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For my favorite uncle, Frank Kerr—the real storyteller in the family.
Acknowledgments
I might write the books, but it takes an entire team to get them ready to read.
Thank you to my fabulous editor, Amy Pierpont; my wondrous agent, Robin Rue; my fantastic beta reader, Susannah Taylor; the ever-on-the-ball Jodi Rosoff, director of marketing and publicity at my publisher; and last, but certainly not least, S. B. Kleinman, my long-suffering copy editor, who persevered despite the egregious overuse of em dashes.
Thank you all!
And special thanks to my Facebook friend, Judith Sandrel Voss, for naming Toby the dog!
Chapter One
Now once there was a king who lived by the sea. He had had three sons and the youngest was named Corineus.…
—From The Kelpie
JUNE 1741
LONDON, ENGLAND
Captain James Trevillion, formerly of the 4th Dragoons, was used to dangerous places. He’d hunted highwaymen in the stews of St Giles, apprehended smugglers along the cliffs of Dover, and guarded Tyburn gallows in the midst of a riot. Until now, though, he would not have counted Bond Street among their number.
It was a sunny Wednesday afternoon and fashionable London was gathered en masse, determined to spend its wealth on fripperies and blithely unaware of any impending violence.
As was, for that matter, Trevillion’s charge.
“Do you have the package from Furtleby’s?” inquired Lady Phoebe Batten.
The sister of the Duke of Wakefield, Lady Phoebe was plump, distractingly pretty, and quite pleasant to nearly everyone, excepting himself. She was also blind, which was both why she had her hand on Trevillion’s left forearm and why Trevillion was here at all: he was her bodyguard.
“No, my lady,” he answered absently as he watched one—no, three—big brutes coming toward them, moving against the brightly dressed crowd. One had a nasty scar on his cheek, another was a hulking redhead, and the third appeared to have no forehead. They looked ominously out of place in workmen’s clothes, their expressions intent and fixed on his charge.
Interesting. Until now his duties as bodyguard had mostly been about making sure Lady Phoebe didn’t become lost in a crowd. There’d never been a specific threat to her person.
Trevillion leaned heavily on the cane in his right hand and pivoted to look behind them. Lovely. A fourth man.
He felt something in his chest tighten with grim determination.
“Because the lace was especially fine,” Lady Phoebe continued, “and also at a special price, which I’m quite sure I won’t be able to find again for quite some time, and if I’ve left it at one of the shops we’ve already visited I’ll be quite put out.”
“Will you?”
The nearest brute—the one without a forehead—was holding something down by his side—a knife? A pistol? Trevillion transferred the cane to his left hand and gripped his own pistol, one of two holstered in black leather belts crisscrossing his chest. His right leg protested the sudden loss of support.
Two shots, four men. The odds were not particularly good.
“Yes,” Lady Phoebe replied. “And Mr. Furtleby made sure to tell me that the lace was made by grasshoppers weaving butterfly wings on the Isle of Man. Very exclusive.”
“I am listening to you, my lady,” Trevillion murmured as the first brute shoved aside an elderly dandy in a full-bottomed white wig. The dandy swore and shook a withered fist.
The brute didn’t even turn his head.
“Are you?” she asked sweetly. “Because—”
The brute’s hand came up with a pistol and Trevillion shot him in the chest.
Lady Phoebe clutched his arm. “What—?”
Two women—and the dandy—screamed.
The other three men started running. Toward them.
“Don’t let go of me,” Trevillion ordered, glancing quickly around. He couldn’t fight three men with only one shot remaining.
“Whyever would I let go of you?” Lady Phoebe asked rather crossly.
He saw out of the corner of his eye that her bottom lip was pushed out like a small child’s. It almost made him smile. Almost. “Left. Now.”
He shoved her in that direction, his right leg giving him hell. The bloody thing had better not collapse on him—not now. He holstered the first pistol and drew the second.
“Did you shoot someone back there?” Lady Phoebe asked as a shrieking matron brushed roughly past her. Lady Phoebe stumbled against him and he wrapped his left arm over her small shoulders, pulling her close to his side. The panicked crowd was surging around them, making their progress harder.
“Yes, my lady.”
There. A couple of paces away a small boy was holding the reins of a rangy bay gelding in the street. The horse’s eyes showed white at the commotion, its nostrils flared wide, but it hadn’t bolted at the shot, which was a good sign.
“Why?” Her face was turned to him, her warm breath brushing his chin.
“It seemed a good idea,” Trevillion said grimly.
He looked back. Two of their attackers, the scarred one and another, had been detained behind a gaggle of screeching society ladies. The redhead, though, was determinedly elbowing through the crowd—straight in their direction.
Damn their hides. He wouldn’t let them get to her.
Not on his watch.
Not this time.
“Did you kill him?” Lady Phoebe asked with interest.
“Maybe.” They made the horse and boy. The horse turned its head as Trevillion grasped the stirrup, but remained calm. Good lad. “Up now.”
“Up where?”
“Horse,” Trevillion grunted, slapping her hand on the horse’s saddle.
