All of the air got trapped in Amarantha’s throat. Then, upon a gasp, a great ball of laughter barked from her mouth.

She snapped her lips together.

“Mrs. Foster, are you unwell?”

It had been so long since she had last laughed, she hardly knew.

“Mrs. Eagan, you now jest, do you not?”

“I do not. Why would you say so?”

“I was once acquainted with the present Duke of Loch Irvine. It was before he came into his title, to be sure, but only five years ago. Unless his character has altered beyond recognition in those five years, there is nothing more absurd than the notion of that man as a twisted demon, except perhaps that he is a recluse who shuns society.”

“Yet both are accurate.”

“I cannot believe it. You claim that all in Edinburgh and Leith do?”

“Everyone.”

“Astonishing. Is there no one in this region who knew him before the girls disappeared?”

“Until last summer, he had been absent from Scotland since boyhood, although there is some disagreement concerning the age he departed his family’s home.”

Thirteen.

After she learned that he had not perished at sea, she had never sought news of his naval pursuits. She knew nothing of him except his unexpected accession to the dukedom, which she had read about in The Times when it reached Kingston.

“This is a busy port town,” she said, “and he was a naval commander. Someone here must have known him before.”

“He owns two vessels that sail from these docks,” the madam said pacifically. “But the crew of both keep apart from others.”

“I daresay hundreds of men arrived here last year, any one of whom could have done these crimes. Or it might have been a criminal who has lived here his entire life. Perhaps several criminals, each who committed a separate crime against the unfortunate girls.”

“Do consider the symbol carved on the gate at Haiknayes Castle,” Mrs. Eagan said, “and its appearance on Maggie Poultney’s cloak, which proves the connection. The lairds of Loch Irvine have always made their home at Haiknayes.”

“That symbol could certainly prove Miss Poultney’s interest in the castle,” Amarantha conceded. “But hardly the Duke of Loch Irvine’s guilt.”

“You seem to have a keen interest in defending his innocence, Mrs. Foster.”

“I am expressing doubt, yes.” The young man Amarantha had known in Jamaica had been no model of propriety, but she refused to believe him a vile abductor and murderer of innocent maidens. That he had gently, wonderfully seduced Miss Poultney, Miss Finn, and Miss Edwards, and that afterward the girls had fled their homes in heartbreak and shame, was however entirely likely. “The police have had ample time to place the blame on him. They must be doubtful too.”

“They recently accused another man of the murder, but they swiftly released him. They had, after all, found her body near the duke’s property.”

“I did not know he had a house in Edinburgh.” They had rarely spoken of their families or homes. Those ten weeks had been singular, at once fiercely thrilling and deliciously intoxicating, a time-out-of-time idyll. Even her heartbreak had defied reality.

You were right to think me a beast.

At the time she had not believed those words. Instead she had believed his lies. She was, she had discovered, a very poor judge of a man’s character when her heart was involved.

“Despite your acquaintance five years ago,” her hostess said, “perhaps you do not truly know the Duke of Loch Irvine.”

Without doubt.

She scooted to the edge of the chair.

“Mrs. Eagan, will you tell me if you have encountered my friend, Penelope Baker? She stands two inches taller than I. Her complexion is light brown, her hair is black and curly, and she has eyes the color of amber.”

“I am sorry to disappoint you, Mrs. Foster.”

Amarantha stood. “Thank you for your time.”

“I regret that I cannot help. A woman never enjoys sending a caller away unhappy.” She offered a smile of feminine understanding.

“Oh, I do not go away from your home entirely downcast. Your story of the Duke of Loch Irvine has had quite the opposite effect, in fact.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It is horrible that the girls’ families are suffering, and I grieve for them, truly. But you have just told me Gabriel Hume is now believed by all to be a villain. That this rumor is surely false has no effect whatsoever on how thoroughly satisfied it has made me. Good day.”

The walk back was short and as she reached the docks the sun was turning the canal a glittering gold color. She purchased rolls and ale, and carried them to the blacksmith shop.

Corporal Nathaniel Hay sat on a stool by the forge, his single weathered hand wrapped about a poker handle, prodding the coals. A fellow passenger aboard ship, he had kind eyes that had drawn Amarantha to him, only to discover that he had served under her father’s command at Yorktown decades earlier. When he learned she was traveling alone, he had insisted on accompanying her.

“I have bought dinner, and it is nearly hot!” she said.

