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Chapter One
By the time she went to bed, Lady Freyja Bedwyn was in about as bad a mood as it
was possible to be in. She dismissed her maid though a truckle bed had been set up in
her room and the girl had been preparing to sleep on it. But Alice snored, and Freyja
had no wish to sleep with a pillow wrapped about her head and pressed to both ears
merely so that the proprieties might be observed.
"But his grace gave specific instructions, my lady," the girl reminded her timidly.
"In whose service are you employed?" Freyja asked, her tone quelling. "The Duke of
Bewcastle's or mine?"
Alice looked at her anxiously as if she suspected that it was a trick question-as well
she might. Although she was Freyja's maid, it was the Duke of Bewcastle, Freyja's
eldest brother, who paid her salary. And he had given her instructions that she was
not to move from her lady's side night or day during the journey from Grandmaison
Park in Leicestershire to Lady Holt-Barron's lodgings on the Circus in Bath. He did not
like his sisters traveling alone.
"Yours, my lady," Alice said.
"Then leave." Freyja pointed at the door.
Alice looked at it dubiously. "There is no lock on it, my lady," she said.
"And if there are intruders during the night, you are going to protect me from harm?"
Freyja asked scornfully. "It would more likely be the other way around."
Alice looked pained, but she had no choice but to leave.
And so Freyja was left in sole possession of a second-rate room in a second-rate inn
with no servant in attendance-and no lock on the door. And in possession too of a
thoroughly bad temper.
Bath was not a destination to inspire excited anticipation in her bosom. It was a fine
spa and had once attracted the creme de la creme of English society. But no longer.
It was now the genteel gathering place of the elderly and infirm and those with no
better place to go-like her. She had accepted an invitation to spend a month or two
with Lady Holt-Barron and her daughter Charlotte. Charlotte was a friend of Freyja's
though by no means a bosom bow. Under ordinary circumstances Freyja would have
politely declined the invitation.
These were not ordinary circumstances.
She had just been in Leicestershire, visiting her ailing grandmother at Grandmaison
Park and attending the wedding there of her brother Rannulf to Judith Law. She was
to have returned home to Lindsey Hall in Hampshire with Wulfric-the duke-and
Alleyne and Morgan, her younger brother and sister. But the prospect of being there
at this particular time had proved quite intolerable to her and so she had seized upon
the only excuse that had presented itself not to return home quite yet.
It was shameful indeed to be afraid to return to one's own home. Freyja bared her
teeth as she climbed into bed and blew out the candle. No, not afraid. She feared
nothing and no one. She just disdained to be there when it happened, that was all.
Last year Wulfric and the Earl of Redfield, their neighbor at Alvesley Park, had
arranged a match between Lady Freyja Bedwyn and Kit Butler, Viscount Ravensberg,
the earl's son. The two of them had known each other all their lives and had fallen
passionately in love four years ago during a summer when Kit was home on leave from
his regiment in the Peninsula. But Freyja had been all but betrothed to his elder
brother, Jerome, at the time and she had allowed herself to be persuaded into doing
the proper and dutiful thing-she had let Wulfric announce her engagement to Jerome.
Kit had returned to the Peninsula in a royal rage. Jerome had died before the nuptials
could take place.
Jerome's death had made Kit the elder son and heir of the Earl of Redfield, and
suddenly a marriage between him and Freyja had been both eligible and desirable. Or
so everyone in both families had thought-including Freyja.
But not, apparently, including Kit.
It had not occurred to Freyja that he might be bound upon revenge. But he had been.
When he had arrived home for what everyone expected to be their betrothal
celebrations, he had brought a fiancee with him-the oh-so-proper, oh-so-lovely, oh-
so-dull Lauren Edgeworth. And after Freyja had boldly called his bluff, he had married
Lauren.
Now the new Lady Ravensberg was about to give birth to their first child. Like the
dull, dutiful wife she was, she would undoubtedly produce a son. The earl and
countess would be ecstatic. The whole neighborhood would doubtless erupt into wild
jubilation.
