Of course, that explained it. Lord Sheridan, with his love of anything old and encrusted with dirt, would naturally have befriended anyone he could find at the British Museum. He probably was jockeying for a place on the board of trustees himself.

“They mentioned that you and he would be sharing a special announcement soon.” Lord Scofield gave her a fatherly wink. “Needed a bit of holiday before all the bustle of wedding preparations, did you?”

Now her face flushed, far hotter than it had with Oliver. And it only got worse when she saw how stiff Lord Willsworth went as he lowered himself to the chair beside her. Not that she cared whether or not he thought her attached, per se. But Scofield had just said she was engaged when Charlotte Wight was within a mile, which meant all of England would hear about it before two seconds were out. And then what would she do?

Her fingers curled into her palm, tucked safely away in her lap, under the tablecloth. “I believe my brother may have overstated it, my lord. He may wish for such a match, but—”

“It wasn’t your brother who said it, my lady. It was Sheridan himself.”

She’d always known she didn’t like him. Why didn’t he have the gumption to stand up to Bram from the start? He couldn’t want the arrangement. He didn’t like her any better than she liked him—she was certain of it. And while she was confident he’d come to the same conclusion given enough time, that was with the assumption that he wouldn’t have bound them both with the fetters of society’s expectations in the meantime. Blast him. “Well, there is certainly nothing official, regardless. I haven’t even seen Lord Sheridan recently.”

Lucky for him. When next she did, she might just borrow a bit of Mabena’s salt-inspired surliness and kick him in the shin.

Then she might as well fly to the moon to hide, if she were dreaming of impossible things.

Her discomfort must have been obvious. Lady Scofield interjected herself into the conversation and deftly changed the subject, asking Willsworth about his latest excavation. Given that he went on to describe animal bones and what he was hypothesizing about them based on fusions in the vertebrae—rather than Sheridan’s inexplicable fascination with shards of pottery and Druid ruins—it would have been an interesting conversation. If only her mind weren’t an absolute muddle and her stomach a matching knot.

Every time she moved, she caught a whiff of the jasmine in her hair, bringing back those terrifying moments on the road. And she’d no sooner shake that off and look over at Lord Scofield than she’d hear Sheridan’s name in her mind again and see Bram’s self-satisfied smirk as he announced that he had the perfect solution to their woes.