Luc shoved to his knees, made his limbs perform. The sword lay inches from his hand. Blessed woman. She had kicked it to him.

He lunged for the weapon. Lurched to his feet.

He struck her attacker with the flat. The other released her, shouting, and ran. Her attacker staggered away, groaning and hurling curses back as he fled.

Abruptly, except for the woman, the alley was empty.

Luc’s head swam. He stumbled. She grasped his arm. Then her arms were around him, pressing her body to his. Everything was astoundingly hazy.

“Don’t fall.” Her voice was strained, her arms tight.

She was holding him up? Preposterous. But the alley was a tunnel of blackness, his limbs heavy and ears ringing.

“We must go to a more populated place quickly,” she said. “But if you fall I am not strong enough to pull you to your feet again.” She shoved her shoulder beneath his arm, banded her arm about his waist and pushed him forward.

Luc blinked, and a fuzzy spot of light became a torch ahead, then a lantern before a door. Then another. His head throbbed and whirred to the music now filtering up the street. He blinked again, then harder, and more came into focus. His shoulder ached like the devil. He focused on the woman beneath his arm. Her hair, bound into a knot and uncovered, glimmered like fire.

He pulled away from her.

Arabella stood shaking. “But are you—”

“Yes.” The street rocked. He grasped her arm and drew her along. They turned a corner to a street with lanterns before each door. People clustered around a pair of jugglers, flaming torches flying between them. Captain Andrew pulled her around the crowd into shadows and swung her to face him. His eye was ablaze.

“Goddammit, what were you thinking to walk about town alone? Where were you going?”

Arabella could not control the shaking that had taken over her body. “To dinner.”

“Dinner?”

“I was hungry.”

“You were—”

“Hungry! I haven’t eaten an entire meal in weeks, and with the wretched coins you insisted on giving me for doing what I should not have done, I intended to eat.” The explanation tumbled from her tongue. “After this morning I could not risk dining at the inn and encountering you because I do not wish to do things I mustn’t again. But . . . I was hungry.”

His gaze seemed to swim. He stretched his hand out to her and she flinched.

He dropped back a step. “I— Forgive me.”

“How can I presume to forgive you for anything when you have just now saved me from those men and my own poor judgment? You are absurd.” She did not want to be beholden to him. Her insides twisted with panic.

“You were not afraid,” he said in a strange voice.

“On the contrary.” Her knees were water. She had been unutterably foolish, thinking only to escape him and of nothing else.

He came toward her, but he only took her hand and wrapped his around it.

“You are safe now,” he said simply.

“I do not wish to be in your debt,” she said, because they might as well have the truth between them.

“That is perfectly clear to me,” he murmured beneath the music of a fiddle nearby. “You were brave. If you’d had Stewart’s bone saw and pewter jug at hand, you would not have even needed my help.” A smile lurked at his beautiful lips. His fingertips came beneath her chin and he tilted her face up. “As I am now in your debt as well, shall we call it even?”

She nodded. He studied her for a silent moment, then with a tight breath released her and turned away. A trickle of crimson stained his neck cloth.

“You are hurt.”

“No more than I have been many times before.” He gestured her from the shadows. “Now I believe it is time you had that dinner you sought.”

“I’ve lost my appetite. I didn’t see everything that happened when . . . What did they do to—”

“Nothing,” he said shortly. “Come.”

She went at his side along the narrow streets. People strolled arm in arm or lingered by doorways of overflowing establishments. All were celebrating.

They came to the brasserie near the inn. He opened the door for her and she saw his grimace of pain.

She halted. “I will not dine until you have seen to your wounds.”

“Blackmail? Miss Caulfield, you were wasted to have been born anything less than a duchess, in truth.” There was something very strange in his gaze as it dropped to her mouth.

“Perhaps I shall someday marry a duke and fulfill my potential,” she said with a forced smile. “Until then, however, I make an exceptional governess.”

“I have no doubt.” His voice was low.

“Your wounds?” she said briskly.

His mouth tilted up at one end. “Or a nanny, if not a governess.”

His half smile made her feel peculiar inside and out of control. Everything about him made her feel out of control. She made rash decisions because of him.

She moved away from the door into the street. “My nanny was a wonderful woman.” She must remain light, speak of nothings, then there would be nothing between them. “I remember little of her; she died when I was three. But I remember her black hair and—”

He grabbed her wrist and turned her around to him. “I don’t wish to know about your nanny.” He spoke low beneath the sounds of merriment all about. “I don’t wish to know anything more about you at all. I am nearly mad with wanting you in my hands, and the madness worsens with every word you speak.”

“About my nanny?”

“About anything. Everything.” His gaze covered her, and like in Plymouth it was both bemused and commanding. “You have only to move your lips and I want you.”

“Then I shall be silent!”

“I don’t imagine you can be silent, and it wouldn’t matter anyway. I would still want you, though perhaps less acutely, admittedly.”

“You speak to me as no man ever has. So frankly. As though—” As though in making his intentions clear he was putting the decision to act upon them in her hands, as he had that morning on the beach. “I wish I had never met you,” she said.

He spoke with quiet intensity. “Destiny, it seems, Miss Caulfield, is a contrary master.”

Destiny?

She whirled away from him and into a stream of people moving along the street. The music of trumpets and drums and pipes were suddenly upon her, firelight dancing off walls and glittering brass and sparkling fabrics. Revelers were laughing, talking, and singing as they jostled along. But the music was familiar now, rich and free. She caught a glimpse of the players, a Gypsy band, unmistakably different from the townsfolk and farmers with their dark skin, thick black locks, and the shimmering gold loops in the men’s ears and on the women’s wrists. She had danced with her sisters every summer of her girlhood to music at the Gypsy fair. They danced the very day the old soothsayer told them their fortune and Arabella declared she would someday wed a prince. That it was her destiny.

Dreams. Fantasies. Like the fantasy she chased now, rushing to a castle to find a prince and instead falling into the hands of men who would hurt her because she was alone.

She wove her way against the crowd, knowing he was following. He would not allow her to go alone now. She squeezed between people, holding her cloak close and peering into faces, not seeing the men who had attacked her, her heartbeats wild. The band drew closer on the street and the crowd pressed her back. Hands grabbed at her in passing. She dragged her cloak free. Her head felt dizzy, disoriented. She could not stop trembling.

He grasped her arms and blocked the crowd from her. Revelers complained with good-natured laughter and went around him.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded. He touched her only where he held her arms, protecting her with the shield of his body. She looked up. His face was shadow and light.

“I don’t know what cruel twist of fate brought you to me, duchess,” he said roughly. “But I would rather a moment of madness with you now than the promise of sanity for a lifetime.”