Taking up a lamp, he followed her into their temporary flat, two rooms behind the blacksmith shop. Watching him settle uncomfortably at the bare table, she recognized his silent suffering. In four years at the hospital, she had seen plenty of the chronic troubles of men and women who spent their lives laboring.

“I have been to a brothel,” she said as she unwrapped the food and set the larger portion before him. “Now, you mustn’t scold. It was a very elegant brothel. A passerby would never know what debauchery goes on inside it.”

“That’s a comfort to hear, my lady,” he said, the creases about his eyes deepening.

“You mustn’t ever speak without sincerity, Nathaniel. It is a sin.”

“Did your husband teach you that?”

“And many more useful lessons. I’m certain I shan’t exhaust all of them before we must eventually part.” She bit into the roll and nearly moaned. To her starved senses, even this simple fare tasted marvelous. She had come no closer to finding Penny today, yet she felt a lightness of spirit that she had not enjoyed in months. Years. Five years. “What did you do today? Stir the coals of caution all throughout my absence?”

“You’re as clever as the colonel.”

“Not at all. Also, my father is much handsomer.”

“I won’t believe it.”

“But it is true. My mother and father’s five youngest daughters are all polished guineas too.”

“And your elder sister?”

“Emily is pretty, but more importantly, she is brilliant, just as Papa. Oh, how good it is to speak of them.” Paul had never liked to hear about her family. “Thank you, Nathaniel, for allowing me to trust you.” She reached out and touched his hand.

His brow knit. “Have you written to Lady Emily yet?”

She snatched her hand back. “No.”

“You should seek your family’s help.”

“I cannot.” She had tried to write to her sister, yet always the words were garbled. Too much had happened to explain in a letter. She had changed. This—being alone, anonymous—was easier. Uncomplicated. She could pursue Penny without interference. “They will demand that I return home.”

“You should.”

She cleared her throat. “How did you pass the afternoon?”

“A boy called for you.”

“Nathaniel! Why didn’t you tell me this immediately? Who was he?”

He shook his head. “Just another urchin looking for money from the lady who’d doled it out at the pub.”

“Which pub?”

“I gave him a coin and sent him on his way.”

“Good grief, which pub?”

“The Blue Thistle.”

Beyond the window night had fallen.

“It is too late already. I will go at first light.”

“You won’t go then either. ’Tain’t safe for a lady. And you’re looking peaked.”

“Peaked?”

“You haven’t slept a full night since we arrived, seems to me. You should take better care of yourself, my lady.”

“I do not understand,” she said, standing, “why I cannot seem to impress it permanently on my mind that all men feel the need to control women’s actions. Even good men.” She went to the doorway between the two tiny rooms. “I understand that you wish to keep me safe, Nathaniel. But I do not need safety.” Only answers.

The following morning Amarantha counted the remainder of her coins: a dispiritingly quick task. Paul had not allowed her to keep money. He thought her too irresponsible to make proper use of it.

Leaning her brow against the shelf above the brazier on which the kettle heated, she closed her eyes to relieve the pressure behind them. In her marriage she had been more fortunate than many women. Paul had never beaten her. He had never spoken disrespectfully to her when in the company of others. He had given her a comfortable home and just enough liberty to work several hours each week at the hospital.

She had been so grateful to him for allowing her to continue that work, despite his disapproval of Mr. and Mrs. Meriwether. When she discovered that he had done so only in order to hide his liaisons with his lover, Amarantha had not wept or screamed. Instead, she had walked the two miles to Penny’s house, and found there warm, welcoming embraces.

Paul had regularly insisted the rumors that Penny was his father’s daughter by an enslaved woman were false, that his father had never been unfaithful to his mother. Yet after his death she learned that he had lied about that too.

A scratch sounded at the door. She opened it to a grubby little boy.

“G’day, miss!” He snatched his cap from his head. “I be Rory Markum. My da’s place be the Blue Thistle you came by yesterday.”

“Oh, do come in, Mr. Markum! I am preparing my breakfast. Will you share it?”

He blushed to the roots of his matted hair.

“I’ve already took breakfast, miss. Mum dinna like to be spreading anybody’s secrets. But after you left she said as you spoke respectful an’ honest, she took a fine impression o’ you. She sent me over here to tell you the lady you be looking for, Miss Baker, stayed a sennight with us at the Thistle.”

Relief washed through Amarantha.

“She was—”

“Like you described her to Mum. The very image!”

“Do you know where she went after she left you?”

“She told Mum she was off to Edinburrah to find the devil,” Rory declared.

A frisson of unease tickled Amarantha’s belly. “What devil?”

