Jack didn’t answer, and Thomas did not feel like pressing further, so he set to work inspecting the shelves.

Moral Rectitude and the Modern Man. No, thank you.

History of Fermanagh. He’d pass on that as well. Lovely as the county was, he’d had enough of it.

Account of the Voyages by James Cook. He smiled. Amelia would like that one.

He closed his eyes and took a breath, allowing himself a moment to think of her. He’d been trying not to. All through the morning, he’d kept his mind focused on the landscape, his reins, the bit of mud stuck to the back of Jack’s left boot.

But not Amelia.

Certainly not her eyes, which were not at all the color of the leaves on the trees. The bark, maybe. With the leaves, together. Green and brown. A mix. He liked that.

Nor had he not been thinking of her smile. Or the exact shape of her mouth when she’d stood across from him the night before, breathless in her desire for him.

He wanted her. Dear God, he wanted her.

But he did not love her.

He could not. It was untenable.

He returned to the work at hand with grim purpose, pulling every book without an embossed title off the shelf so he could open it and look inside. Finally he reached a section with nothing but ledgers. He pulled one out, and his heart began to pound when he realized that the words before him were recordings of births. Deaths. Marriages.

He was looking at one of the church registers. The dates were wrong, though. Jack’s parents would have married in 1790, and these were all far too recent.

Thomas looked over his shoulder to say something to Jack, but he was standing stiffly by the fire, his shoulders drawn up toward his ears. He looked frozen, and Thomas realized why he had not heard him moving about the room, looking for the register.

Jack had not moved since they had entered.

Thomas wanted to say something. He wanted to stride across the room and shake some bloody sense into him because what the devil was he complaining about? He, not Jack, was the one whose life would be ruined at the end of the day. He was losing his name, his home, his fortune.

His fiancée.

Jack would walk out of this room one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. He, on the other hand, would have nothing. His friends, he supposed, but they were few in number. Acquaintances he had in abundance, but friends—there was Grace, Harry Gladdish…possibly Amelia. He found it difficult to believe that she would wish to see him after all was said and done. She would find it too awkward. And if she ended up marrying Jack…

Then he would find it too awkward.