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forward, her curiosity momentarily making her forget her fear. The carriage window framed her head and shoulders, the light outside glinting off her hair and spinning a bright nimbus about her silhouette. She would, indeed, be unsafe traveling unescorted. She was, he thought distantly, unsafe with him.
    “Because I’d forgotten what freedom was like,” he said, “and now I remember and the comparison is … keen.”
    Backlit as she was, it was impossible to read her expression.
    “Why did your family not—”
    “My turn,” he cut across her query. Ash was gone, Fia probably bartered off to the wealthiest suitor by now, and he did not want to think of Carr. He had no interest in his sire, nor any desire to ever again behold him. Though he supposed it might prove inevitable once he’d reached Wanton’s Blush.
    Wanton’s Blush.
    Once again his future held choices, options, and prospects beyond the simple ambition not to be killed in the next prison brawl. The realization rushed in on him with heady force.
    “Monsieur?”
    He blinked like a man coming into the sun after too long in the dark, overwhelmingly aware of the debt he owed this young woman. Even if, as he suspected, there was more to this girl’s scheme than she was letting on, at least tonight possibility existed where yesterday there had been none.
    “I owe you a debt,” he said.
    “Please, Monsieur. You owe me nothing. You are aiding me.” She dipped her head, studying her gloved hands. A long tendril slipped over her shoulder. She looked fresh, soft, and tantalizingly vernal with a youth he’d never experienced himself. “I am in
your
debt,” she murmured.
    Now, to ask the heavens for
that
boon would take even more audacity than even he had ever owned. But she’d made the declaration and he had never denied being an opportunist. “It would seem we are mutually indebted, eh
ma petite
Madame?” He paused. “Can I … May I touch your hair?”
    It hadn’t been what he’d meant to say and he heard in the stumbling hesitation of his voice a yearning controlled only by some remnant of pride.
Oafish bore,
he berated himself,
blathering fool. How polished, how urbane. ‘May I touch your hair …’
    Yet he awaited her answer.
    He saw the slight dip of her chin, the barest of assents. Slowly he reached out, as careful of alarming her as if she’d been a Highland colt seeing a man for the first time. She held herself just as still, just as cautiously. His fingers hovered above the gleaming tresses, moved. Felt.
    Silk. Cold silk. So polished as to seem crisp, so slickery cold. He rubbed the lock between thumb and forefinger, closing his eyes, intently cataloguing its texture and richness. His fingers worked higher, moving up, identifying the point where the strands lost their metallic coolness and grew warm with proximity to her skin. He opened his hand wide, letting the strands flow between his fingers, crushing the silky mass in his fist and releasing it and the faint fragrance of soap. He sighed.
    “How old are you, Monsieur?” he heard her ask wonderingly. He opened his eyes.
    “I am a few years into my third decade, Madame.”
    “So young?
Mon Dieu,”
she breathed. “How many years were you in prison?”
    “What matter—”
    “How many?” she insisted.
    “Four.”
    “You were just a youth …” He barely heard her and the horror in her voice made him uncomfortable. Disconcerted he looked away and then immediately back again because he’d not feasted his eyes on a woman like her in years.
    “It is unfair,” she murmured. “This is not right.”
    Once more her naivete goaded awake the long-dormant devil within, a misplaced part of himself that could still be amused by such things as a girl’s innocence. “ ‘Right,’
ma petite?
What has
right
to do with my fate … or yours?”
    His hand was still in her hair. Slowly, his eyes never leaving hers, he wound a handful about his fist. She resisted, but not adamantly. With each