Moving quickly, she gathered her few possessions: a change of clothes, her mother’s handkerchief—one of the only items she’d been permitted to keep—and the small volume of poetry Harriet had given her years ago. Her riding habit hung in the corner, creased but serviceable.
The house slept around her as she crept down the servants’ stairs. She knew which steps creaked, which doors stuck. Two years had taught her the geography of her prison.
The study door opened silently. Moonlight guided her to the desk, to the hidden compartment behind the third drawer where Aunt Agatha kept household funds. Cressida’s hands trembled as she counted out enough for coach fare and lodging, even as she tried not to think about what exactly she was doing right at that moment.
Theft.
She was committing theft. But she’d scrubbed floors until her hands bled. She’d mended gowns and polished silver and endured endless humiliation. Surely, she’d earned this much.
She left the house without looking back.
The journey was a blur of walking through the night, hiring a coach at dawn, and enduring endless hours of rattling roads and aching muscles. By the time the small stone church came into view, isolated and lovely in the countryside, exhaustion had seeped into her very bones.
But she was here. She’d made it.
“Finally,” she sighed.
She approached on foot, having dismissed the coach a mile back. She could hear voices inside, the murmur of the ceremony already begun.
No. She wasn’t too late. Shecouldn’tbe. With that thought pounding at the back of her skull, she burst through the church door.
“Harriet!” she cried out, ready to stop this madness?—
But she was yanked back.
A hand clamped over her mouth, large and firm. An arm banded around her waist, lifting her clean off her feet. She was being dragged backward, away from the entrance, away from Harriet, away from everything.
Cressida thrashed wildly, trying to scream against the palm pressed to her lips. Her captor was stronger than anyone she’d ever encountered, hauling her with ridiculous ease. His forearm around her waist held her casually back, and his bare palm burned against her skin.
The church door swung shut before anyone inside could react to the commotion.
Trees surrounded them now, but Cressida did not stop struggling as her captor dragged her backwards. He pushed her against the rough bark of an oak, finally releasing her mouth but keeping her pinned with one hand on her shoulder.
She got her first proper look at him then, and wished immediately that she hadn’t.
He was tall, she realized. Imposingly so. Broad-shouldered and dressed with careless elegance, dark hair falling across his brow. His jaw was strong and uncompromising, and there was something about the set of his mouth that made it plain he was accustomed to being obeyed.
He was not handsome, exactly. Or rather, handsome in the way that certain dangerous things were: a storm rolling in off the sea, a horse that hadn’t yet decided whether to tolerate you. His eyes were dark brown, nearly black in the dappled light, and they moved over her face with a coolness that made her feel simultaneously catalogued and dismissed.
“Stop acting like a wildcat,” he commanded, his voice low and dark as midnight in her ear. “I’m going to remove my hand, and you will remain silent. Understood?”
Cressida nodded, her heart racing. But the moment his palm left her mouth, she drew breath to shout?—
His hand returned, faster than thought.
“I said,silent.” Those dark brown eyes were utterly without mercy. “We are not playing this game. Nod if you comprehend.”
Fury burned through her exhaustion.
Who was this brute? This… thisbarbarianwho dared to manhandle her?
Still, she knew she was outmatched here, so she could do nothing but nod. And again, slowly, he lowered his hand.
Cressida shoved at his chest immediately, but it felt like pushing against a stone wall. “Release me at once, you—you villain! You have no right?—”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “You cannot stop this wedding.”
The certainty in his voice made her falter.
