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last, long breath of fortitude and prayed for the best.
    “He…he’s my husband.”

Chapter 5
    H usband.
    Charles felt his heart thud and then stop. He took a sharp breath to start it again, but there was still a cold lump in his gut.
    Married. The woman was married. She should have said earlier that he’d stolen her from her husband’s side.
    But the man hadn’t been there; she’d been alone in her bed when Summerwell found her. Her coward of a husband had doubtless fled down the back stairs, leaving his innocent wife to face the consequences of his folly.
    Bloody blazes!
    “Spindleshanks is your husband, madam?”
    “Alas, my lord, he is!” She was weeping intothose rusty iron chains at her delicate wrists, and they suddenly seemed horrific.
    Christ, how he hated this. A woman weeping in his office. This woman.
    “What is your husband’s name?”
    “MacGillnock, of course.”
    “His Christian name, madam?”
    “It’s, it’s—” The bastard’s name became a flood of weeping and clanking as she snuffled and wiped her nose. “It’s Adammmmmmmm.”
    The coward. “Adam MacGillnock,” he said, hating the stabbing taste of it on his tongue.
    “Yes.” She gathered herself up on pitifully wobbling legs, her face beautiful even streaming with tears, her shoulders sagging now, her fingers laced together among the folds of her nightgown and the lank chain. “I’ve told you all I know. Now you must let me leave, my lord. I’m so very tired. To the inside of my heart I am.”
    “Not quite yet, Miss…madam—” He couldn’t bring himself to say Mrs. MacGillnock ; the name didn’t suit her in the least. Miss Finch did. She was far better than MacGillnock; so magnificent in her defense of her rotter of a husband, in her foolhardy attempt at perjury to save his lousy skin.
    “But you promised, my lord! I’ve just betrayed the man I love and for what purpose? Do you mean to keep me here at your mercy?”
    The man she loved—it set his teeth on edge tohear it. That she would waste her life and her love on a man like that. Not that he cared a whit about the woman’s private life; he merely detested injustice, and that was the case here.
    “You’ll be free to go as soon as you tell me where he is.”
    “Gone.” She sniffled and shook her head, making all that cascading gold shimmer down her back.
    “Gone where?”
    That brought a little whimpering sound. “I don’t know. He didn’t say.”
    Bloody hell, he’d never had a bit of luck with weeping women. He usually sped off in the opposite direction, but this one made him want to dry her tears, to soothe her fear. To apologize, for God’s sake!
    “When did you see him last?” he snapped, because like an utter dolt he was reaching into his breeches pocket for a handkerchief, offering it to her.
    She caught her lower lip with her perfect white teeth, snuffled again, and started to reach for the linen, but the chains dragged her hands down. Bloody hell.
    “It was three loooong nights ago. Very late. I don’t know where he’d been.”
    The meeting at Rennick’s mill. “What did MacGillnock look like when he arrived home? What was he wearing?”
    “His shirt.” Another sob shook her shoulders.
    “Trousers and a leather waistcoat, like always. He was tired and hungry.”
    He lifted her chin and dabbed at the dampness in her eyes. “What did he do then?”
    “We’d been two whole weeks without seeing each other. So I fed him supper, and then he took me upstairs, and we—Oh.” It was a tiny but telling sound and made his teeth hurt. She blushed absolutely everywhere he could see, leaving him to imagine all the sultry places that were hidden just beyond his jurisdiction.
    “Well, he was gone when I woke up the next morning.”
    The thought of Hollie Finch warmed to her ears and naked and tangled up in cool linen sheets unbalanced his thinking and brought a roaring heat to his groin. Though he hadn’t a single claim to her.
    “You haven’t