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though. We’re two of a kind, you and I.”
    She sniffed. “Good day, Lord Dowling. Take care on your way back to Bedlam.”
    “We neither of us arrived at our current circumstances through our own actions,” he called out as she walked away. “You’re an heiress through the fortunate providence of Arthur de Lacey’s death without issue.” She whirled to face him, mouth open in fury, but he only nodded as he strolled after her. “I’m on the brink of ruin because my father, and then his appointed guardian, thought our family fortunes lay in the colonies. Unfair in both cases, don’t you agree?”
    She found her voice. “I never asked to be an heiress. I told my brother to keep his money. The ducal branch of the family cut us off decades ago. How dare you imply I reveled in the death of—”
    “Of a cousin you never met, and probably would have disliked if you had.” He grinned again. “I knew him in passing. He would have been just like his father, miserly with his patronage and cruel to his servants. No one in England was sorry to see him meet an untimely end.” He paused. “Although I do believe he was near sixty. Hardly cut down in the blush of youth.”
    “I never knew him, and didn’t realize until after his untimely death what it meant for my brother,” she said coldly. “I was happy as I was!”
    “Were you?” His gaze wandered down her bare throat and bosom, over her tightly laced bodice, past her striped silk petticoat, all the way to her embossed red leather shoes tied with jaunty black ribbons. Margaret had never felt so studied, and even though her face flushed at his impertinence, some small, wicked part of her liked it. If he was merely pretending to find her attractive, he was doing a very flattering job of it.
    Which was ridiculous. He would say anything to seduce her, and once she succumbed to his charm and married him, he could lock her away in his attics and spend every last farthing of Francis’s money.
    “I was happy,” she told him with hard finality. “I had dear friends—who now are too inferior for me to associate with, for all their kindness and good natures. I had a comfortable home—not a mansion, but warm and safe and cozy. I was never hungry, or cold, or despised.”
    “But did you ever have passion?” he murmured. “A lover? A husband to protect and provide for you, to hold you in his arms at night, to give you children?”
    The charge struck home, but she hid her flinch. “One doesn’t need those things, my lord.”
    “No?” He arched a brow. “Perhaps some do not . . . most likely because they don’t know what they’re missing. But you, my dear, you need them. You crave them. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be strolling Lord Feithe’s grounds wearing a dress worth more than a farmer makes in a year. You’re disgusted by me, and every other man simpering over you, because you want someone who will love you, not your dowry.”
    He was right, sadly. Her shoulders hurt from the effort of keeping still. “You wouldn’t even be speaking to me if not for that dowry,” she said softly.
    “Only because I never had the chance to meet you before.”
    That made her laugh. “Indeed? You would have called us two of a kind when I was merely the sister of a businessman in Holborn, years past her prime with only five hundred pounds to her name?”
    “No, I would have said you were above me,” he replied with a remarkably straight face. “I inherited my title twenty years ago, and there was precious little money in the estate then. I was only a boy of ten; a cousin of my father’s had the management of all that was mine until I reached twenty-one, and he did a piss-poor job of it. I watched my inheritance bleed away because he fancied everything would be solved by tobacco farms in the colonies.” His voice was growing tight, but he lifted his shoulders and his tone eased. “Perhaps it did, until the slave rebellion, followed by the fire, and then fever. Now