Prologue
The puppy was the final straw.
Nicky loved Zouzou with all his seven-year-old heart, so much so that on the second night he’d smuggled the puppy into his bed. Even if she hadn’t heard excited puppy squeaks coming from beneath the bedclothes, Callie could have guessed by her son’s look of extreme innocence that he’d broken the rules. But some rules were made to be bent a little.
She set the warm milk on the bedside table, kissed him good night, and left, hiding a smile.
Two hours later when the reception finally finished she looked in on Nicky again.
The puppy was dead.
Nicky was sitting up in bed, distraught, his face streaked with tears, the tiny puppy cradled stiff and lifeless in his arms. Dried yellow froth clung to its little muzzle.
“He wouldn’t stop being sick. What did I do, Mama, what did I do?”
On the floor beside the bed was a half-drunk bowl of milk and an empty cup, the same cup she’d given to her son.
“Did you drink any of the milk?” she asked, scarcely able to raise her voice from a whisper.
“It tasted funny,” he said. “I didn’t like it. So I gave it to Zouzou.”
And then she knew. Had he not fed his milk to the puppy, Nicky’s would be the small, cold body on the bed.
She understood then what she had to do. There was no longer a choice.
One
Dorset, England, 1816
“Best not take the cliff path home, Capt’n Renfrew. It’s blowin’ up a storm, and without the moon, that path is treacherous.”
Gabriel Renfrew, late of the Fourteenth Light Dragoons, cast a cursory glance at the darkening sky and shrugged. “There’s time enough before the storm hits. ’Evening, landlord.” He let himself out of the small, snug tavern and made for the stables.
A buxom, blonde tavern maid followed him outside and slipped a friendly arm though his. “Why risk the cliff path, Captain, when I have a bed upstairs that’s right snug and warm?”
Gabe smiled. “Thank you, Sally. ’Tis a generous offer but I need to go.” He must be getting old, Gabe decided as he rode off. To choose riding a horse through the freezing darkness, home to an empty house, when he could be riding a curvaceous blonde in the cozy warmth of her bedchamber…
But though mindlessness was what he craved, mindless coupling no longer appealed. And when the blue devils hit, as they had again tonight, neither drink nor women could help.
Nothing but darkness and speed and danger could scour his mind and heart clean.
Tonight the blue devils rode him worse than ever. Talk in the tavern had turned to the men who hadn’t come home, to the families struggling on without them; Gabe’s contemporaries, boys he’d grown up with, boys who’d followed him and Harry to war. “I’ll take care of them,” he’d said so blithely as they left…
But he hadn’t.
Why had he, of all of them, returned? Those other lads were grieved for, mourned, desperately missed. They were needed by their families.
Not Gabe.
He galloped faster through the fleeting shadows. The narrow, moonlit path disappeared as the thickening clouds obscured the full moon. The waves pounded on the rocks below. Salt mist stung his skin and Gabriel rode the fine line between life and death, as he’d done so often before, giving fate a chance to change its mind.
Proving to himself yet again that, against all the odds, he was still alive. Even if he didn’t know why.
The English Channel
“No! This isn’t right!” Callie, fugitive princess of Zindaria, was trying to force her dizzy head to steady. “I paid to be taken to Lulworth.” She clutched the rail of the pitching boat and peered desperately out into the night. Shifting clouds blocked the moonlight and all she could see were white caps and looming dark cliffs. There was no sign of life, no building or habitation.
Was this even England? She had no way of knowing. It was the middle of the night and she’d been woken roughly from a fitful sleep. The seven hours before that she’d spent being violently ill.
