Shit. He’d been afraid she wouldn’t believe him. But then, she didn’t really need to believe she could help him. She simply needed to agree.

“All I ask is that you stay with me. A couple of nights a week.”

She gasped. “Impossible.”

“I’d let you use the building,” he said, playing one of his last two cards. “Rent-free. As often as you wish.”

She froze, her beautiful face impassive. But he could tell from her eyes that she was sorely tempted. “You’d bribe me to spend the night with you?”

“It’s not a bribe,” he assured her. “More like a trade. You’d be doing me a service, and I’d be compensating you for your time. I wouldn’t ask you if I wasn’t…” He couldn’t bring himself to say it—to reveal the depths of his desperation. “I wouldn’t ask if I thought I had another option,” he amended.

She paced in front of him, the emerald silk swishing around her feet like waves churning along the shore. He could almost see her weighing her desire to use the tailor’s shop against her resolve to avoid trouble.

“No,” she said at last. “As much as I’d like to help, I can’t. Do you imagine for one second that my parents would permit me to spend the night alone with a bachelor? And if anyone learned of our little arrangement—innocent or not—my name would be trampled in the mud like primroses after a foxhunt.”

“You were wandering the streets alone on the night we met,” he countered. “If you managed to escape your house once, surely you could do it again.”

“That’s different,” she said. “I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

He arched a brow at that. She may not have been breaking any laws, but she clearly had a few secrets of her own. “I’m not asking you to do anything wrong either.”

She held out her palms helplessly. “I’m sorry, Reese. I know you’re convinced that I can help, but I can’t. And I can’t risk my whole future and my family’s good name just to prove that to you.” She shook her head regretfully. “I must go.”

Despair hovered, threatening to smother him like a shroud. He couldn’t—and wouldn’t—force Miss Kendall to spend a night with him.

But he couldn’t let her leave without playing his very last card, which wasn’t a card at all. “Wait,” he said. He reached behind the base of the birch tree and picked up the single rose he’d cut from his garden that morning. The yellow blossom, large as a saucer, had reminded him of her—bold and open, but soft, too. And the petals, brilliant gold with hints of orange at the edges, were as fresh as the sunrise. As warm as her smile.