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I assure you I am very conscious of the safety of your family. But the shots were not for me. There was a single gunman. He fired, from my recollection, three shots, in succession at timed intervals, which suggests some army training. And every single one of them was fired at your Miss Cates. Thank God I got here when I did.”
    “Miss Cates? That’s ridiculous.” James echoed Cat’s sentiments. “Who would want to shoot a poor governess?”
    The list, by Thomas’s calculation, was not extensive. Just brutally efficient. “I think you should know, there is more to your Miss Cates than meets the eye.”
    James crossed his arms over his chest and took a more careful, measured look at his younger brother. “I could say as much about you, Thomas. Miss Cates has been living amongst us in the neighborhood quite peacefully until you showed up. And you’re the one who scared her half to death. You frightened her even before the shooting. Why?”
    Thomas weighed his truths out as carefully as possible. “I knew her in India.”
    “So I gathered. She did not seem pleased to renew the acquaintance.”
    “No, she didn’t.” Thomas had imagined their reunion many, many times in the past two years. In each imagining Catriona had been glad—more than glad. She had been deliriously happy to see him. She had thrown her arms around his neck and kissed him passionately. She had not pulled away in disgust and said, “Leave me alone.”
    “Did you manhandle her there as well? I hope I don’t need tell you, Thomas, as pleased as I am to see you, I won’t stand for anyone, even my long-lost brother, bullying or mistreating my servants. Miss Cates is greatly valued by Lady Jeffrey. Greatly.”
    Thomas looked at his brother and his father—whom he hadn’t even greeted properly—and felt the weight of his own shortcomings, his own failures. Cat had been right. She was not ecstatic to see him because he had failed her. Miserably.
    “I understand completely. Again, my apologies. Hello, Father.”
    His father, the Earl Sanderson, extended his hand and gave his youngest son a deep, slow smile. “It is, of course, a pleasure—more than a pleasure—to see you after all these years, Thomas, but … It has not been the most auspicious of homecomings.”
    “No. I am sorry.”
    James was only partially mollified. “Sorry doesn’t explain why someone shot at my family. Or, as you insist, at my governess.”
    Thomas’s natural inclination was to keep the few of Cat’s secrets that he did know to himself, for they were rightly hers to tell. But James was right—his family had been exposed to gunfire. Thomas owed them a larger measure of the truth. “How much of what I did in India do you know?”
    James looked to their father.
    “A little.” The earl settled into a leather armchair. “A very little. I could find only that you were asked by the company to assume another identity, though even I couldn’t learn anything beyond that. I assume you were a spy.”
    “That’s as neat a description as any.” It gave Thomas little pleasure to have his work described thusly. However good he had been at gathering intelligence, spying was hardly an honorable profession for a gentleman. He had hoped never to mention his erstwhile career to his family—only to tell them he had made his fortune in horse trading and breeding.
    But his father, it seemed, had intelligence sources of his own. “It was not, perhaps, a career I would have chosen for you,” his father admitted. “Indeed, I had hoped your service in India would lead eventually to a political career.”
    His career, such as it was, was over. Finished.
    “I didn’t choose it, either. It seemed to have chosen me.” Not for the first time in the past year, Thomas wished for a drink. After years of honoring the vow of abstinence he had taken in his identity as Tanvir Singh, this was what his tangled obsession with Catriona Rowan had reduced him to. Even this early in the