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do them worry about him.
    He still had the loyalty of his friends, his former teammates, but he did not want them to see him in this condition. “I’m not going anywhere,” he assured her in a low tone, holding her stare. “You helped me; I help you.”
    The softening around her tender lips did strange things to his insides. She slipped the key to his chains out of her décolleté where she had hidden it close to her heart. She held his gaze and thrust it into the hole. Nick swallowed hard, wanting her to the point of pain as she turned the key and made the iron lock pop.
    As the manacles released, he nearly groaned.
    She removed the little key from the manacles and handed it to him. He leaned down and unlocked the cuffs around his ankles.
    The iron shackles dropped to the carriage floor, an unutterable weight taken from him, like a very anchor that had been holding him underwater, placed there by all those who were just waiting for him to drown. Straightening up, he gave her back the key. “Thank you,” he said in a low, earnest tone.
    Again the hint of a silken smile tugged at her lips. “After all you’ve done, you deserve better than to have my staff see you in chains.”
    Nick searched her face for any sign of irony. He found none. Yet for his part, he barely knew what she was talking about—“everything he had done.”
    All he could remember these days was the bad imputed to his account. The guilt. The disappointment he was to those who had invested so much in him. Prison had a way of making a man forget the good about himself if he had ever really known it in the first place.
    Then the carriage door opened.
    Lady Burke alighted, her hand resting on that of her groom. Nick rubbed his chafed wrists as he stepped down after her, leaving his shackles behind as he stepped out into the sunlight.
    “This way.” The baroness turned to him with a steadying gaze, as if she knew how disoriented he felt as he stood there in the drive, a free man, more or less, for the first time in months.
    Damn. It was so moving to taste freedom again that he, Nick Forrester, trained assassin, hardest of the hard, had a lump in his throat.
    A sunbeam caressed his cheeks as he turned his face to the open sky above him.
    “Come.” Lady Burke touched his elbow gently after a moment. “Welcome to Deepwood, my lord. If you’ll follow me?”
    He opened his eyes and found her watching him. Her curious stare brought him back to earth, then he trailed after her as she went ahead of him into her grand, porticoed mansion.
    Nick was almost beginning to feel like a real human being again as she introduced him to the butler, Mason; the housekeeper, Mrs. Hill; and the first footman, Edward, who would be looking after him.
    Young, squeaky-clean Edward looked slightly terrified to have been assigned this duty, but he needn’t have worried. Nick had no plans of causing trouble.
    Indeed, it seemed Virgil’s daughter had done the impossible—had inspired the old Scot’s problem agent to be a good boy.
    And that in itself, thought Nick, was probably cause for alarm. Then he trailed after her, damned near ready to do whatever she said.

 
    Chapter 3
    G in watched him climb the stairs with a weary, prowling stride, like the pitiful big cats kept on public display at the Tower of London’s menagerie. Embittered and broken as the animals became from too many years in a stone cell, they were still capable of mauling a well-meaning keeper on occasion.
    She knew she would have to be on her toes with him, and yet he was beautiful, dangerous as he was, with an innate nobility. “Lord Forrester?” she called, as he followed Edward to the landing of the staircase.
    He turned. “Yes, my lady?”
    “Do you have a favorite dessert, by chance?”
    He did not seem to comprehend the question.
    “Dinner is served at seven, and since you are our guest, we would like to make you happy.”
    “Anything,” he forced out with a catch in his voice, as though he