“I recall.” He tapped his stiff finger against the tankard. When he’d made that offer, he’d have picked a fight with anything big and angry, just in hopes of losing for a change. “But things are different now. I have responsibilities here. And I think I’m done with brawling.”

Bellamy leaned over the table and drilled him with a look. “Well, you’ll come out of retirement for this. You’re a member of the Club, and Leo was our founder. You owe him that much, to avenge his death.”

Uncertainty quirked the corner of Rhys’s mouth. Just what did he owe Leo Chatwick? This Club of his had done nothing for him. But it was Leo’s murder that had finally convinced Rhys of the futility of chasing after death. If Leo hadn’t been killed, Rhys might not have returned to Buckleigh-in-the-Moor for years. This one chance at redemption might have been a long time coming.

Perhaps he did owe Leo a great deal.

“Find the man first,” Rhys said. “Then we’ll talk.”

Chapter Ten

During his brief stay at the Three Hounds, Mr. Julian Bellamy did precisely one thing to endear himself to Meredith. He left before dawn.

By contrast, she’d expected Cora to sleep until noon—wasn’t that what ladies of the night must do? So the girl’s appearance during morning baking was a true surprise.

“Good morning, Mrs. Maddox.”

Meredith lifted a board lined with risen yeast rolls and sneezed at a puff of flour. “Mr. Bellamy has already left for London.”

“Yes, ma’am. I gathered as much.”

Cora was all fresh-faced innocence this morning. No paint or powder to obscure her fair complexion, and her blond hair was styled in a simple knot. Her china-blue muslin day dress was low-cut and in want of a fichu, but otherwise unremarkable in style or quality.

And despite all this, she was still a very pretty girl. Perhaps prettier than she’d been yesterday. Which made Meredith think the girl would be trouble.

She didn’t like having Cora in the inn, but she liked the alternatives less. There was no way this harlot was staying in any private residence—be it a London town house or moorland hovel—belonging to Rhys. Meredith might have refused the man’s offer of marriage once or twice, but she wasn’t resigning all interest in him. Not after yesterday at the pool, when she’d been inches away from making years of fantasies come true.

She wrenched open the oven door, and a wave of heat swamped her. Sweat beaded instantly on her brow and neck. Her defenses were momentarily stripped. Memories rushed in.

His strong arms anchoring her in the pool. Their tongues, mating with wild abandon. The hot, swollen tip of his arousal gliding under her touch, silky as twice-milled flour.

His fingers, so thick inside her …

She thrust the bread into the oven and banged the door shut. Focus, Meredith. Her torrid daydreams had already scorched the first batch of rolls.

“Breakfast is over,” she told Cora, wiping her hands on her apron. “And the noon meal will be awhile yet. But there will be fresh bread in a few minutes. Do you take coffee or tea?”

“I don’t suppose there’s chocolate?”

A pretty face and a taste for sweets? Trouble. “I’m afraid not.”

“Then tea, please.”

When Meredith moved to put the kettle on, the girl intervened. “Oh, let me do it, ma’am. When I lived in London, I always made tea for the girls in the house. I’ve a knack for it.”

Meredith surrendered the kettle. As she watched the girl fill it with water and place it on the hob, she cleared her throat and brought out her sternest voice. “Listen, Cora. We both know this discussion is coming, so we may as well have it over with now.”

The girl’s eyebrows arched in surprise, as if she’d no idea what Meredith was going to say. “Yes, ma’am?”

“This is my inn, and it’s a respectable establishment. The local men who come in here of an evening—they’re going to take quite an interest in you. But even if you are a friend of Lord Ashworth’s, I warn you now, I won’t abide any mischief.”

“Oh, yes, ma’am. I’m not wanting any mischief. I know Mr. Bellamy said he’d pay my account, but I’d rather work for my keep.”

Meredith narrowed her eyes. “I thought I just told you—”

“Oh, not that kind of work.” The kettle rumbled. Cora plucked a towel from the table and wrapped it about her hand before removing the kettle from the hob. “That life was never what I wanted. I hardly know how it happened. I was living in Dover—that’s where I was raised. My mother worked as a seamstress there, and one day she sent me to the market. I was dallying with friends on my way home, and a fancy gent drove by in a splendid coach. Handsome as anything, he was. He opened the door and called me a pretty little thing and asked, would I like to ride with him to London? Why certainly I would. Always wanted to see London, what girl didn’t?” She frowned. “Where’s the tea?”

Meredith motioned toward the tea caddy.

Biting her lip, Cora measured tea leaves into the pot with childlike concentration. She was such a strange mix of girl and woman. Meredith couldn’t decide which she was feigning: the innocence, or the worldliness.

“So you went with him to London …” she prompted, vaguely wondering why she was even taking an interest.

“I went with him to London. And when I arrived there, I was a whore. The handsome gent shoved me out in Covent Garden and tossed me a shilling.” She gave a matter-of-fact shrug as she covered the tea leaves with steaming water and set them to steep.

“How old were you?”

“Thirteen.”

Meredith gasped. “Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes. Thirteen and alone in the world, with no other way of earning bread, no coin to go home … I didn’t think my mother would even want me back.” A little smile curved her lips as she stared down at the tea. “But she did. When I went to see her just last month, she told me she’d prayed for me every single day.”

