His brow creased. “And for what? Merely to stop Compton from standing in the way of some bill in Parliament?” He scanned her face. “Who’s subsidizing it all? Lady Belwood?”

“No,” Effie said. “Not Lady Belwood. Someone else.”

“Who?”

For a moment it appeared she wouldn’t answer. And then: “A lady who champions the causes of women.”

“What lady?”

“It doesn’t matter who she is now. It’s who she was before. A vulnerable lady like so many others—exploited by a powerful man, unprotected by a loathsome half brother. Her fortune taken from her, and her reputation destroyed.”

Gabriel stared at Effie in dawning understanding. “Good God,” he uttered. “Not Wingard’s sister?”

26

Effie had no intention of revealing Miss Corvus’s secrets. How could she when she didn’t know the half of them herself? But after what she had learned in Trowley Green, and after Gabriel had accepted her—truly accepted her—she couldn’t lie to him any longer.

He was right. They were the same.

Perhaps they even belonged together. It certainly felt that way, on his lap and in his arms. Here, at last, she was safe, and known, and…

Beloved.

Gabriel hadn’t said it in so many words, but the emotion was there all the same. It was in the way he held her and comforted her. In the tenderness that deepened his voice and softened the hard edges of his granite-hewn face. No longer cynical, he had looked into her eyes with raw sincerity.

“I know who you are,” he’d said.

Effie’s heart had thumped heavily in answer. This connection between them…It was a form of kinship she’d never encountered. An elemental recognition, all tangled up with vulnerability and desire. The temptation to give in to it was great indeed. But in the aftermath of learning about her mother, another feeling had emerged in Effie’s aching heart. An iron-forged sense of what she owed to Miss Corvus.

Reluctantly, she withdrew from Gabriel’s arms. He didn’t attempt to stop her, only looked at her steadily, his expression intent, as she collected her bonnet from the adjoining seat and moved to take its place.

“I don’t know her by that name,” she said, arranging her skirts. “But I believe she may well be her.”

Gabriel sat up straighter as she settled beside him, leaning toward her in her seat, his pale blue eyes riveted to her face. “Wingard said his sister went abroad. He told me she’d died.”

“A version of death. The lady who raised me wasn’t a broken woman. She was a creature of singular strength. So much so that I spent all my life imagining her cold and heartless.”

His brows notched. “You say she raised you—”