Worried that she’d make a misstep and give away her true purpose, instead of embracing the role of witless heiress, she’d gone all stiff and jumpy like a nervous ninny. On top of that, she had removed the correspondence from its very clever hiding place—though probably not from an expert spy like the Duke of Thornbury—inside her mattress and had yet to find another spot for it. Nowhere seemed safe.

She glanced at the folded piece of parchment sitting atop a sheet of paper on her dresser. The wax on the seal had nearly come unstuck, likely from the humidity in the salted air of the ocean. Perhaps she could commit the details to memory and then she would not have to worry about someone finding it.

Her pulse raced. Should she? It was exceedingly sensitive information, she knew, especially since the page beneath was from a report on Brent Sommers, an American man who had been arrested by Thornbury himself for smuggling, treason, and other crimes.

She’d read that with no compunction.

Fascinated by the neat, meticulous handwriting, she’d practically memorized the information that detailed Brent Sommers’s extensive network of accomplices on both sides of the Atlantic. Snatching up the sheet, she traced the lettering. How did the duke have such precise, beautiful calligraphy? Strong and controlled. Much like him. Her fingertip brushed over the initials at the bottom. V.A.M.

Valentine Alexander Medford.

Even his name sounded like it had a giant stick lodged up its arse. Bronwyn stifled a snicker. Not that hers was any better. Perhaps their parents had been cut from the same cloth—pretentious and affected. It was why she had preferred the much simpler nickname Bee, given to her by Rawley, Courtland’s cousin from Antigua, though her mother detested the shortened sobriquet.

“It’s common, Bronwyn,” the marchioness had sneered with such disdain that Bronwyn had tasted it. “You are a highborn lady and you will conduct yourself as such. No more of this nickname nonsense. And you will stay a far step from Ashvale’s contemptuous relations. The nerve of him, sullying your father’s good name with the lower classes from the islands. The horror.”

“What makes them contemptuous to you, Mama?” she had shot back without thinking. “The fact that they might not have money or the fact that they are not white?”

“How dare you speak to me so, you wretched child?”

Bronwyn had dared because her mother was wrong.