Freyja preferred not to be anywhere near the vicinity of Alvesley when it happened-and
Lindsey Hall was near.
Hence this journey to Bath and the prospect of having to amuse herself there for a
month or more.
She had not drawn the curtains across the window. What with the moon and stars
above and the light of numerous lanterns from the inn yard below, her room might as
well have been flooded by daylight. But Freyja did not get up to pull the curtains. She
pulled the covers over her head instead.
Wulfric had hired a private carriage for her and a whole cavalcade of hefty outriders,
all with strict instructions to guard her from harm and other assorted inconveniences.
They had been told where to stop for the night-at a superior establishment suitable
for a duke's daughter, even one traveling alone. Unfortunately, an autumn fair in that
town had drawn people for miles around and there was not a room to be had at that
particular inn or any other in the vicinity. They had been forced to journey on and
then stop here.
The outriders had wanted to take shifts sitting on guard outside her room, especially
on learning that there were no locks on any of the doors. Freyja had disabused them
of that notion with a firmness that had brooked no argument. She was no one's
prisoner and would not be made to feel like one. And now Alice was gone too.
Freyja sighed and settled for sleep. The bed was somewhat lumpy. The pillow was
worse. There was a constant noise from the yard below and the inn about her. The
blankets did not block out all the light. And there was Bath to look forward to
tomorrow. All because going home had become a near impossibility to her. Could life
get any bleaker?
Sometime soon, she thought just before she drifted off to sleep, she really was going
to have to start looking seriously at all the gentlemen-and there were many of them
despite the fact that she was now five and twenty and always had been ugly-who
would jump through hoops if she were merely to hint that marriage to her might be
the prize. Being single at such an advanced age really was no fun for a lady. The
trouble was that she was not wholly convinced that being married would be any
better. And it would be too late to discover that it really was not after she had
married. Marriage was a life sentence, her brothers were fond of saying-though two
of the four had taken on that very sentence within the past few months.
Freyja awoke with a start some indeterminate time later when the door of her room
opened suddenly and then shut again with an audible click. She was not even sure
she had not dreamed it until she looked and saw a man standing just inside the door,
clad in a white, open-necked shirt and dark pantaloons and stockings, a coat over
one arm, a pair of boots in the other hand.
Freyja shot out of bed as if ejected from a fired cannon and pointed imperiously at
the door.
"Out!" she said.
The man flashed her a grin, which was all too visible in the near-light room.
"I cannot, sweetheart," he said. "That way lies certain doom. I must go out the
window or hide somewhere in here."
"Out!" She did not lower her arm-or her chin. "I do not harbor felons. Or any other
type of male creature. Get out!"
Somewhere beyond the room were the sounds of a small commotion in the form of
excited voices all speaking at once and footsteps-all of them approaching nearer.
"No felon, sweetheart," the man said. "Merely an innocent mortal in deep trouble if he
does not disappear fast. Is the wardrobe empty?"
Freyja's nostrils flared.
"Out!" she commanded once more.
But the man had dashed across the room to the wardrobe, yanked the door open,
found it empty, and climbed inside.
"Cover for me, sweetheart," he said, just before shutting the door from the inside,
"and save me from a fate worse than death."
Almost simultaneously there was a loud rapping on the door. Freyja did not know
whether to stalk toward it or the wardrobe first. But the decision was taken from her
when the door burst open again to reveal the innkeeper holding a candle aloft, a
short, stout, gray-haired gentleman, and a bald, burly individual who was badly in
need of a shave.
"Out!" she demanded, totally incensed. She would deal with the man in the wardrobe
after this newest outrage had been dealt with. No one walked uninvited into Lady
Freyja Bedwyn's room, whether that room was at Lindsey Hall or Bedwyn House or a
shabby-genteel inn with no locks on the doors.
"Begging your pardon, ma'am, for disturbing you," the gray-haired gentleman said,
puffing out his chest and surveying the room by the light of the candle rather than
focusing on Freyja, "but I believe a gentleman just ran in here."
