Gray curled over, bracing his head in his hands. Was there no one he could trust? His father had given Otis a good job and paid him well, but Gray had been out of the country for most of the last twenty years. He didn’t truly know Otis.

“I’ll figure this out,” he said grimly. “If Otis stabbed us in the back, I’ll catch him in the act.”

“In the meantime, I’m not giving up on Luke,” Caroline said, but this was a battle she shouldn’t waste her strength on. Luke was deliberately sacrificing himself so as not to suck the rest of his family down with him.

“Luke wants the best for you,” Gray said gently. “He specifically said he wants you to soar.”

She kept her chin high but blinked furiously to stop the tears from falling. “I will never, never give up on him.”

Gray reached out an arm to pull her against him. This horrific crisis had brought him and Caroline closer than they’d ever been. She no longer bucked against his rules, and he’d lost interest in trying to mold her into the sort of sober, conventional woman he thought she should be. They both had bigger problems to confront, and the stain on their family’s honor was going to scorch. Gray could afford a hit to his reputation, but Caroline couldn’t.

“Once news of the scandal breaks, you may not be able to keep working here.” He’d never approved of Caroline getting sucked into the McKinley administration, but she loved her work and was likely to become a casualty of Luke’s disgrace.

“I’ve already told Mrs. McKinley and the president everything,” she said.

“And how did that go?” he asked, stunned that Caroline could still be employed if news had already reached the White House.

“Not well. Mrs. McKinley was so appalled that she recoiled from me as I talked. I hadn’t even finished before she raced straight to the president’s office to tell him everything. But, Gray . . . President McKinley was so kind. He actually tried to comfort me instead of hurling me out of the house as I feared.”

“So that’s it?”

She nodded. “I think so. Mrs. McKinley takes her cue from the president, and since he accepted it, she fell into lockstep behind him.”

“A matched pair, then.”

The tone of his voice must have irked Caroline, for her spine stiffened, but her voice became earnest.

“You don’t understand them,” she said. “Mrs. McKinley is a fragile, difficult woman, but her husband dotes on her anyway. He dances attendance on her. You ought to see how solicitous he is.”

He snorted. “So are you.”

“The difference is that I’m being paid, and he has to put up with her for free.”