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While the hall emptied out, guests rushing past to inspect the chaos in the adjoining room, it occurred to Maggie that she didn't know what Mr. Darrow looked like. She needn't have worried, for it quickly became obvious that there were precious few candidates left behind. Her attention shifted to two men at the far end of the corridor, their heads bent together in low conversation while they stood sandwiched between a pair of arcing ferns. Some sour-faced ancestors glowered down at the men from their portrait, as if disapproving of the overheard subject matter.

Maggie felt like her throat had filled with nettles. This was beyond impropriety, but she hadn't lugged the manuscript around all night just to turn chicken now. Papa liked to read to her from Julius Caesar, even though her mother disapproved of the treachery and violence. Her father had been a navy man, and he always made the gory parts feel real and terrifying.

Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.

That was perhaps a bit dramatic, given she was just a writer facing down an awkward social interaction, not armed senators waiting to ambush her with knives, but the grandiosity spurred her on. What were we but the players in our own dramatizations, amusing an ever-shifting audience of family, friends, and strangers? Maggie charged forward, arriving just as the two men finished speaking. One had been whispering, a short, round man with a friendly face and tiny spectacles perched on his nose. He had a scholarly appearance, and so Maggie dredged up her courage, Caesar-style, and shot out in front of him.

"Mr. Darrow?" she asked, voice bright with hope.

 

"Me? Oh, heavens, no," the man said with a laugh, and as he went on his way, tapped the other fellow on the shoulder. "Darrow? There's a lady here for you."

That little tap seemed to pull Mr. Darrow back from worlds away. He spun toward her, hair mussed, intensely dark eyes snapping to her with alarm. One hand was tucked under his chin, and there was a faint smudge of ink on the bare flash of skin between glove and sleeve, not unlike the ink staining Maggie's fingers beneath her gloves. Maggie's nervousness vanished, a new, unfamiliar emotion replacing the last: desire.

She had desired things in her life before—a secure future for her family, longevity for her parents, to see her book in the hands of readers across England—but never had she wanted a specific person. The heroes she had imagined for her stories paled in comparison, for they were concocted of words and punctuation, and this man before her was real, warm. It radiated from him, an intoxicating heat, and those searching, powerful eyes of his fell on her with genuine curiosity. If she had felt hot in the other room, now she felt fit to explode.

He smelled incredible, musky somehow, but not unpleasant, like a powerful, wild animal mixed with the fresh blast of the outdoors after rain. It was enough to banish the reek of Mr. Gainswell's unwashed stockings from her memory forever.

"Yes?" He cocked his head to the side. He was tall, well-built, with the strength of a person who rode and looked after their exercise. "Do we know each other?"

He sounded, well, annoyed, but he looked at her with enough inquisitiveness to light a flame of hope in her chest. Did he find her beautiful? Something in his gaze told her it might be so. His eyes were stormy blue, boundlessly dark to the point that they were nearly black. Even so, there was delight there or curiosity. The other hand, the one at his side, impatiently opened and closed around nothing. Whatever conversation she had interrupted, it didn't seem to be a happy one.

"I'm afraid we haven't been introduced," said Maggie, dropping into a polite curtsy as she remembered her long-lost manners. "Miss Margaret Arden. We might be acquainted, sir, but it would only be through the post. Some months ago, I sent you my manuscript, The Killbride." And here, she hastened to take the bundled pages out from under her arm and its protective shawl covering. She felt stupider by the second as she unwound the fabric, realizing that she must seem to him an absolute lunatic. "And because you never responded, I thought perhaps the pages were lost, or for some unfortunate reason you never received them."

The shawl removed, Maggie held up the fat stack of paper between them.