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had never met?”
    She looked irritated to have been caught out. “I heard Sir Frederick mention your name, that is all.”
    Garrick smiled. “How disappointing to discover that you did not deliberately seek to learn my identity,” he murmured.
    She flicked him a look of polite scorn. “I am sure that your grace’s self-confidence will survive the blow.”
    “I know your name, too,” Garrick said. “You are Lady Merryn Fenner.”
    Now there was no doubting her dismay. She stiffened. Her lips pressed together in annoyance. Then she raised her chin and looked him straight in the eyes. She did not deny it.
    “I am,” she said. “I am Merryn Fenner.”
    Garrick admired both her frankness and her intellect. In that second she had evidently weighed up the fact that he knew her true identity and she had decided that there was nothing to be gained in denying it. Garrick doubted, however, that he had won anything beyond that one point. Merryn Fenner, he was beginning to suspect, would be a stimulating adversary.
    There was a silence, as though she was waiting for him to say something. Garrick wondered if she expected him to apologize. He regretted Stephen Fenner’s death every day but any conventional words of condolence would seem at best hollow, at worst hypocritical. And he doubted that any words of his would make the slightest difference to Merryn’s feelings. He had killed Stephen. She hated him for it. He could tell. He could feel the emotion in her, heated, dark, driven.
    “What were you doing in my house?” he asked. “Were you telling the truth when you said you were homeless? Sleeping on the streets? Forced to take shelter where you can?”
    For a moment his imagination presented him with appalling scenes of the Fenner girls destitute because of his actions all those years before. He had known that the Earl had died a bare year after his son and heir but he had not known what had happened to the daughters. He had been living in exile then, trying to come to terms with the fact that he had failed to save Kitty from the demons and the misery that had haunted her, trying to die in the service of his country and salvage some honor from disaster.
    Merryn Fenner was looking at him thoughtfully with those blue, blue eyes. “It is true that my sisters and I lost our fortunes after our father died,” she said, and the guilt that stalked Garrick’s footsteps tugged at him again.
    “But that is not the reason that I…borrowed…your bed,” she finished. She turned away slightly, picking up a book from the stack on the table beside them, absently fingering the spine. “I was making a point.” She cast him a glance under her lashes. “Farne House is defenseless, your grace, easily taken.” Her voice was soft. If it had been anyone else Garrick would have thought she was making idle conversation but when she looked up and met his gaze her eyes were fierce. “You should be careful,” she said, “that your secrets are not so…vulnerable.”
    Garrick straightened, his eyes narrowing. It was extraordinary that the conversation had moved so swiftly. Lady Merryn Fenner wasted no time. And she was very open in her hostility to him. He suspected that it was because she felt so strongly. He had met men who were as direct but seldom a woman. And with Merryn there was something else, some powerful bond between them that was as undeniable as it was unexpected. Perhaps it had been kindled by her hatred of him, but whatever the cause, it burned in her like a cold flame.
    “Are you threatening me, Lady Merryn?” he asked slowly.
    “I would do nothing so vulgar as to make threats.” She gave him a proper smile this time. It lit her eyes, making them even more spectacular. “I am warning you,” she said, “that those matters you thought were long buried are going to come out into the light and then…” She shrugged. “Well, you risk losing many of the things that you value, I think.”
    “And what do you think that