Jasper looked up at him. “No. Thank you, Reynolds. Thank you…Benedict.”

His friend smiled slightly at the return to informality, then he saluted playfully and headed from the study, leaving Jasper alone. Except for the words that kept bouncing around in his head. About Anne, about both the Maitlands who had a hand in her disappearance, about Thomasina and whatever future he might build with her.

In that moment, he had a strong urge to go to his wife. An urge he didn’t resist as he set his work aside for the moment and gave in to the peace Reynolds had seen. The peace Jasper had denied even though it was absolutely true and felt completely dangerous.

Thomasina sat in the parlor on a settee, her feet tucked beneath her and a book perched in her fingers. She was not, however, reading. She couldn’t, for the words swam on the page every time she made the attempt, and she ended up reading the same sentence over and over without any understanding of its meaning.

She was distracted. That was no surprise, after all. Distracted by Anne, by the strange turn of events that had brought her here…and by Jasper. Their interaction in the study had been both unsatisfying in how she had learned nothing about her sister and only a tantalizing taste of Jasper’s true character and history.

She was, as far as investigations went, a failure. But she couldn’t stop thinking of her husband’s face when he’d mentioned his strained relationship with his brother. Or when he’d asked her if she intended to stay with him or go to London if her father and sister left.

Both times he had seemed…pained. Almost younger, like those questions drew him back to a more vulnerable and sorrowful time. And yet he kept her from the heart of it. The truth of it. The truth of him.

Would it always be this way?

“I’m sorry to interrupt.”

She started at the voice that came from the doorway. That of the very man she had been pondering endlessly since she saw him less than an hour before.

She stood and faced him with a blush. “You weren’t interrupting,” she said as she took him in from head to toe. Great God, but he was handsome. Looking at him was always a pleasure, her pleasure.

“The book in your hand tells me otherwise,” he said, motioning to it. “I can leave you to it.”

She set the book down with a dismissive wave. “I can tell you I was not attending the story at all.”

“No?” He arched a brow. “You were preoccupied then? By what, if you don’t mind my asking?”

She blushed, for she’d been caught. She shrugged and broke her stare from his. “By…everything, I suppose. You could name anything that happened during the upheaval of the last few weeks and I was distracted by it. The good and the bad.”