“Of course she had.” Meredith poked at the fire. Smoke stung her eyes, giving her a convenient excuse to blink away a tear. The girl’s story was undeniably moving. Stirring enough to blow years of accumulated dust off her maternal instincts. She might be barren, but the Three Hounds worked like a magnet for unwanted adolescents in need of a friend. First Gideon, then Darryl. Now this girl, too.

She took the towel from Cora’s hand and prepared to remove the rolls from the oven. “And how old are you now?”

“Eighteen, ma’am. And I don’t want to go back to that life, I don’t. Please let me work for you, Mrs. Maddox. By the time I leave here, mayhap I’ll have prospects for better employment. Perhaps Mr. Bellamy or Lord Ashworth would see fit to furnish me with a character reference, and I could find a post in service. Could send my mother some money from time to time, and she wouldn’t have to worry where it come from.”

“Well, I can see you’ve thought it all through.”

“Lay awake half the night, ma’am. I suppose that’s why I overslept.”

Meredith offered her a fresh roll, and Cora accepted it eagerly, crying out in alarm when it singed her fingertips. Meredith smiled at the ensuing juggling act, and at Cora’s bubbly, girlish laugh.

“Is there jam?” she asked hopefully, her cheeks flushing pink.

“Yes. Yes, there is. And honey too.” And the next time she saw Gideon, Meredith would ask him to bring round some chocolate.

As she retrieved the pots of sticky sweetness, Meredith thought of herself at Cora’s age. She’d already been caretaker to her invalid father and the family’s only potential wage-earner. All that, plus desperate and hungry. Fortunately, thanks to her father and dear late mother, she’d had some skills and education. Sometimes she’d suspected Maddox of marrying her out of pity. Or perhaps simply because she knew how to read and write and do sums better than most anyone in the village. Certainly better than Maddox himself.

She’d been lucky. By contrast, Cora had found herself friendless, penniless, uneducated, and transplanted to an unfamiliar city at the age of thirteen … after being crudely indoctrinated into womanhood by some passing “gentleman” with a high-sprung carriage. It was remarkable that she’d survived at all, and her tale certainly explained why she acted like a girl who was thirteen-nearing-thirty.

It made a tragic sort of sense that a child stripped of innocence might cultivate another, more willful naïveté to replace it. She thought of Rhys, and his stubborn belief in fate. What lies would an abused boy tell himself, rather than believe he’d somehow earned such vile treatment?

Cora poured two cups of tea, and Meredith took a cautious sip. “Not bad at all,” she said, savoring the rich warmth spreading down her throat. “I’ll teach you coffee next. There’s an apron hanging on a nail, just the other side of the onion bin.”

The girl clapped her hands together. “You’ll allow me to work for you?”

Meredith nodded as she took another sip of tea. She wanted to give the girl a chance, and there was no doubt she could use the extra help. Once the new construction started, she’d have a crew of hungry men to feed. And those hungry men would be earning wages, a portion of which they’d slide right back across the bar at the end of the day.

“You’ll be my new serving girl,” she said. “Your day starts at breakfast, and then you’ll help Mrs. Ware with the cooking until the noon meal. Your afternoons will be your own from two to five, and then it’s back to tend the bar until close. How does that sound?”

“Oh, it sounds lovely.”

“Lovely?” Meredith chuckled. “We’ll consider this first week a trial. Innkeeping is difficult labor. You may not take to it.”

“Oh, I will.” Cora’s cheeks dimpled with a grin as she looped the apron over her arms. “I’m stronger than I look.”

“I don’t doubt it. We women usually are.” She slid a bowl of risen dough in the girl’s direction and demonstrated the way to form rolls. “But mind you, this isn’t London. Some of the men hereabouts are of a rough sort. If they give you any trouble, you’re to tell me.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And don’t go wandering the countryside on your own. The moor can be dangerous if you don’t know your way. If there’s anywhere you need to go, the stable hand will take you.”

“Not at the moment, he won’t.” A deep voice interrupted them. “Darryl’s occupied putting up my mare.”

Meredith turned to spy Gideon standing in the doorway between kitchen and tavern. Leaving the rolls to Cora, she hurried to meet him. God, she hoped he hadn’t …

“No. No wagon today,” he said, answering her unspoken question. “I’ve come on horseback, just to suss matters out. Brought your newspapers, though.” He held them aloft. “There’s a fine bottle of port in my saddlebag, and …” His gaze drifted over her shoulder.

“And bloody hell, who is that?”

She looked over her shoulder at Cora. The girl was covered in flour to her wrists, industriously pulling the yeasty dough and shaping it into knots. The lumps of risen dough bore a marked resemblance to her pale breasts, overflowing her bodice in two healthy scoops as she leaned over the table.

“That’s Cora,” she said, turning back to Gideon.

His unshaven throat worked. “She looks like a harlot.”

Meredith pulled him through the doorway, out from the girl’s hearing. “Well, she was. Until recently. Now she’s my new barmaid.”

He scowled. “You’re taking in whores? I thought this wasn’t that kind of inn. You’re always talking about making the Three Hounds a respectable establishment.”