“I’ll wager you didn’t expect to see me,” drawled Lord Richard Selwick.

Amy woke with a gasp of horror.

“Drat him!” You would think the nasty cad could at least leave her to dream in peace! Amy punched the pillow, rolled over, and went back to sleep. Lord Richard invaded her slumbers once more, but this time Amy didn’t mind. She dreamed with great satisfaction of pushing Lord Richard off the side of the boat, and then sticking out her tongue at him as he thrashed in the cold waters of the Channel.

On the other side of the cabin, Richard’s slumbers were equally uneasy—even though he had no idea that Amy was mentally chucking him into the Channel. He had lain awake for some time, alternately fuming over his own behavior and that of Amy. He had dismissed a ridiculous voice in his head (which sounded unsettlingly like Henrietta’s) that rather caustically informed him that if he wanted Amy’s attention behaving like a seven-year-old was not the best way to go about it. “She started it,” Richard grumbled, and then felt even worse, because, devil take it, he had sunk to the level of arguing with people who weren’t even there. If he continued like this, he’d be more fit for Bedlam than espionage.

Richard fell asleep while mentally drafting an instructional pamphlet for the War Office entitled Some Thoughts on the Necessity of the Avoidance of the Opposite Sex While Engaged in Espionage: A Practical Guide. The title itself took him some effort to get just right. By the time he finished composing Item One (“Under no circumstances allow yourself to be drawn into conversation, no matter how well read the young lady in question, or how fine her eyes”), Richard slid seamlessly into a familiar nightmare.

He was just outside Paris, making his way through the Bois de Vincennes to the rendezvous with Andrew, Tony, and the Marquis de Sommelier. Percy was to meet them at Calais with his yacht and the Comte and Comtesse de St. Antoine. Another successful week’s work for the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel.

Richard wasn’t feeling particularly buoyed with success; he was still brooding over that last call on Deirdre. She had been arranging flowers from Baron Jerard when he had arrived. Baron Jerard! What sort of rival was that! Forty if he was a day! Richard would be willing to wager the man couldn’t sit the back of a horse for the duration of a hunt, much less pull off dashing rescues with half the military might of revolutionary France in pursuit. It had been the way Deirdre said his name when Richard asked about the flowers that had set Richard off. “Baron Jerard called,” she’d said, and there was just a hint of something secret, something almost smug, only his Deirdre, his perfect, beautiful Deirdre would never possibly be smug. That’s when Richard rashly spilled his secret.

But when he’d told her . . . well, what he wasn’t supposed to tell her, she’d just kept on arranging Jerard’s pestilential flowers, and trilled, “La, you are droll, my lord!”

“What will it take to convince you, the head of a Frenchman on a platter?” Richard had cried in anguish, and stormed from the parlor.

Geoff poked Richard in the ribs. “Richard, something’s not right.”

Blinking, Richard realized they were already at the small shack they used for their rendezvous. And Geoff was right—something was quite, quite wrong. There should have been a scrap of scarlet cloth in one of the rough rectangles that passed for windows. The door of the shack hung ominously ajar.

The two old friends exchanged a long look, and crept silently along the side of the shack. “Ready?” Richard breathed. Geoff nodded, and they exploded into the hovel. Only to find one man lying twisted on the floor, his clothes dark and wet with his own blood.

Tony.

And then Geoff uttered the words that Richard couldn’t erase from his brain, not with a hundred bottles of port. “Someone must have tipped them off.”

“Damn her!” Richard cursed, as he thrashed in his sleep. “Damn her!”

Chapter Eight

Voices in the foyer jolted me out of Amy’s world.

Expecting to hear only waves lapping against the keel of a boat, the sound of laughter in the next room knocked me unwillingly back into the twenty-first century. I blinked to rid myself of the last phantom images of tarry decks and canvas sails. It took me a moment to remember where I was; my head felt as muzzy as though I’d just taken a double dose of cold medicine. A quick glance around informed me that I was still sprawled out on the Persian rug in Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s drawing room and the fire next to me had burned down to mere embers from lack of tending. I had no idea what time it was, or how long I’d been reading, but one leg seemed to have gone numb, and there was a vague ache in my shoulders.

I was experimentally stretching out one stiff leg—just to make sure it still worked—when he appeared in the doorway.

