Page 1

PROLOGUE

HUNGERFORD, BERKSHIRE, MAY 1786

Rowden stopped in the doorway of the small parlor of Foxleigh and stared in horror at what had become of his best friend. At eighteen years of age, he was finding certain aspects of young manhood difficult blows to bear, but this betrayal was the worst yet.

“God’s knuckles, Ro, what have they done to you?” His voice cracked on the words, another humiliating reminder of inevitable change.

Late afternoon light fell through the tall sashed windows, turning Sophronia’s skin to pale gold. She leaned against the back of a chair in an attitude of elegant indolence, yet her back arched unnaturally, and her hands, laid over one another as if she’d never lifted them to labor in her life, showed white at the bent knuckles. She spoke without moving her lips, which bared her teeth in what appeared to Rowden a feral smile, but didn’t take her eyes off the other man in the room with her.

“I am getting my portrait painted. Do go away.”

The painter, older, wearing a bag wig and brandishing a palette, scowled at her, his white brows thick and white enough to hide a small mouse. He muttered under his breath in French, and Soph narrowed her eyes.

“But your— This!” Rowden waved a hand back and forth in the air as if he were brushing the flank of a horse, an activity he liked to indulge in, though his uncle’s estate did not want for grooms. “You don’t look yourself at all.”

And she didn’t. If the great Dr. Johnson had wanted to illustrate the word tatterdemalion in his learned dictionary, he could not have done better than to choose a sketch of Sophronia Edmons for the task. On any given day, Soph’s hair sprouted a quill pen, the stem of some leafy vegetable, or a clump of cobwebs swept from whatever place she had been poking her nose into. Sometimes her wild braid sported all these things together.

The pockets of her apron perpetually sagged with rocks or nuts and other assorted treasures she had excavated on her adventures of the day, or whatever the local children had charged her with keeping. The buckles of her shoes would cry out for polish, the hems of her petticoat would be ripped or muddy or both, and either the bodice or robe of her gown would sport some smudge of dirt or strand of hair from an animal or person who had been cuddled against their will. Or which had cuddled her, an act of derring-do in itself, for Soph, when not approached with proper caution, wasn’t the least bit cuddly.

Sophronia was not precious, she was not a charming picture, and she never came near the broadest interpretation of words like “sweet” or “demure” or “lovely.” Sophronia Edmons was a force of nature, as raw and elemental as if she were a mythical goddess sprouted straight from the earth, and that was precisely why Rowden liked her.

And now she’d gone and turned into that most horrifying of creatures: a proper young woman.

“I can’t imagine the effort required of Prue to comb your hair,” he remarked.

“Shush. It’s a wig. I beg you will leave us, for if this takes a moment longer than it must, I am either bound to strangle Monsieur Peintre, or he will be the death of me. Then all of Aunt’s efforts will be at a loss, Papa will be in despair, and I will be hung by my toes from the rafters.”

The painter harried her in French, his tone stern, and Soph spat back a reply. Her pronunciation was flawless, the effect of having lessons drilled into her whenever her aunt managed to nail Sophronia down. This was not often, which was why Aunt Edmons had learned to be ruthlessly efficient with her time.

“What’s to be your background?” Rowden gazed with fascination at the rare sight of Soph held captive long enough that one could study her. She was the daughter of a man who had made himself into a gentleman, and of a woman whose family had been born into distinction in an older age, but she was not a creature of painted rooms and indoor spaces. He knew her aunt sometimes snared her into receiving callers and practicing embroidery, but he’d never seen it. Rowden was much more familiar with the attics, kitchen, cellars, and, in one regrettable incident, the cistern of Foxleigh than he was the reception rooms or other living spaces.

He leaned on his walking stick, a new affectation he’d adopted, since it was no longer fashionable for young men to wear swords. “The Roman Forum? The Acropolis? A full-scale mappa mundi, with the orb and scepter cradled in your arms?”

She scratched an itch on her arm. “A little less cheek from you, please.”

“I’m more likely to be caught holding a book than you are.” Rowden pointed to the open volume trapped beneath her fingers like a vole in a cat’s maw.

“It makes me look learned, and accomplished young ladies are learned. Also polite, graceful, well-spoken, and possessed of excellent posture and even temper. And,” she added, in a moment of reflection following this assessment, “they hardly ever swear.”

“God’s toes, you’re a young lady now?”

“Kind of you to notice.” Her eyes shot sparks at him. At least no one could change one thing about Sophronia Edmons: those magnificent eyes. They were blue as the sky over the Mediterranean Sea, a place neither of them had seen but both wanted to. As blue as the chips of sapphire in the one piece of jewelry Soph had inherited from her mother. As blue as their placid River Kennet on a balmy summer day, and Rowden had the oddest sense that something had slipped by him. Without his noticing, the world had tilted half a degree, and something had shifted that could never be got back.

He studied Soph as if he had never seen her before, and in truth, when one was engaged with the mobile expressions of her face, which Rowden generally was, one did not pay much mind to the rest of her. She had four limbs, a strong back, and a head of wild-looking hair that generally defied whatever efforts her maid, Prue, put into taming it. She had a long oval face with a high brow and a long narrow nose, the straight slash of her mouth a contrast to the high curving arch of her brows, drawing attention to those oh-so-expressive eyes.

She was commanding, she was ever in motion, and she was always entertaining, but he had never stopped to notice that Soph was handsome. Not pretty; nothing about her was delicate enough to merit dainty praise. But her looks, developing the fullness of womanhood from the lean fierce grace of her girlhood, had an arresting quality that made a man pause.

Then he looked then at the rest of her, and the full weight of the realization bore down on him, with all its horrifying implications. Her hair—a wig to be sure—was charmingly puffed and powdered and teased into a halo around her face, then topped with an enormous picture hat. Her bodice was some absurd experiment with fashion, the black short-sleeved silk jacket pointed before and behind, with a clever lacing down the front that made a dashing contrast to the sheer white shift with long sleeves. White petticoats billowed and layered about her hips, cascading down her legs and stopping just above a pair of slender ankles in white clocked stockings and feet in heeled black silk slippers.

He swept his gaze back up, disbelieving. The linen skirts betrayed, with sensual suggestion, the shape of long limbs grown strong from striding about the Hungerford Downs, very often carrying a heavy basket that Aunt wanted delivered to a tenant on one hip and, on the other, a small child who had wanted to join in the errand but grew weary of the walk. The bodice nipped into an impossibly tiny waist—she must be knotted into stays tighter than she’d normally tolerate. And that meant that, beneath the gauzy kerchief knotted demurely around her neck—a neck the length and slenderness of which he had never before noticed—Sophronia had a bosom.

Lovely. Delectable. Mouthwatering. Breasts.

“God’s eyebrows,” Rowden croaked. “Why?”

She scowled at him, and Monsieur Peintre growled at her, but the artist had apparently deduced it would aid his sanity, and his commission, to focus on completing the work rather than attempting the useless effort of scolding his subject into submission. Which left Rowden and his former playmate staring at one another, he with a sensation of being poleaxed, she with a forlorn air.

“To show future husbands, of course,” she said through gritted teeth.