangements by correspondence, we'd still be at it come autumn."
"..."
He wasn't wrong.
She thought of everything they'd worked through this evening—the merchant conflict she'd never have been able to untangle from a distance, the banquet seating that had required her to talk through two years' worth of local history before it made any sense. And there was still more left unfinished. She'd told him the rest could be handled by post, but even as she'd said it, she'd known it wasn't quite true.
*I'll have to go myself.*
She remembered last year's preparations. Her father, her mother, Emily—all of them had gone together and stayed at Blissbury for a full two weeks. Even then, with everyone present, there hadn't been a quiet moment. Ryan, stepping into this without any knowledge of local customs or the particular sensitivities of the families involved, would be navigating it nearly blind.
"And since Mr. Severton is away," Ryan continued, "aren't you, as his deputy, now my co-manager?"
*Co-manager.*
The word landed somewhere unexpected.
Eloise had loved Blissbury her entire life—had known its rhythms and its people as well as she knew her own home. She had managed its affairs, quietly and steadily, for years. But she had always been the manager's daughter. Not the manager. Never the manager.
Even with her father gone, she had assumed Baron Stanford would simply send someone from the capital to fill the role—someone official, someone appointed, someone who wasn't her, regardless of how long she'd been tending to things in the interim.
But here was Sergeant Thornton, the new manager, using the word without hesitation.
*Co-manager.* Recognized. Acknowledged.
It was temporary. She knew that. And yet the corners of her mouth crept upward before she could stop them.
Ryan looked at her and smiled.
"It seems you agree. Then—"
He dismounted and untied the basket from his saddle, handing it across to Emily.
"What's this?"
"Desserts from Mrs. Parker. Take them inside and share them with your mistress and Mrs. Severton."
Emily's eyes went wide with something approaching reverence. Mrs. Parker's desserts had always occupied a particular place in Emily's imagination—a glimpse into the kind of refined, elegant world she read about and dreamed of but rarely encountered firsthand.
"Thank you!"
She clutched the basket to her chest as though someone might try to take it, turned on her heel, and marched briskly toward the house—then stopped and looked back.
"My lady, why are you just standing there? Come on!"
From the look on her face, she intended to investigate the basket's contents the moment the door closed behind her.
"Go ahead," Eloise said.
Emily needed no further encouragement.
Ryan watched her go, then turned back to Eloise with an easy smile.
"See you tomorrow."
---
## — Part Four: Gentlemen from the Capital —
Philip Osborne and Richard Cameron were, in their respective ways, rather well-known figures at Army Headquarters.
Philip first.
Second son of the noble Osborne family out of the western province of Wales, he had joined the army the moment he came of age—dark brown hair, brown eyes, and a face that was pleasant and tidy without being remarkable. He was twenty-eight, and his defining characteristic, the one everyone who knew him eventually mentioned, was an almost absolute silence.
His father, anxious by nature, had pulled every available string to secure Philip a posting in the rear—or at the very least at Headquarters in the capital. But Philip's stubbornness proved even more immovable than his father's connections, and he went where the fighting was worst.
He eventually ended up in the 57th Infantry Battalion, where he served quietly at Ryan Wilgrave's side from the beginning—unobtrusive, efficient, and steady—until Ryan rose to lieutenant colonel, at which point Philip was promoted to lieutenant.
No one would call a lieutenancy nothing. At Philip's age, it represented a pace of advancement that made even the more conservative senior officers raise their eyebrows. And Ryan's promotion to lieutenant colonel at his age was the sort of thing that people in the army discussed in low, slightly disbelieving voices long afterward.
---
Now, Richard Cameron.
Richard was famous in a somewhat different manner than Ryan—and in some circles, even more so.
Third son of Viscount Cameron, whose estates lay north of New, Richard could walk uninvited into virtually any gathering in the country and be received not with displeasure but with genuine delight. People said his presence made an evening better simply by virtue of his being in the room.
This was partly the Cameron name, which carried both wealth and an impeccable reputation. But it was, in larger part, his face.
Even Viscount Cameron himself had clicked his tongue at the cradle, muttering that the boy had been born with a face designed to devastate women. It proved something close to prophecy. Richard Cameron grew up to be so strikingly beautiful that strangers stopped short when they first encountered him—as though they needed a moment to adjust.
At six years old, dressed in a girl's frock for a family event as was traditional, he'd been trailed through the gardens by a devoted procession of children of both sexes. People began referring to him simply as *that beautiful child.*
He grew broader across the shoulders as he aged and his features became more defined, but the essential fact of his appearance remained unchanged. And with it, so did the company he attracted.
As the third son of a viscount, on excellent terms with his brothers, and promised the title of baron besides—with a sizeable townhouse in the capital to his name—Richard should have been among the most coveted matches in society.
Instead, mothers of eligible daughters went pale at the mention of his name.
The reason was not complicated. Richard, with all the advantages of his looks and his fortune, had developed a personal life of extraordinary complexity. At one point he had maintained simultaneous entanglements with four young women at once, a situation that culminated—inevitably—in a scene on New's main street in which ladies of good family could be seen seizing one another by the hats in broad daylight.
This sort of incident occurred, by general estimate, at least once a month.
The public's patience eventually reached its limit. A delegation, loosely organized but firmly motivated, presented itself to Viscount Cameron with a simple message: *please do something about your son.*
Even the most indulgent father could not ignore such a petition.
"Richard." The Viscount had been magnificently brief. "Go to the army immediately. Sit there and conduct yourself like a human being."
And so Richard Cameron entered military service.
Unlike Philip's father, who had maneuvered to keep his son from the front, Viscount Cameron made the opposite request of his acquaintances in the army: treat the boy like any other soldier—no special treatment, no exceptions. Unfortunately for Richard, a number of those acquaintances happened to be fathers of the very daughters he had treated as seasonal entertainment, and his postings reflected their opinions accordingly.
It was, in retrospect, something of a miracle that he'd survived as long as he had.
He endured it all in the 57th Infantry Battalion, where he too was assigned as Ryan's adjutant, and where he had remained ever since. When Philip made lieutenant, Richard was promoted to junior lieutenant.
"I was supposed to make captain," Richard said, with the tone of a man who genuinely believed this. "Do you think my father intervened?"
"No," Philip replied, without looking up. "Your manner of speaking simply didn't agree with the commander's sensibilities."
Richard ignored this completely and returned to grumbling about wanting leave so he could return to the capital and have some fun.
For all that they were utterly unlike each other, they were friends.
Perhaps it was inevitable—they had shared a commander, and that commander was Ryan Wilgrave.
---
Ryan, on the eve of a second summons to the war council, had departed for the countryside under the pretext of medical treatment.
They hadn't expected letters.
Ryan was not a man who waited for correspondence, and he certainly wasn't one who initiated it.
Which was why, when a letter in Ryan's handwriting arrived, Philip stared at it for a long moment before reading it aloud.
"*Order new clothes from a military tailor and have them sent to me.*" He paused. "And a proper suit as well?"
Across the room, Richard went very still.
Ryan. New clothes. A *suit.*
He crossed the room in three strides, took the letter from Philip's hand, and examined it with the scrutiny of a man assessing a forgery.
"It's his handwriting," he said at last.
He knew—better than almost anyone—how profoundly Ryan despised wearing a suit. For Ryan to send to the capital specifically requesting one made no logical sense whatsoever.
Richard read the letter twice more. Then he handed it back to Philip with the solemn air of a man who has arrived at a significant conclusion.
"Ryan has a woman."