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the peelers return my drowned body here to Danforthe House, you take pity on me and don’t tell my brothers that I was driven, out of desperation, to end my own life.”
    “Wait, do I hear violins?”
    “I wouldn’t want to be buried outside the church wall with the sinners and those unbaptized. For then I might have to come back and haunt…somebody.”
    She already did, he mused, thinking of the scratching inside his wainscoting. But she didn’t hide from him today. She’d stepped out of the shadows to get his attention. Her bonnet he vaguely recognized now as one that previously belonged to his sister. Molly Robbins must have altered it slightly, taken away some of the decoration and restyled it to fit her less flamboyant personality. Her cheeks were thinner than his sister’s, the skin a little darker. Dimples, pouts, and fluttery lashes had no place on Miss Robbins’s face. There was no artifice, such as he often detected painting the features of his mistress. Molly didn’t need anything of that sort; hers was an honest face, unwavering, composed, fearless.
    Carver watched her thoughtfully. Perhaps she was not so very plain after all. Or perhaps he had simply never observed her closely enough.
    “Is there something amiss?” she inquired, very polite. This slender girl, sneezing all over his library, dampening his air with her germs, had the gall to ask if there was anything wrong with him . “You look a trifle pale, my lord.”
    He stabbed a finger at the No Tomfoolery clause in her contract. “This won’t be necessary.”
    “I’d like it there all the same. Just to be sure.” Bloody woman didn’t even blink.
    “Well, it’s your ink wasted.” He smirked. “Mouse.”
    “Better be safe than sorry, my lord. Like I said, if you don’t feel up to it. If you prefer that I seek funds elsewhere, from some other gentleman who—”
    “Hush, woman!”
    He would never hear the last of it from his sister if he turned Robbins away from his door, and to be perfectly honest, he didn’t like the idea of her going to others for assistance. He supposed this strange pinch of anxiety might have something to do with being dragged up and out of his own bed so blasted early, but he could not allow her to go to anyone else. Not with those wise-beyond-their-years brown eyes and lips that grew bolder by the minute.
    Grabbing his pen, he scrawled an angry signature across the bottom of both copies, ending with a hard press to the last upward swing of the “m” in Everscham. A fat blot of ink blossomed on the paper—almost, much to his embarrassment, in the shape of a heart—and then he dropped the quill back into the ink well.
    “You have somewhere to live?” he demanded gruffly.
    “I will find lodgings, my lord.”
    Carver picked up his letter opener and tapped it on the desk, watching as she signed her name to the papers beside his own unwieldy blots. “My solicitor, Edward Hobbs, can be of assistance with that. Seek him out in his offices. Bishopsgate. My carriage can take you there this morning. I will write you a note to give him.”
    “Thank you, my lord. That is most kind.”
    Kind? Humph. “Well, I wouldn’t know about that,” he muttered. He was merely thinking he should know where she went in case any of the silver was later discovered missing and he needed to track her down. That, he assured himself briskly, was the only reason why he bothered to involve Hobbs.
    He glanced at her neat signature. Margaret “Molly” Robbins might masquerade as a mouse, but her only similarities to such a creature were speed and hunger. While stealing cheese from the kitchen, she would never be crushed under the cook’s feet or flattened by a rolling pin. She certainly knew what she was doing when she bearded him in his lair so early in the day and before he was properly awake.
    The contract completed, she flashed her dark, spirited eyes back up at him, and he got the distinct impression she was celebrating.