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Jack’s white-knuckled hands. “No need. She’d do it for you.” Beau grimaced. “I once tried to get my mouth as close to hers as you did, and she smacked me in the cheek with a turnip. She almost knocked my jaw out of joint.”
    Good for you, Lady M.
    But the deep feeling of admiration and the spark of lightness in his heart instantly vanished.
    Someone shot at me, she had said.
    It could have been an accident, but a stray shot directed at her head while she was poking into an old murder seemed too much of a coincidence. She’d claimed she had pressed magistrates to accept his innocence and recognize they’d imprisoned the wrong man. But whoever had strangled the governess Grace Highchurch and young Lady Sarah Sutton in the hedgerow maze on Lady M.’s estate believed he’d gotten away with it.
    Lady Madeline had made the killer realize he hadn’t.
    Rain fell harder.
    “We’re not going to be ready to go tomorrow night.” Shaking droplets from his hair, Beau thrust his lip out in a pout—a look that apparently melted women’s hearts and made them want to drag him to the altar.
    Jack knew he would never understand women. He would never figure out why a woman would want a scoundrel. “I’m going, Beau. You can wait around if you want to. I’ll even leave you the second key—” He stopped. The back of his neck prickled, and he looked behind him.
    He could see the top of the quarry—the ridge of grass and scattered rocks that marked the edge of the moor, before the quarry plunged down a sheer face of smooth granite. Sentries patrolled the edge, muskets at the ready.
    A few yards beyond the red coats, a slim, dark figure stood, unmoving against the rolling cloud that looked ready to swallow her whole. Rain hammered ruthlessly on her slender form, and her cape fluttered and snapped. A gloved hand was at the throat, holding a cowl hood in place against the whip of the wind.
    If a lock of hair were to blow free of the hood, Jack would bet his soul it would prove to be a unique color of blonde that blended both sun-gold and starlight silver into a bewitching shimmer. Her eyes would be dark, almost the blue-black of a deep, cool lake. Yet steal a long enough look at them, and a man would see, in their depths, glints of tempestuous gold.
    Her eyes were the deep blue he’d used on the walls of his last and most elegant gaming hell—the way that color looked when reflected on a gold sovereign.
    Lady Madeline. She must have taken a path up from Princetown, then crossed the moor below the tor to reach the pit.
    He should have known. Not showing up at the market this morning did not mean she had finally given up. No, she was plunging deeper into trouble.
    But Lady M. was doing all this for a man she believed was a good-hearted groom with a gentle touch with horses, not a former gaming hell proprietor who had needed to run away from his old life, his guilt and his sins. She thought he was an innocent man caught up in hell. In truth, many of the things he’d done to make his fortune should have got him in jail. Or hanged.
    One of the soldiers turned and shouted at Lady M., motioning her away with a jerk of his weapon. She backed away, but the soldier took a menacing step, forcing her to spin and run from the edge with stumbling strides.
    A hand clamped hard on his forearm. “Easy. You can do nothing from down here but get your ballocks blown off.”
    Jack hadn’t realized he had taken a few steps toward her as though he could rush up to the ridge and protect her.
    “Get to work,” a guard shouted. Not Blenchley. One of the others. Gray-haired and stoop-shouldered, the guard looked miserable beneath the now-streaming rain. Orders were to shoot low at escapees—to disable and not kill. But the guards were stuck out on cold, miserable days, lived in quarters little better than the prisoners’ blocks, and ate much of the same repugnant food. Shooting a prisoner would be a high point of the day.
    “You know,