Then, in the inn yard, she encountered the children.

“I had a matter of some importance to see to,” she evaded.

Lamplight cast unsteady shadows across the captain’s face. Probably it had been a very handsome face before the scar disfigured it, with a strong jaw shadowed now with whiskers and a single deep green eye lined with thick lashes. His dark hair caressed his collar and tumbled over the strip of cloth tied about his head.

“A matter of more importance than your new position at a château?”

He did not believe her.

“If you must know,” she said carefully, “I have three children I must take to their father this evening before I travel to France.”

He looked blankly at her. “Children.”

“Yes.” She turned and gestured to the curb beneath the eave of the tavern. Three little bodies huddled against the wall, their eyes fixed anxiously upon him. “Their father awaits them across the city. While I was attempting to contact him, my ship departed without me,” taking with it her traveling trunk, another trouble she could not think about until she solved her first problem.

But the daily cruelties of the foundling home had taught her resourcefulness, and working for spoiled debutantes had taught her endurance. She would succeed.

“I am relieved—” Captain Andrew’s fingers crushed his hat brim, the sinews of his large hand pronounced. “I am relieved to learn that you take pride in your progeny even as you abandon them.”

“You have mistaken it, Captain,” she said above the clatter of a passing cart, making herself speak as calmly as though she were sitting in an elegant home in Grosvenor Square recommending white muslin over blush silk. “They are not my children. I encountered them only in the posting inn yard. Their mother had abandoned them, so I determined to find their father for them.”

The captain turned toward her fully then, his wide shoulders limned in amber from the setting sun that lightened his hair with strands of bronze. In his tousled, intense manner, he was not commonly handsome, but harshly beautiful and strangely mythic. His dark gaze made her feel peculiar inside.

Unsolid.

His lips parted but he said nothing, and for a moment he seemed not godly but boylike. Vulnerable.

She tilted her head and made herself smile slightly. “I can see that I have surprised you, Captain. You must reevaluate matters now, naturally. But while you are doing so I do hope you will reconsider the plausibility of me being mother to a twelve-year-old boy.” She paused. “For the sake of my vanity.”

He grinned, an easy tilt of one side of his mouth that rendered a pair of masculine lips devastatingly at the command of a grown man indeed.

“How callous of me.” He crossed his arms and leaned his shoulder against the doorpost. “I beg your pardon, madam.”

“Without any sincerity whatsoever, it seems. I pray you, sir, will you take me to Saint-Nazaire?”

The grin slid away, leaving the vibrant scar dipping over his right cheek yet more pronounced. He must have suffered the injury recently. The war had been over for a year and a half, but he bore the erect carriage and authoritative stance of a naval commander.

It wouldn’t matter if he were the head of the Admiralty and his vessel a hundred-gun ship of the line, as long as he carried her swiftly to her destination.

“How did you determine the location of their father’s home?” he said.

“I asked about. I can be persistent when necessary.”

“I am coming to see that.” He pushed away from the doorway and started off along the street. “Come.”

“Come?” She gestured to the children and hurried after him.

He looked down at her as she awkwardly tried to match his long strides, and he halted mid-street. He did not seem to heed the traffic of horses and carts and other pedestrians, but stood perfectly solid before her like he owned the avenue. His eye glimmered unsteadily, a trick of the setting sunlight, she supposed. It was a very odd sight. He seemed at once both in thorough command and yet confused.

He pointed at a building across the street. “Give my name to the man that you find on the other side of that door and tell him that I said he is to escort you to the children’s home and return you to your inn tonight.”

“But—no.” Arabella’s cold hands were pressed into her skirts. “You needn’t. That is to say—”

“He is a good man, in my employ, and you and the children will be considerably safer crossing this town with him than without.” He scowled again. “You will do this, Miss Caulfield, or I will not take you to Saint-Nazaire on my ship.”

Her heart turned about. “You will take me there?” Upon his ship. Upon the sea.

She must.

He scanned her face and shoulders. “To whose home are you traveling, little governess?”

He was no longer teasing. She must be honest. “I am going to Saint-

Reveé-des-Beaux. It belongs to an English lord, but the Prince of Sensaire is in residence there and he has hired me to teach his sister before her debut in London society at Christmastime.”

“Saint-Reveé-des-Beaux,” he only said.

“Do you know it, Captain?”

“A bit.” His brow cut downward. “Miss Caulfield . . .”

“Captain?”

“My ship is not a passenger vessel. There will be no other women, no fine dining or other amusements. Aboard it, you will be at my mercy. Mine alone.

You do understand that, do you not?”

“I . . .” She hadn’t given it thought after so many people in port recommended him. Naïvely, she had assumed it meant he was a gentleman.

But gentlemen had lied to her before.

She had no choice. “I understand.”

“We depart at dawn, with or without you.”

He moved away, and Arabella released a shaking breath. Forcing a bright smile, she pivoted about and beckoned the children to her.

A

With the publication of her debut novel in 2010, KATHARINE ASHE earned a spot among the American Library Association’s “New Stars of Historical Romance.” Amazon awarded How to Be a Proper Lady a place among the Ten Best Books of 2012 in Romance, When a Scot Loves a Lady is a nominee for the 2013 Library of Virginia Literary Award in Fiction, and in 2011 Katharine won the coveted Reviewers’ Choice Award for Captured by a Rogue Lord.

Reviewers call her books “breathtaking,” “lushly intense” and “sensationally intelligent.”

Katharine lives in the wonderfully warm Southeast with her beloved husband, son, dog, and a garden she likes to call romantic rather than unkempt. A professor of European history, she has made her home in California, Italy, France, and the northern United States. Please visit her website at www.KatharineAshe.com.

Vi s i t www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.


By Katharine Ashe How a Lady Weds a Rogue How to Be a Proper Lady When a Scot Loves a Lady In the Arms of a Marquess Captured by a Rogue Lord Swept Away by a Kiss Coming Soon I Married the Duke Available from Avon Impulse How to Marry a Highlander A Lady’s Wish