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A choked sob broke out of her. They were going to die here. They had come to this desolate place in search of safety and found only danger.

Gran reached past her and tried the other handle. It opened easily. “Thank God,” she muttered. Evaine wanted to laugh wildly with relief. She had tried the wrong side.

Inside, she slammed the door shut and sagged against the wood. Triumphant, Gran reached past her and shot the bolt home, locking it.

For the first time in hours, they were dry. They had a solid roof over their head, food, and as soon as she found a room to clear of dust, they could rest. Exhaustion gnawed Evaine’s bones. She could not continue on like this indefinitely.

She had to be strong for her Gran.

“This way,” Evaine said, collecting herself. She had imagined those footsteps following them. Conjured them from a frightened corner of her mind that worried she could not find a way through this rough patch. That there would never be real safety or hope in her future again.

But that couldn’t be true. Gran had heard them first.

She remembered the way to the kitchen. The hurricane lamp cast a circle of bright light along the hall. Evaine imagined that within this circle, nothing could hurt them. Whether it was true or merely a trick of her mind, they arrived at the kitchen without further incident, where she put the heavy food basket on the long work table and poured water from the gooseneck faucet into a kettle. She prodded the coals in the stove to life and set the kettle on to boil.

“Did anything make it through dry, or was everything soaked?” she asked Gran, who was sitting in an old chair near the warming stove.

“We have changes of clothes and a warm nightgown each. I brought your book, too.”

Evaine scoffed. That little tome had proven to be utterly useless. Or perhaps she was not cut out for foraging. She was too much a creature of the city. She didn’t belong out here in the countryside.

The kettle whistled. She made them each a cup of tea, but just as she was about to sit down and drink hers, masculine footsteps stepped methodically closer. Every instinct told her to flee. Instead she snatched up a knife.

Evaine whirled. A tall, dark form loomed just beyond the kitchen entry. Her grip on the knife slipped. It crashed to the floor, clattering noisily at her feet.

Chapter 11

Gareth

“What are you doing in my house?” Gareth demanded. “At this hour?”

Evaine Ballard’s pretty face had gone ashen at the sight of him. Gareth’s pounding head had kept him tossing and turning, but it was the creak and slam of a door that had finally—reluctantly—dragged him from his bed. He’d felt his way down the stairs in the dark, listening. He had been utterly confounded to hear the teakettle’s whistle and followed it to the kitchen, where he discovered two women taking shelter inside his ruined mansion on a rain-soaked night. He had not given them leave to enter.

“You must be the duke.” An elderly woman with soft gray hair piled atop her head and a thick flannel shawl wrapped around her thin shoulders smiled brightly.

“Lord Lucan,” he grunted in confirmation. “I know who she is. You must be Miss Ballard’s grandmother.

“I am,” replied the woman. Her gaze found Evaine, who was busy putting away a knife that had fallen to the floor when he walked in. Either he had startled her or she had intended to stab him. “A tree fell on our cottage. Our home flooded. We had nowhere else to go.”

He observed the stiff set of her slim shoulders and the restless way she kept moving after she had put the knife back inside a drawer. Something had rattled her. She was a stalwart sort of woman. She didn’t flinch when the dreaded Duke of Wolfhaven snapped at her. What could possibly have frightened her so badly?

“There is nowhere for you to stay,” he said curtly.

“I’ll set up a pallet for my grandmother here in the kitchen. We can find a room to clean out in the morning.”

“Where will you sleep?” he asked. In my bed, came the immediate answering thought, nearly flying from his lips on a foolish breath. With me.

He really should have swallowed his pride and visited the actress who’d been well compensated to pretend she liked him before he left London. She had let her façade slip as soon as he was buttoning his trousers and he hadn’t conquered his self-loathing enough to return to her again before coming here, believing—erroneously, in retrospect—that he could complete his work in a day or two and escape back to civilization.

As if she could read his thoughts, Evaine shook her head vehemently. “I won’t be sleeping again this night,” she said, glancing at the window. No clock struck the hour, for none had been wound in a decade. His watch was on the dresser in his room upstairs. He guessed it was around two in the morning. With the thick storm clouds blocking the sky he couldn’t see the moon.

A wave of melancholy struck him. Though he had been restlessly, dreamlessly asleep only minutes ago, tiredness hit him with the force of a tsunami. All caused by hitting his head when Miss Ballard struck him with a chestnut and felled him from his horse, he knew. Anger spiked through him.

Her presence here was a plague.

Physically, she reminded him too much of Marina. Her manner, however, was reminiscent of the women in London who recoiled from his scarred body while taking his money.

He wanted her, and he hated her, in equal measure. He respected her intelligence and grit, and those same qualities simultaneously infuriated him. He was aware that his reaction to her had everything to do with his own feelings of inadequacy and isolation—both exacerbated by being here in his ruined childhood home—and little to do with her at all.