Fennel, a weedy man with a shifty expression, promptly withdrew into the dressing room, shutting the door behind him with a click.

“I require your opinion on a horse I’ve been eyeing at Tattersalls,” Ridgeway said. “Unless you have other plans today?”

“Nothing that can’t be changed. When are you leaving?”

“Presently.” Ridgeway sat forward in his chair, examining his freshly trimmed side-whiskers in the glass. “What do you think?”

Jasper could detect no difference from the way Ridgeway usually looked. “I suppose they’re shorter.”

“I despaired of them growing too full. A man wants to appear dignified, but after all, one doesn’t wish to look like the prime minister.”

“No chance of that.” Jasper crossed the floor to take a seat in a velvet-upholstered wing chair near the fire.

Ridgeway kept only enough servants to support a bachelor establishment. His house was, nevertheless, comfortable and well tended—a definite improvement from the hotel Jasper had been staying at when he’d first arrived in town.

Not that he’d had much choice in lodgings.

He had no family in London to impose upon. No real friends on whom he could inflict his company.

Even his connection with Ridgeway was tenuous at best.

They’d met six years ago in Constantinople—both men at their lowest ebb. Ridgeway had come to Scutari Hospital to collect the body of his younger brother, killed in the skirmish that had taken the lives of the rest of Jasper’s men.

Jasper had been at Scutari, too; not on an errand, but as a gravely injured patient—the sole survivor of the skirmish, rendered all but unrecognizable by the severe wound on his face.

Ridgeway had spoken to him, attempting to rally his spirits. A futile task. Jasper had been in no mood to speak to anyone. But later, upon his release from hospital, when Ridgeway had written to him, Jasper had grudgingly replied.

An occasional correspondence had followed.

It wasn’t a friendship. Not anywhere near it. Jasper hadn’t any friends. And unless he was mistaken, neither had Ridgeway. They were merely two men brought together by circumstance. Cordial acquaintances—and sometimes, not even that.

Indeed, since coming to stay with him, Jasper had found Ridgeway’s cold-bloodedness increasingly repellent.

“Why so glum?” Ridgeway cast him a glance. “No luck with Miss Wychwood?”

“Luck has nothing to do with it.”

“You did see her?”

“I did,” Jasper said. Despite the fact that she clearly didn’t want to be seen.

Given the drab, ill-fitting clothing that shrouded her figure and the riding veils that concealed her face, one might think she had reason to hide. That her face and body were something to be ashamed of.

It wasn’t true.

Julia Wychwood was beautiful.

He’d realized that from the first moment he’d set eyes on her.

In another time—another life—he might have been in grave danger of losing his heart.

Ridgeway continued admiring his reflection. “What’s the problem, then?”

“The problem,” Jasper said, “is that this business is becoming quite a bit more mercenary than I’d intended.”