It was the Golden Man. He of the photograph on Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s mantel. For a moment, in my befuddled state, caught between past and present, I half fancied that he’d just strolled out of the photograph. All right, I know it sounds silly, but I actually took a quick look to make sure the man in the picture was still where he ought to be, frozen in perpetual laughter next to his horse. He was. And on a second glance at the man in the doorway, I picked up the differences I had missed the first time around. The man in the photograph hadn’t been wearing gray slacks and a blazer, and his blond hair had been bright with sun, not dark with wet.

He also hadn’t been wearing an unspeakably chic woman on his arm.

She was about my height, but there the resemblance ended. Her long, glossy dark brown hair floated around her face as though it was auditioning for a Pantene commercial. Her brown suede boots were as immaculate as if she had just walked out of the Harrods shoe department, and her smart little brown wool dress screamed Notting Hill boutique. They made an attractive pair, like something out of Town and Country: Mr. and Mrs. Fabulously Fabulous Show Off their Gracious Home.

It was enough to make one feel like a miserable mugwump.

I was so deep in mugwump land that it took me a moment to realize that not only was the smiling, golden man of the photograph not smiling, his expression was positively explosive. And it was aimed at me.

“Hi!” I struggled to my feet, a few yellowed pages tumbling from my lap as I levered myself up with one hand, the other hand clutching the bundle of letters. “I’m Elo—”

Golden Man stalked across the drawing room, snatched up the papers I’d left on the floor, flung them into the open chest, and slammed the lid shut.

“Who gave you leave to take those papers?”

I was so shocked by the transformation of the friendly man of the photograph that my brain and my mouth stopped working in partnership.

“Who gave me . . . ?” I glanced down dumbly at the papers in my hand. “Oh, these! Mrs. Selwick-Alderly said—”

Golden Man bellowed, “Aunt Arabella!”

“Mrs. Selwick-Alderly said I could—”

“Serena, would you go fetch Aunt Arabella?”

Chic Girl bit her lip. “I’ll just go see if she’s ready to leave, shall I?” she murmured, and hurried off down the hallway.

Golden Man plunked himself down on the chest, as though defying me to snatch it out from under him, and glowered at me.

I stared at him in dismayed confusion, automatically clutching Amy’s letters closer to my coffee-blotched sweater. Could he be under some sort of misapprehension about my intentions towards his family papers? Maybe he thought I was an appraiser from Britain’s equivalent of the IRS, come to charge his aunt great gobs of money for possessing a national treasure, or a rogue librarian, come to steal the papers for my library. After all, if there was art theft, maybe there was document theft, too, and he thought I was a dastardly document thief. I didn’t think I looked particularly dastardly, just disheveled—it’s hard to look dastardly when one has wide blue eyes, and one of those easy-to-blush complexions—but maybe document thieves came in all shapes and sizes.

“Mrs. Selwick-Alderly said I could look at these papers for my dissertation research,” I tried to reassure him.

He continued to eye me as though I were a Victorian scullery maid caught parading around in the mistress’s best diamond tiara.

“I’m getting a PhD,” I added. “From Harvard.”

Why had I felt the need to say that? I sounded like one of those intolerable academic types who wore leather patches on their tweed jackets, affected horn-rimmed spectacles, and pronounced “Hahvahd” without any Rs.

Golden Man clearly thought so, too. “I don’t care if you’re David bloody Starkey,” he snapped. “Those papers aren’t open to the public.”

Forget golden. He was being rapidly demoted to bronze. Tarnished bronze, at that.

“I’m not the public,” I pointed out as Chic Girl slipped unobtrusively back through the open doorway. “Your aunt invited me here, and offered me the use of these papers.”

“Damn!” he cursed explosively.

“Really, Colin,” she of the enviable boots broke in, “I don’t think—”

“Colin?” I took a step forward, eyes narrowing as a nasty suspicion began to form. “Not Mr. Colin Selwick of Selwick Hall?”

Suddenly, it all made sense.

I dropped the disputed bundle of papers on an overstuffed chair. “Not Mr. Colin Selwick who likes to send nasty letters to American scholars?”

“I wouldn’t say—” he began, looking harried, but I didn’t let him get any further. After all, if I was going to be flung out of the house like a disobedient Victorian scullery maid, I might as well go out with style.