The moon has a face like the clock in the hall;
It shines on thieves on the garden wall.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Georgina rushed down the brick path toward the kitchen, her skirts gripped tightly in her fists, her shoulders back like a conquering general charging toward the enemy lines. The silver lobster and crab trays were picked clean, there were only two servants on the grounds, and the champagne fountain was empty.
That bourgeois Emerson girl, the one that had all the money Georgina should have had, had just made a spectacle of herself by breaking her engagement to William De Pysters.
Georgina hadn’t seen the quarrel, and barely knew the girl, but she’d arrived in time to see the aftereffects. The girl had run away somewhere, but not before she’d destroyed a refreshment table and a dozen full bottles of French champagne.
This was the night to make matches, not to break them off. Silly foolish people. She was surrounded by them.
And the silliest one of them all was Phoebe Dearborn. She was all over John Cabot. Georgina’s John Cabot. Georgina’s rich John Cabot.
“Phoebe Dearborn,” she muttered with complete disgust. The woman had a huge fortune all her own. Her father was in banking, shipping, and mining, and if that wasn’t rich enough, her maternal grandfather owned half of Portland and a goodly part of Maine and New Hampshire.
Phoebe Dearborn laughed like a braying goat with the hiccups, and whenever she was around a man she fluttered her eyelashes and cooed. It was common knowledge that Phoebe had more faces than the town clock.
Unlike Georgina, she didn’t need the Cabot money. Who cared if she could trace her family back to the Dark Ages? Georgina’s ancestors had been battling invading barbarians right alongside of them.
Besides, Georgina thought,shehad snagged John Cabot first. Well, after tonight she will have snagged him.
Georgina walked a little faster, her narrow heeled evening slippers clicking on the bricks like the precise second hand of a Bayard clock. She marched past the high fieldstone fence covered with lush trails of ivy and flaming red bougainvillea, past a wagon and team that she sincerely hoped was filled with more cases of champagne, round the corner of the brick building that housed the kitchens, and right into a man’s chest.
A pair of strong hands gripped her by the shoulders and kept her from falling right on her backside. She looked up, way up at the man’s face, a face so sharply handsome that gazing at it made her knees suddenly weak and she forgot to breathe.
Behind him the full moon was shoulder high, and its light made his blond hair look golden. He was tall, so very tall that the top of his head almost touched the low eaves of the kitchen, and he had shoulders wide enough to block her view of the building beyond.
But it was his face that left her, Georgina Bayard, a woman with a comment on almost anything, speechless and frozen, standing there and staring at him. He had a chiseled sensual face that made her feel weak and powerless, a face that made her think she was facing something she couldn’t handle. She’d seen this kind of face in weak youthful dreams she’d learned to give up years ago.
He wore a pale yellow shirt with an open pointed collar and leather laces instead of mother-of-pearl buttons. Even the local fisherman managed to have shell buttons on their shirts instead of strings.
His tan vest was dull and smudged and made of the kind of soft wrinkled leather that came from weather and wear. He wore it open, as if he had just thrown it on. His dark brown breeches had faded spots from wear and they fit tightly on his long legs. His boots were tall and black, of good leather, but they looked absolutely ancient because of the mud, grass, and nicks.
For one insane moment she wished this man were dressed in white tie and richer than any Cabot, Dearborn, or Winthrop could ever be.
His hands were still firmly gripping her shoulders, which her evening gown bared, a calculated choice since the neckline was elegant but low enough to help pull a proposal from John. She could feel the calluses on this man’s palms against her skin.
He had hard hands, the kind that were used to holding leather reins, she thought, then remembered the wagon parked at the back of the kitchens. Those hands were used to handling a team, to unloading wagons. He had the hands of a deliveryman.
“In a hurry there, lass?”
Oh my... He had a deep voice, the kind that went right through you, that deep male voice of a girl’s wildest dreams. Dreams that had held those last vestiges of innocence. Dreams of recklessness and desire.
If John had a voice like this man’s she could forget he was half bald and short. She could close her eyes on her wedding night and just listen to him.
Then it hit her that she must look as stupid as Phoebe Dearborn, standing there and gaping at a delivery man.
“You are in my way.” She gave him her most quelling look.
“Aye.” He laughed, a rich sound that should have irritated her instead of ringing right through her and making her stupid breath catch in her throat. Too much champagne, she thought. Then she remembered she hadn’t had any champagne.
“I’m Georgina Bayard.”
He started with the top of her head and gave her a long, slow, bold, and completely insolent looking-over. He said her Christian name as if testing the sound of it on his tongue.
“Miss Bayard,” she corrected.
