Chapter One

      London—1810

      The door of the approaching carriage opened as it stopped beside her in a sudden and unexpected haste.

      ‘Get in now.’

      ‘I beg your pardon.’ Lady Florentia Hale-Burton could not quite believe what she had heard even as the stranger standing above her on the top step of the unliveried coach repeated it again more loudly.

      ‘I said get in now.’

      The man frowned when she did not move and leaned forward so that his face was not far from her own. A beautiful face, like an angel, she thought, though his voice held no notes of the celestial at all.

      ‘Look, unlike your long-suffering paramour, I am not up to playing this silly game of yours, madam. If you don’t get in this minute I will drag you inside and be done with it. Do you understand?’

      ‘I will do no such thing, sir. Of course I will not.’ Finding her voice, Florentia looked about wildly for some help from her maid, Milly, but the girl had dropped back, her mouth wide open in alarm as she turned to run. It was like some dream, Flora thought, the horror of it appalling, like a nightmare where no matter how much you wanted to escape you could not. Fright held her simply rigid. The sky was grey and the day was windy. She could smell cut grass and hear birds calling from the park across the road. An ordinary Wednesday on a walk she had done a hundred times before and now this...

      As the stranger stepped down from the carriage and took her arm she finally found resistance, swinging her heavy reticule at his face and connecting with a thump. The two books inside the bag were weighty tomes on the history of art, leather bound and substantial. The edge of one cut into the skin above his right eye and blood gushed down his cheek, though instead of looking furious, which might have been expected, he only began to laugh.

      ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘Thomas damned well owes me for this though he did warn me you might not come easily if he was not present. But enough now. We are beginning to attract some attention and if I am going to be of any help to you we have to leave immediately.’

      Grabbing at her, he pulled her hard against his body and she bit into his hand. Swearing, he brought one arm down across her breast when she screamed as loud as she could manage. Then he simply clamped his fingers on the top of her right shoulder and all she knew was darkness.

      * * *

      James Waverley, Viscount Winterton, couldn’t believe he was doing this, kidnapping his cousin’s whore before Hyde Park and rendering her unconscious. But Tom had insisted, pleaded, cajoled and finally called in any favour James had ever promised. So he had.

      ‘She’s a feisty one, you will find,’ his second cousin had insisted, ‘and if I was in any position at all to go and get her myself I would, but...’ He’d looked down at his leg cast from the ankle to the thigh. ‘She needs to be out of London, Winter, needs to be safe from those who might hurt her.’ And because one of his own unruly horses was responsible for his cousin’s broken leg, James had consented.

      ‘What does she look like?’

      ‘Blonde and sensual. She will be wearing red, no doubt, as she always does and will be waiting on the corner of Mount Street opposite Hyde Park at five o’clock precisely.’

      Lord help me, James thought. Tom hadn’t mentioned that she would be the type to scream her head off in fury or whack him with a heavy bag full of books.

      She didn’t have the appearance of a whore either, with her demurely cut pink and red day dress and old-fashioned hat, but then what was the look of one? He’d never required the services of a lady of the night before, though he had seen them around Covent Garden and the Haymarket and many of them had appeared...quite ordinary. Perhaps Acacia Kensington was one of those girls, thrown into the game by dire circumstance and the need to survive.

      She certainly had good teeth. The bite mark on his hand stung badly having cut the skin to leave it swollen and throbbing.

      Laying her down on the seat opposite, he took off his jacket and placed it under her head as a pillow. She’d wake up soon and there would be all hell to pay, the journey north taking a good few hours to complete. With a frown he looked away.

      Is this who he was now? A man who would hurt a woman? A man who might take the path of least resistance when quite plainly it was the wrong thing to do?

      Swearing, he sat back and glanced out the window. A young maid was running along the pathway and shouting at the top of her lungs, another couple joining her. When the man raised his hand in a fist the first shudder of things not being quite as they ought to be went through him and he was glad when the carriage turned into the main road north, its speed increasing.

      The blood from the cut above his right eye had begun to blur his vision and he swiped at it with the sleeve of his jacket, blotting the redness against dark linen.

      Thomas could do his own courting next time, broken leg or not, he thought, and if the girl came to as angry as she had been he didn’t quite know what he would do next. Put her out, he imagined, and let her make her own way from London, or not. In truth he didn’t care any longer.

      She had a damn expensive ring on the third finger of her right hand, the diamonds winking in the light. No false gold or cut glass either, the patina and shape of the piece telling him this was the real thing. Perhaps a paramour had gifted it to her. Tommy had the funds to procure such a bauble, should he have wished it, so maybe this was his doing. He was a man inclined to the grand gesture.

      The anger that had been his constant companion threatened to choke him and he pushed back the familiar fury. Once he would have told his cousin exactly where to go with his hare-brained schemes of procuring women, but now...

      The war had knocked the stuffing out of him and he had returned from Europe and the first Peninsular Campaign unsettled. He did not fit in here any more, having neither property nor much in the way of family, save a father who had taken more and more to the drink. He wanted to be away from the London set and its expectations, but most of all he needed to be away from the brutality of war. It had settled into him the aftermath of violence, making him jumpy and uncertain, the ghosts of memory entwined even in the ordinariness of his life here.

      * * *

      He swore again twenty moments later as sky-blue eyes opened and simply looked at him, the paleness of her cheeks alarming.

      ‘I think... I am going...to be...sick.’

      And she was, all over his boots and on her dress, heaving into the space between them time after time and shaking dreadfully. Her eyes watered, her nose ran and the stench of a tossed-up lunch hung in the air as she simply began to cry. Not quietly either.

      Banging his cane against the roof, James was glad as the conveyance drew to a halt, the countryside all around wide and green, the road empty before them and behind. He didn’t stop her hurried exit as he threw water he carried for the journey on to the carriage floor, drying what he could with great bunches of wild grasses pulled from the side of the road.

      She was gone when he had finished, disappeared into a tract