“We need to go,” Thomas said, pushing his stool back to stand. He turned to Harry and gave him a nod.

“You’re together?” Harry asked with surprise.

“He’s an old friend,” Thomas said. More of a grunt, really.

Harry did not ask from where. Harry always knew which questions not to ask.

He turned to Audley. “You didn’t mention you knew the duke.”

Audley shrugged. “You didn’t ask.”

Harry appeared to consider this, then turned back to Thomas. “Safe journeys, friend.”

Thomas tipped his head in response, then headed out the door, leaving Audley to follow in his wake.

“You’re friends with the innkeeper,” Audley stated once they were outdoors.

Thomas turned to him with a broad, false smile. “I’m a friendly fellow.”

And that was the last thing either of them said until they were just minutes from Belgrave, when Audley said, “We’ll need a story.”

Thomas looked at him askance.

“I assume you don’t wish to set it about that I am your cousin—your father’s elder brother’s son, to be precise—until you have verification.”

“Indeed,” Thomas said. His voice was clipped, but that was mostly because he was angry at himself for not having brought the same thing up earlier.

The look Audley gave him was blindingly annoying. It started with a smile but quickly turned to a smirk. “Shall we be old friends, then?”

“From university?”

“Eh, no. Do you box?”

“No.”

“Fence?”

Like a master. “I’m passable,” he said with a shrug.

“Then that’s our story. We studied together. Years ago.”

Thomas kept his eyes straight ahead. Belgrave was looming ever closer. “Let me know if you wish to practice,” he said.

“You’ve equipment?”

“Everything you could possibly need.”

Audley glanced at Belgrave, which now hung over them like a stone ogre, blotting out the last dusky rays of the sun. “And everything one doesn’t need, too, I imagine.”

Thomas didn’t comment, just slid off his mount and handed the reins to a waiting footman. He strode inside, eager to put his back to the man behind him. It wasn’t that he wished to cut him, exactly. It was more that he wished to forget him.

Just think how lovely his life had been, merely twelve hours earlier.

No, make that eight. Eight, and he’d have had a bit of fun with Amelia as well.

Yes, that was the optimal cut-off point between his old life and new. Post-Amelia, pre-Audley.

Perfection.

But ducal powers, far-reaching though they were, did not extend to the turning back of time, and so, refusing to be anything but the sophisticated, utterly self-contained man he used to be, he gave the butler a quick set of orders about what to do with Mr. Audley, and then entered the drawing room, where his grandmother was waiting with Grace.

“Wyndham,” his grandmother said briskly.