She stepped rather noticeably to the side. “Please,” she said, “go.”

He didn’t move. She’d piqued his curiosity, and there was little in this world more tenacious than Hugh Prentice with an unanswered question.

“You have just spent the last hour ordering me out of your way,” she ground out.

“Five minutes,” he corrected, “and while I do long for the serenity of my own home, I find myself curious about your fourteen men.”

“They were not my fourteen men,” she snapped.

“I should hope not,” he murmured, then added, “not that I would judge.”

Her mouth fell open.

“Tell me about the fourteen men,” he prodded.

“I told you,” she insisted, her cheeks flushing a satisfactory shade of pink, “it was nothing.”

“But I’m curious. Fourteen men for supper? For tea? It’s too many for a team of cricket, but—”

“Stop!” she burst out.

He did. Quirked a brow, even.

“If you must know,” she said, her voice clipped with fury, “there were fourteen men who became engaged to be married in 1821.”

There was a very long pause. Hugh was not an unintelligent man, but he had no idea what this had to do with anything. “Did all fourteen men become married?” he asked politely.

She stared at him.

“You said fourteen became engaged to be married.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does to them, I would imagine.”

He’d thought they were done with histrionics, but Lady Sarah let out a cry of frustration. “You don’t understand anything!”

“Oh, for the love of—”

“Do you have any idea of what you’ve done?” she demanded. “While you sit in your comfortable home, all cozy in London—”

“Shut up,” he said, only he had no idea if he’d said it aloud. He just wanted her to stop. Stop talking, stop arguing, stop everything.

But instead she stepped forward and, with a venomous glare, demanded, “Do you know many lives you have ruined?”

He took a breath. Air, he needed air. He did not need to listen to this. Not from her. He knew precisely how many lives he’d ruined, and hers was not one of them.

But she would not let up. “Have you no conscience?” she hissed.

And finally, he snapped. Without a thought to his leg, he stepped forward until they were close enough for her to feel the heat of his breath. He backed her against the wall, trapping her with nothing but the fury of his presence. “You do not know me,” he bit off. “You do not know what I think or what I feel or what measure of hell I visit each and every day of my life. And the next time you feel so wronged—you, who do not even bear the same surname as Lord Winstead—you would do well to remember that one of the lives I have ruined is my own.”

And then he stepped away. “Good night,” he said, as pleasantly as a summer day.

For a moment he thought they might finally be done, but then she said the one thing that could redeem her.