Had he awaited an answer to his knock and then addressed her with the proper
deference, Freyja might have betrayed the fugitive in the wardrobe without a qualm.
But he had made the mistake of bursting in upon her and then treating her as if she
did not exist except to offer him information-and his quarry. The unshaven individual,
on the other hand, had done nothing but look at her-with a doltish leer on his face.
And the innkeeper was displaying a lamentable lack of concern for the privacy of his
guests.
"Do you indeed believe so?" Freyja asked haughtily. "Do you see this gentleman? If
not, I suggest you close the door quietly as you leave and allow me and the other
guests in this establishment to resume our slumbers."
"If it is all the same to you, ma'am," the gentleman said, eyeing first the closed
window and then the bed and then the wardrobe, "I would like to search the room.
For your own protection, ma'am. He is a desperate rogue and not at all safe with
ladies."
"Search my room?" Freyja inhaled slowly and regarded him along the length of her
prominent, slightly hooked Bedwyn nose with such chilly hauteur that he finally looked
at her-and saw her for the first time, she believed. "Search my room?" She turned
her eyes on the silent innkeeper, who shrank behind the screen of his candle. "Is this
the hospitality of the house of which you boasted with such bombastic eloquence
upon my arrival here, my man? My brother, the Duke of Bewcastle, will hear about
this. He will be interested indeed to learn that you have allowed another guest-if this
gentleman is a guest-to bang on the door of his sister's room in the middle of the
night and burst in upon her without waiting for a reply merely because he believes
that another gentleman dashed in here. And that you have stood by without a word
of protest while he makes the impudent, preposterous suggestion that he be allowed
to search the room."
"You were obviously mistaken, sir," the landlord said, half hiding beyond the door
frame though his candle was still held out far enough to shine into the room. "He must
have escaped another way or hidden somewhere else. I beg your pardon, ma'am-my
lady, that is. I allowed it because I was afraid for your safety, my lady, and thought
the duke would want me to protect you at all costs from desperate rogues."
"Out!" Freyja said once more, her arm outstretched imperiously toward the doorway
and three men standing there. "Get out!"
The gray-haired gentleman cast one last wistful look about the room, the unshaven
lout leered one last time, and then the innkeeper leaned across them both and pulled
the door shut.
Freyja stared at it, her nostrils flared, her arm still outstretched, her finger still
pointing. How dared they? She had never been so insulted in her life. If the gray-
haired gentleman had uttered one more word or the unshaven yokel had leered one
more leer, she would have stridden over there and banged their heads together hard
enough to have them seeing wheeling stars for the next week.
She was certainly not going to recommend this inn to any of her acquaintances.
She had almost forgotten about the man in the wardrobe until the door squeaked
open and he unfolded himself from within it. He was a tall, long-limbed young man, she
saw in the ample light from the window. And very blond. He was probably blue-eyed
too, though there was not quite enough light to enable her to verify that theory. She
could see quite enough of him, though, to guess that he was by far too handsome for
his own good. He was also looking quite inappropriately merry.
"That was a magnificent performance," he said, setting down his Hessian boots and
tossing his coat across the truckle bed. "Are you really a sister of the Duke of
Bewcastle?"
At the risk of appearing tediously repetitious, Freyja pointed at the door again.
"Out!" she commanded.
But he merely grinned at her and stepped closer.
"But I think not," he said. "Why would a duke's sister be staying at this less-than-grand
establishment? And without a maid or chaperone to guard her? It was a
wonderful performance, nevertheless."
"I can live without your approval," she said coldly. "I do not know what you have done
that is so heinous. I do not want to know. I want you out of this room, and I want
you out now. Find somewhere else to cower in fright."
"Fright?" He laughed and set a hand over his heart. "You wound me, my charmer."
He was standing very close, quite close enough for Freyja to realize that the top of
her head reached barely to his chin. But she always had been short. She was
accustomed to ruling her world from below the level of much of the action.
"I am neither your sweetheart nor your charmer," she told him. "I shall count to three.
One."
(Continues...)
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