“Oi!” shouted the boy.
Lady Phoebe was a clever girl. She felt down to the stirrup and placed her foot in it. Trevillion put his hand squarely on her lush arse and pushed her hard up onto the beast.
“Oof.” She clutched at the horse’s neck, but didn’t look frightened at all.
“Thanks,” Trevillion muttered to the boy, who was now wide-eyed, having caught sight of the pistol in his other hand.
He dropped his cane and scrambled inelegantly into the saddle behind Lady Phoebe. He yanked the reins from the boy’s hand. With the pistol in his right hand, he wrapped his left arm around her waist, still holding the reins, and pulled her firmly against his chest.
The redheaded brute made the horse and grabbed for the bridle, his lips twisted in an ugly grimace.
Trevillion shot him full in the face.
A scream from the crowd.
The horse half-reared, throwing Lady Phoebe into the V of Trevillion’s thighs, but he sternly kneed the beast into a canter, even as he holstered the spent pistol.
He might be a cripple on land but by God, in the saddle he was a demon.
“Did you kill that one?” Lady Phoebe shouted as they swerved around a cart. Her hat had fallen off. Light-brown locks blew across his lips.
He had her. He had her safe and that was all that mattered.
“Yes, my lady,” he murmured into her ear. Flat, almost uncaring, for it would
never do to let her hear the emotion that holding her in his arms provoked.
“Oh, good.”
He leaned forward, inhaling the sweet scent of roses in her hair—innocent and forbidden—and kicked the horse into a full gallop through the heart of London.
And as he did so, Lady Phoebe threw back her head and laughed into the wind.
PHOEBE LET HER head fall to Captain Trevillion’s shoulder—quite improperly—and felt the wind against her face as the horse surged beneath them. She didn’t even realize she was laughing until the sound rushed back to her ears, joyous and free.
“You laugh at death, my lady?” Her guard’s dour words were enough to put a damper on the lightest of spirits, but Phoebe had grown used to Captain Trevillion’s gloomy voice in the past six months. She’d learned to ignore it and him.
Well, more or less.
“I laugh because I haven’t ridden a horse in years,” she said with just a small amount of reproach. She was only human, after all. “And I’ll not let you spoil it for me with false guilt—you were the one who killed that poor man, after all, not I.”
He grunted as the horse cantered around a corner, their bodies leaning as one. His chest was broad and strong behind her, the holstered pistols against her back hard reminders of his potential for violence. She heard an indignant cry as they whipped past and fought the urge to giggle. Strange. She might find the man irksome, but she’d never had any doubt at all that Captain Trevillion would keep her safe.
Even if he didn’t particularly like her.
“He was trying to do you harm, my lady,” Trevillion replied, his tone dry as dust as his arm tightened around her waist and the horse leaped some sort of obstacle.
Oh, that feeling! The swoop of her stomach, the momentary weightlessness, the thump as the horse landed, the movement of powerful equine muscles beneath her. She hadn’t exaggerated to him: it had been years since she’d felt this. Phoebe hadn’t been born blind. In fact, until the age of twelve her eyesight had been quite normal—she hadn’t even needed spectacles. She couldn’t recall now when it had started, but at some point her vision had begun to blur. Bright light made her eyes smart. It wasn’t anything to be worried about at the time.
At least not at first.
Now… now, at the ripe age of one and twenty, she had been effectively blind for a year or more. Oh, she could make out vague shapes in very bright sunlight, but on an overcast day like today?
Nothing.
Not the birds in the sky, not the individual petals on a rose, not the fingernails on her own hand, no matter how closely she held it to her face.
All those sights were lost to her now, and with them many of the other simple pleasures in life.
Such as riding a horse.
She tangled her hands in the horse’s coarse mane, enjoying Captain Trevillion’s confident horsemanship. She wasn’t at all surprised at the easy grace with which he guided the animal. He’d been a dragoon—a mounted soldier—and he often accompanied her on her early-morning trips to the Wakefield stables.
Around them the cacophony of London continued, eternally unabated: the rumble of carriage and cart wheels, the tramping of thousands of feet, the babble of voices raised in song and argument, people buying and selling and stealing, callers of wares, and the shriek of small children. Horses clip-clopped by and church bells tolled the hour, the half hour, and sometimes even the quarter hour.
As they rode, people shouted at them angrily. A canter was quite fast for London, and judging by the bunching of muscles beneath them and the sudden changes of direction, Trevillion was having to weave in and out of the traffic.
She turned her head toward him, inhaling. Captain James Trevillion wore no scent. Sometimes she could discern coffee or the faint smell of horses on him, but beyond that, nothing.
It was quite irksome. “Where are we now?”
Her lips must have been scandalously close to his cheek, yet she couldn’t see him to be sure. She knew the captain had a lame right leg, knew the top of her head came to his chin, knew he had calluses between the middle finger and ring finger on his left hand, but she had no idea at all what he looked like.
“Can’t you smell, my lady?” he replied.
