She looked around for someone who might assist her. Her eyes fell at once on the gentleman at her side. He didn’t appear to be a particularly friendly sort of fellow, but his height was truly commanding and surely he must have a voice to match his size.
“I beg your pardon, sir.” She touched him lightly on the arm with one gloved hand. His muscles tensed beneath her fingers. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but would you mind very much to summon—”
He raised his head from drinking and, very slowly, turned to look at her.
The words died on Helena’s lips.
He was burned. Badly burned.
“Do you require something of me, ma’am?” he asked in an excruciatingly civil undertone.
She stared up at him, her first impression of his appearance revising itself by the second. The burns, though severe, were limited to the bottom right side of his face, tracing a path from his cheek down to the edge of his collar and beyond it, she was sure. The rest of his face—a stern face with a strongly chiseled jaw and hawklike aquiline nose—was relatively unmarked. Not only unmarked, but with his black hair and smoke-gray eyes, actually quite devastatingly handsome.
“Do you require something of me?” he asked again, more sharply this time.
She blinked. “Yes. Do forgive me. Would you mind very much summoning the innkeeper? I cannot seem to—”
“Blevins!” the gentleman bellowed.
The innkeeper broke off his loud conversation and scurried back to their end of the counter. “What’s that, guv?”
“The lady wishes to speak with you.”
“Thank you, sir,” Helena said. But the gentleman had already turned his attention back to his drink, dismissing her without a word.
“Yes, ma’am?” the innkeeper prompted.
Abandoning all thoughts of the handsome—and rather rude—stranger at her side, Helena once again addressed herself to the innkeeper. “I was supposed to meet someone here at one o’clock. A Mr. Boothroyd?” She felt the gentleman next to her stiffen, but she did not regard it. “Is he still here?”
“Another one for Boothroyd, are you?” The innkeeper looked her up and down. “Don’t look much like the others.”
Helena’s face fell. “Oh?” she asked faintly. “Have there been others?”
“Aye. Boothroyd’s with the last one now.”
“The last one?” She couldn’t believe it. Mr. Boothroyd had given her the impression that she was the only woman with whom Mr. Thornhill was corresponding. And even if she wasn’t, what sort of man interviewed potential wives for his employer in the same manner one might interview applicants for a position as a maidservant or a cook? It struck her as being in extraordinarily bad taste.
Was Mr. Thornhill aware of what his steward was doing?
She pushed the thought to the back of her mind. It was far too late for doubts. “As that may be, sir, I’ve come a very long way and I’m certain Mr. Boothroyd will wish to see me.”
In fact, she was not at all certain. She had only ever met Mr. Finchley, the sympathetic young attorney in London. It was he who had encouraged her to come to Devon. While the sole interaction she’d had with Mr. Boothroyd and Mr. Thornhill thus far were letters—letters which she currently had safely folded within the contents of her carpetbag.
“Reckon he might at that,” the innkeeper mused.
“Precisely. Now, if you’ll inform Mr. Boothroyd I’ve arrived, I would be very much obliged to you.”
The man beside her finished his ale in one swallow and then slammed the tankard down on the counter. “I’ll take her to Boothroyd.”
Helena watched, wide-eyed, as he stood to his full, towering height. When he glared down at her, she offered him a tentative smile. “I must thank you again, sir. You’ve been very kind.”
He glowered. “This way.” And then, without a backward glance, he strode toward the hall.
Clutching her carpetbag tightly, she trotted after him. Her heart was skittering, her pulse pounding in her ears. She prayed she wouldn’t faint before she’d even submitted to her interview.
The gentleman rapped once on the door to the private parlor. It was opened by a little gray-haired man in spectacles. He peered up at the gentleman, frowned, and then, with furrowed brow, looked past him to stare at Helena herself.
“Mr. Boothroyd?” she queried.
“I am Boothroyd,” he said. “And you, I presume, are Miss Reynolds?”
“Yes, sir. I know I’m dreadfully late for my appointment…” She saw a woman rising from a chair within the private parlor. A woman who regarded Helena with an upraised chin, her face conveying what words could not. “Oh,” Helena whispered. And just like that it seemed the tiny, flickering flame of hope she’d nurtured these last months blinked out. “You’ve already found someone else.”