Tiny teeth snagged in her hem. The runt tugged on the fabric.
“Good heavens, this is not my gown. You mustn’t tear it.” She bent and scratched the pup around the ears while she pried its miniature jaws from the flounce of Ann’s gown. “Now good night. Again.”
In short bounds that rustled the straw it followed her, mewling when she nudged it back with her toes to close the door. It yipped and scratched upon the wood. Ravenna retraced her steps and cracked open the door. The runt wiggled with joy and leaped at her ankles. At their mother’s side, his warm, well-fed siblings remained oblivious.
“You want adventure, do you?” She tucked it against her chest. “I once knew a creature like you.” She fondled a soft little paw between her fingers. “He was entirely black and grew to be much larger than you ever will. But you have something of his spirit, I think.” She rubbed her nose against its silky white brow and breathed in the scent. “I know just what to do with you.” Pulling her shawl over it, she enclosed it against her chest.
A groom bid her a good night and she crossed the forecourt into the castle. The last time she’d made this short trip she had run. Thrown to the ground and kissed by a strange man in the dark, she had been frightened and angry and confused.
Now her strides were light and giddy.
Inside the castle she could still hear the guests in the drawing room. Someone played the pianoforte beautifully—Arielle Dijon, probably. Perhaps Lord Case had cajoled her out of her despair for a moment. Ravenna ducked inside the servants’ stairwell and climbed to the bedchamber floor. A guard stood mid-corridor.
“Which bedchamber is Lord Vitor’s?” she asked.
He directed her along the passage.
The door opened without resistance. In his bedchamber, she poured water from the pitcher into the washbasin and offered it to the pup. It mewled and yipped again when she shut the door, leaving him behind her. But in the warmth he would soon fall fast asleep right where she had left him. Her smile split her cheeks as she followed the narrow passageways to her bedchamber.
A man stood by her door, leaning against the wall, a candle in one hand illumining his face.
“Mr. Anders?” She did not allow the jump in her nerves to sound in her voice. Her guard had apparently disappeared forever. She was alone with one of their prime suspects in the dark. “This is the ladies’ wing. Are you lost?”
“Only lost in admiration.” He set the candle on a table and moved toward her.
“Oh.” She reached for the door handle. “Well then, I bid you good night—”
He grasped her shoulder and turned her to face him. “Do not abandon me so early in the evening, dearest Miss Caulfield.”
She could not reach the knife in her pocket. Foolish. “Abandon you?” She spoke lightly. “I’ve barely ever spoken with you. How on earth could I abandon you?”
He gripped both her arms. “Yet I feel as though the moments that I have admired you across rooms full of bothersome others have been endless—endless torture to be so ardent in my admiration yet so far from the object of it.”
He did not smell of alcohol, but he didn’t smell of malevolence either.
“Mr. Anders, there is a guard on the other side of that corner,” she lied, “who will stick you through with his big Portuguese sword if I call out.”
“I would not harm you! I could not harm you! You are a treasure beyond telling.”
Fear slipped away from her. This was not an assassination attempt but simply a young man’s natural idiocy. She had not really believed him capable of murder anyway. “Sir, do take your hands off me and be done with this nonsense.”
Poetically long hair that wasn’t quite long enough to match the hair on Mr. Walsh’s coat fell over one eye. But the other eye gazed at her ardently. “Now that I have touched you, I cannot release you. You must allow me to remain close. For the farther you are from me the greater my torment.”
“Sir, unhand me or you will come to fiercely regret it.”
“But I love you!”
“You do?”
“Powerfully. Deeply. Truly. My darling.”
“Not two hours ago you were drooling into your soup over Lady Iona. If this is true love then I don’t think I wish to see infatuation.”
His brow grew stormy. “She is all beauty and no passion. She has no appreciation for real feeling. But you, Miss Caulfield, are of an emotional race.”
“What?” The word came out choked.
“Your dark, exotic blood knows true desire. I can see it in your eyes. They are the eyes of a wild creature. You need a man to tame your heat. I want to be that ma—”
Her knee impacted precisely where she aimed. Mr. Anders doubled over with a groan, and she slipped into her room and locked the door. Without lighting the fire, she stripped off the delicate pin-striped gown meant for a lady, then curled beneath the covers in her bed and waited for morning.
VITOR REMOVED HIS horse’s tack, rubbed him down and filled the hay rack, all with a head muddled from his sleepless night. He’d spent more peaceful nights on battlefields. The farther away he’d tied the mongrel from him in his bedchamber, the louder it had whined.
He rubbed his eyes and glanced at the pup rolling about in the straw at Ashdod’s hooves.
“Come on, then.”
It cocked its head at him.
He opened the stall door. “Your mistress will wish to know how you fare.”
In the forecourt his elder brother walked toward him beneath a sky that had turned gray again overnight.
“You are permitted to ride abroad while the rest of us are locked within these walls?” he said, glancing at the puppy stumbling through the snow at Vitor’s heels.
“The prince knows that I am not the murderer.”
“But the rest of us don’t know that.” Wesley turned and fell in beside him. “You might have any one of us on your list. I could be next, and then you would be earl and when father is gone all your dreams would come true.”
“My dreams have never bent in that direction.” Last night his dreams had bent toward a black-eyed woman. Like in that moment by the river when he had removed her sodden clothing, his dream had painted a vision of her body encased in linen rendered translucent by water, the dark points of her breasts poking hard beneath the cloth. In his dream he had peeled that garment off her and warmed her with his hands and mouth. He had never wanted his father’s or brother’s titles. He’d never wanted much of anything except to make himself useful to both his fathers and kingdoms. Now, however, he wanted Ravenna Caulfield.
“You know that,” he added.
“I do,” Wesley said easily. “What do you make of the general’s daughter?”
“Do I think she is a murderer?”
“Do you think she could be a countess?”
Four years earlier, Vitor had spent an endless fortnight enduring his elder brother’s questioning without once speaking a word. Now, despite his surprise at this question, he maintained his even stride. “I suspect so.”
“She is of noble blood.” Wesley said this as though it were a minor advantage. “Her father is the fifth son of a French count of little land and status, although he enjoyed some notoriety in the early months of Boney’s ascendancy. The general first followed in his father’s tracks, but when that resulted in a painful venture to Russia, he shifted his interests and went off to the United States. Made a name for himself advising the army and took to breeding world-class hounds, it seems, from which lucrative endeavors he amassed considerable wealth and land. Father could not object to her pedigree, I think.”