She raised her head a bit, sniffing, then immediately wrinkled her nose at the distinctive stink—fish, sewage, and rot. “The Thames? Why bring us this way?”
“I’m making sure they aren’t behind us, my lady,” he said, calm as ever.
Sometimes Phoebe wondered what Captain Trevillion would do if she reached up and slapped his face. Or kissed him. Surely he’d not maintain his maddening reserve then?
Not, of course, that she actually wanted to kiss the man. Horrors! His lips were probably as cold as a mackerel’s.
“Would they follow us this far?” she asked doubtfully. The whole thing seemed quite unlikely, now that she thought of it—being attacked in Bond Street of all places! Rather belatedly she remembered her lace and mourned the loss of a really good bargain.
“I don’t know, my lady,” Captain Trevillion replied, somehow managing to sound condescending and emotionless at the same time. “That’s why I’m taking an unexpected route.”
She tightened her grip on the horse’s mane. “Well, what did they look like, my attackers?”
“Like common footpads.”
“Perhaps they were?” she ventured. “Common footpads, I mean. Perhaps they weren’t after me in particular.”
“In Bond Street. In broad daylight.” His voice was completely without inflection.
It would serve him right if she did turn and kiss him, really it would.
She huffed a breath. They’d slowed to a walk now and she patted the horse’s neck, its hair smooth and slightly oily beneath her fingers. It snorted as if agreeing with her opinion of Captain Trevillion. “I can’t think what they wanted with me in any case.”
“Kidnapping for ransom, forced marriage, or mere robbery come to mind immediately, my lady,” he drawled. “You are, after all, the sister of one of the richest and most powerful men in England.”
Phoebe wrinkled her nose. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re excessively blunt, Captain Trevillion?”
“Only you, my lady.” He seemed to have turned his head, for she could feel the brush of his breath against her temple. It smelled very faintly of coffee. “On numerous occasions.”
“Well, let me take this opportunity to add to them,” she said. “Where are we now?”
“Nearing Wakefield House, my lady.”
And with his words, Phoebe suddenly realized the full ghastliness of the situation. Maximus.
She immediately started babbling. “Oh! You know my brother is terribly busy today, what with gathering support for the new act—”
“Parliament isn’t in session.”
“It takes months sometimes,” she said earnestly. “Very important! And… and that estate in Yorkshire is flooding. I’m sure it kept him up half the night. Was it Yorkshire?” she asked with disingenuous desperation. “Or Northumberland? I never can remember, they’re both so very far north. In any case, I really don’t think we ought to bother him.”
“My lady,” Captain Trevillion said with stubborn male finality, “I shall be escorting you to your room, where you might recover—”
“I’m not a little child,” Lady Phoebe interrupted mutinously.
“Perhaps have some tea—”
“Or pap. It’s what my nanny always used to give us in the nursery and I loathed it.”
“And then I shall report today’s events to His Grace,” Trevillion finished, not at all perturbed by her interruptions.
And that was exactly what she was trying to forestall. When Maximus learned of this morning’s debacle he’d use it to hobble her even further.
She wasn’t entirely sure she’d not go insane if that happened. “Sometimes I rather dislike you, Captain Trevillion.”
“I am most gratified that it’s only sometimes, my lady,” h
e replied, and he brought the horse to a halt with a murmur of approval for the animal.
Drat. They must already be at Wakefield House.
She caught one of his hands in a last-ditch effort, holding it between her far smaller palms. “Must you tell him? I’d really rather you not. Please? For me?” Silly to make a personal appeal—the man didn’t seem to care for anyone, let alone her—but there it was: she was desperate.
“I’m sorry, my lady,” he said, not sounding sorry at all, “but I work for your brother. I’ll not shirk my duty by keeping something so important from him.”
He disentangled his hand from hers, leaving her fingers holding empty air.
“Oh, if it’s your duty, then,” she said, not bothering to keep the disappointment from her voice, “far be it for me to stand in your way.”
It’d been a rather wild hope anyway. She should’ve known that Captain Trevillion was too bloodless to be moved by entreaties aimed at his nonexistent compassion.
He ignored her surliness.
“Stay,” he said, rather as if she were a particularly silly canine, and then belatedly added, “my lady.” And she felt the sudden absence of his heat as he dismounted behind her.
She huffed, but obeyed because she wasn’t nearly such a ninny as he seemed to think her sometimes.
“Cap’n!” That was the voice of their newest footman, Reed, who had a tendency to lapse into a Cockney accent when he was hurried.
“Get Hathaway and Green,” Captain Trevillion ordered.
Phoebe heard the footman running—presumably back into Wakefield House—then several raised male voices and more footsteps, traveling here and there. It was all so confusing. She still sat atop the horse, stranded, unable to dismount alone, and suddenly she realized she hadn’t heard Trevillion’s voice in quite a while. Had he already gone in?
“Captain?”
The horse shifted beneath her, stepping back.
She grabbed for its mane, feeling off-balance, feeling afraid. “Captain.”
“I’m right here,” he said, his deep voice quite close at her knee. “I haven’t left you, my lady. I’d never leave you.”