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his fire-green eyes lancing into her. “But I’ll be damned if I’ve come all this way to find you, just to let that happen. So you’d better get bloody used to me, kaur .”
    Whoever the bastard is.
    He didn’t know who wanted to kill her?
    She ought to feel some relief. But the tight, caged feeling in her lungs was still too close to panic for anything approaching relief. And the intense heat in his eyes, scant inches from hers, pouring his angry distrust over her, was enough to make her want to weep.
    How could he not know—he who had seen everything? How had they come to this—this intensely hard feeling that was perilously close to hate? How had something so sweet and fine become so twisted and mean? But she would not cry. She would not. She was done with spilling useless tears for him. “Leave me alone.”
    “Sir?” The tentative call came from the lawn beyond their dark shelter. “Mr. Jellicoe? Can you hear me? Lord Jeffrey sent me to give you the all clear.”
    Thomas Jellicoe looked for a moment as if he would not reveal their place, as if he would keep her there by force and be-damned to the consequences. But finally he rose, and pushed his way through the dense branches, holding them back and extending his hand to assist her.
    But she would not willingly touch him again. Catriona turned her shoulder and edged around him, heedless of the clawing branches scratching at her skin and gown.
    He ignored her snub and snared her elbow in his implacable grip. “Thank you,” he addressed Michael, the groundskeeper’s son, who knuckled his forehead in response. “Has the bastard been caught?”
    “Was anybody hit?” Catriona interrupted with her own pressing question instead. “The children?”
    “No, miss. Nary a one. We seem to have come through this all to rights.”
    “Thank God.” Now she did feel at least some relief. She drew a shaky breath into her cold lungs.
    “And the gunman?” Thomas Jellicoe repeated his question.
    “No. If it please you, sir,” Michael answered, “my father tracked fresh hoofprints south back down the road from Sixpenny Handley. And his lordship’s set him to take riders to follow and track the assassin down.”
    Thomas Jellicoe nodded, and narrowed his eyes to scan the tree line beyond the manor walls. In that moment, she could see the canny Punjabi, the wily and brilliant sawar Tanvir Singh inside the trappings of this English gentleman. But when he spoke, his voice was again that of Lord Jeffrey’s brother, son of the Earl Sanderson, all assumed, imperious command. “Good man. Where are Lord Jeffrey and the earl, now?”
    How blind had she been, never to have seen it—that his sense of command came from an innate sense of privilege? How stupidly infatuated had she been that she had never seen the obvious truth of the man standing so close to her?
    Too close. Again, she tried to wrest her elbow from his grasp.
    He tugged her closer.
    “Gun room, sir.” Michael was saying. “My Lord Jeffrey says I’m to take you there now, if our Miss Cates isn’t hurt.”
    It gave her strength, that “our Miss Cates,” that feeling of belonging. She found her voice somewhere in the back of her aching throat. “No. I’m not hurt.”
    Michael chanced returning a small smile. “I’m glad, miss. Then you’re to go to Lady Jeffrey and the children.”
    “Yes, of course. Thank you.” She tugged against Thomas Jellicoe’s grip again, harder. “I’ll go directly.”
    But Thomas Jellicoe wouldn’t let her go. He continued to ignore Michael’s, or more properly, Lord Jeffrey’s request—continued to do just as he pleased, just as he always had. “I’ll escort your Miss Cates.”
    “I am not your Miss Cates, either. I am not your anything.”
    He loomed over her, intimidating her with his height and breadth, and his dark English coat. “We are not done, Cat,” he promised her. “Not by a long measure.”
    She looked up at him, and it was as if she were seeing him