Chapter One
London
May 1896
Dominic Prince shot up in bed, his body eager for escape from the nightmare he’d been lost in. Sunlight streamed with an unrelenting gleam through the curtains of his flat above his family’s antiquities shop, and he lifted an arm to block the light.
His head weighed a thousand pounds and his throat burned as if he’d swallowed sand. Flexing his hand, he winced at the pain, then glanced down to see flakes of blood clinging to his knuckles.
He was sore all over, as if he’d rolled his way home over the roughest cobblestones in London. And yet none of it had eased the emptiness in the center of his chest.
The night before had been too much—too much liquor, too much carousing, too much pain and anger to hold inside. Memories flashed and flickered in his mind. He couldn’t even say for sure who he’d punched. Probably Hemphill. He was always game for a night of revelry, but he liked to provoke too, and Dom had been in no mood for provocation. Whoever it had been, it seemed they’d landed a few blows of their own. His side ached and pain from his jaw reverberated into his neck.
As he shifted to collect his trousers from the carpet, he let out a groan. Bloody hell. Maybe there had been more than one opponent landing blows. His back was a mess of knots and aches.
Crossing to the wardrobe to collect a fresh shirt, a ball of white caught his attention out of the corner of his eye. He sneered at it, though the sneer was truly directed inward.
The crumpled letter lay at the edge of the fireplace grate. He hadn’t even been able to dispose of the loathsome thing properly.
The letter’s author, a lady cousin of his longtime friend, had written a lengthy, rambling missive with one salient point. Sharp enough to cut Dom to the quick—Peter Caldecott was dead.
They’d been friends for as long as Dom could remember. The Caldecotts had owned a jewelry and silversmith enterprise on Oxford Street, not far from Dom’s own family’s antique shop. Dom’s father had been a restless soul, always off on an adventure somewhere far from home, often taking his mother along with him. But the Caldecotts had been like the ledgers Peter kept for the family’s shop with such meticulous care: balanced and dependable. And Peter had been the steadiest of them all.
Dom had wanted to take after his father and traveled with him as soon as he was old enough. Those absences had cost him friends and lovers aplenty, but when he returned to London, Peter was always there. Unchanged and steadfast.
Dom had pitied him. Who could bear such cloying domesticity? He imagined Peter envied him, the one who would never settle and had no other aim than constantly seeking the next thrill.
When Peter married, Dom had thought him a fool for succumbing to wedlock so young. Then he’d seen Peter and his bride together and known that his friend had found a contentment Dom couldn’t fathom. A contentment that, for the merest of moments, he’d yearned for too.
And then, two weeks ago, some bloody drunken fool had crashed his carriage and ended Peter’s steady, contented life. And Dom’s own life had become too much of a chaotic mess for him to even read the letter for a week.
For years, he’d been living out of traveling cases. When he did return to London, he preferred the cramped flat above his family’s shop to his elegant rooms in the town house his family owned. His bedchamber at the Prince town house was too comfortable, too warm and inviting. It reminded him too much of the domesticity he did not want.
He kept his life busy, always moving, to keep monotony at bay.
It was no wonder he’d ignored his post for weeks. Who could bother sorting letters when one was planning the next expedition, the next hunt for treasure, the next daring feat that would get him a mention in the papers?
But now Peter was dead, and learning of his loss had forced Dom to stop and take stock of his own life.
He loathed self-examination. Hated acknowledging that there wasn’t a great deal to show for his decade and a half of chasing his father’s acclaim. A few yellowed clippings from the newspapers. A map of scars on his body. A trunk full of journals and photographs cataloging his travels to lands far and wide. And dozens of lively stories to tell at parties. Everything else in his life was changeable. No woman stayed long, friends found him unreliable, and he’d never met anyone he’d even considered asking to share his unpredictable life.
Restlessness gnawed at his belly like hunger. God, he longedto depart London. Only a few more days, and he and Eve, his sister and partner in the excavation project they’d begun in Norfolk, would head north again.
He couldn’t wait. If he had his way, they’d depart today.
Since reading that damnable letter and learning that Peter was gone, he’d needed to escape. He’d been stagnant too long. After their promising dig a few months past, he and Eve had barely ventured beyond London. Their patron, American tycoon Gordon Van Arsdale, was working behind the scenes to arrange for further exploration, though the landowner involved was apparently a challenge to maneuver. Eve, the studious Prince, was busy presenting papers, doing research, and writing about Anglo-Saxon history. She relished all of it. Dom had always preferred action, so the weeks of waiting had all but driven him mad.
Learning of Peter’s death had pushed him over an edge he hadn’t even fully realized he’d been perched upon.
He’d been on the go for so many years of his life that he no longer knew how to sit in discomfort, how to savor a moment, how to feel at home anywhere. Though it wasn’t until contemplating Peter’s loss that he’d realized his insatiable wanderlust might keep him from ever feeling anything like contentment.
Admitting as much made him angry—at himself for chasing so doggedly in his father’s footsteps, at his father for leaving a legacy that was so bloody hard to live up to, and at Peter for reminding him what mattered most in life.
“Do you think you’ll ever marry and have children?” Peter had asked the question the last time Dom had seen him, while still in the first months of marriage to his pretty bride.
Dom scoffed at the question, bristling at the expectationthat he fall in line with what all the other boring gentlemen in society did. But Peter asked because he cared. Because he somehow sensed the moments of loneliness Dom hid with a procession of paramours and travel to far corners of the globe.
“Hello?” Eve’s voice echoed up from the hallway stairwell. “Dominic?”