“The Devil’s Duke, o’ course!”

The simplest explanation sufficed. The female population of Leith and Edinburgh had been whipped into a frenzy of anxiety with stories of missing maidens and bloody cloaks. Surely the pub mistress was as gullible as Mrs. Eagan.

When the boy left, Amarantha packed a satchel with necessities, tucked three of her five remaining coins into Nathaniel’s bedroll, and donned her cloak. A blacksmith by trade, Nathaniel had already made himself at home in the pub nearby and in the smith’s shop that kept this little flat warm throughout the damp nights on the Firth. She could not drag him with his aching joints the two miles to Edinburgh.

Nathaniel was a good man, and too observant: she was in fact not feeling her best. But she would never again allow any man’s demands, even kindly offered, to impede her.

Sliding her notebook into the satchel, she paused, then opened the volume and drew from it a folded paper: a letter written to Emily but never sent. For five years she had kept it as a reminder to her unwise heart.

Unfolding the page, she stared at the words her trembling hand had penned, the ink smudged by her hot tears.

A wave of emotion arose in her, an echo of the excessive feelings that had propelled the writing of those words.

She had continued to pray for months after that, guilty for the secret she hid from her husband, yet justifying it as piety, as though the Eternal Almighty had not known precisely the root of her prayers. She had only ceased praying for Captain Gabriel Hume the day she discovered God had given her another soul for whom to pray, a precious new life wholly in her care.

Nine months later, she had ceased praying to God entirely.

Yet she had, throwing her affection and good intentions into her marriage. Youthfully naïve, passionately innocent, and so easily tossed to the heights of pleasure or hurled to the depths of misery, even in the midst of heartbreak she had sought happiness. And love.

No longer. Five years older, she was much wiser. And the lessons her marriage had taught her—lessons in dampening her emotions and mistrusting her desires—could never be unlearned.

She wrote a swift note to Nathaniel. With rumors of abducted women flying about, she would not give him cause to worry.

For her own sake she was unconcerned about the diabolical duke. Gabriel Hume had long since stolen the innocent girl in her. If the Duke of Loch Irvine were, in fact, the demon people believed him to be, she among all women in Scotland had nothing to fear.

A dozen naked women gazed languidly at Gabriel.

“The roof is leaking again,” he mumbled.

“I beg your pardon?” his companion replied, obviously surprised.

Gabriel scratched his fingertips across his two-day’s growth of whiskers. Awakening from the old dreams this morning, he had been too unsettled to hold the razor steady enough to shave.

Cloverleaf eyes fevered with desire. Tresses like fire and sunshine. A smile that stripped him of all but the hunger to taste her. Laughter that unhinged him and shot his body through with hot, hard need.

He had awoken with a head full of confusion and a cock so eager to please it ached.

He scraped a hand over his face again. How she could remain so beguiling in his dreams after five damn years, he’d no idea. Probably because he was an idiot.

He knew the reason for the dream’s return, though. News of the death of Paul Garland had arrived in Leith aboard Gabriel’s ship a fortnight ago. Every night since then he had dreamed.

The dreams had never really ceased, not entirely, not in five years. He had simply gotten accustomed to them coming a wee bit further apart.

Focusing his eyes again on the letter, he reread the final lines.

“The roof is leaking again,” he repeated. “Worse than before.”

“It is not,” Ziyaeddin replied. “The roof of this house is perfectly adequate.”

“An’ they’ve need o’ more sherry barrels.” Crumpling the page in his fist, Gabriel blew out a breath and raked his fingers through his hair. “The fifty barrels I’d Courtenay send up from Spain a year ago cost the better part o’ the quarter’s income. Judas, the place will suck me dry an’ those females will still be asking more o’ me.”

“Ah, Kallin. Again.” The young man shook his head. “How you can stand there in the midst of these”—he gestured to the paintings lining the gallery—“and grumble about leaking roofs and sherry barrels, I cannot fathom. Although perhaps the inner beast is in fact awake, merely caged in ducal cares.”

Gabriel dropped his hand. “Inner what?”

“Suck you dry? Honestly, Your Grace, if you had not been such a fine naval commander, I would think you entirely lacking in intelligence.”

“Fortunately, Your Highness, a man dinna require intelligence to understand idiot innuendos.”

“True. Now, which of these do you prefer for your study?” Ziyaeddin nodded at the array of paintings. “There is no space on these walls for the next. One must go.”

Gabriel perused the canvases hung the length of the gallery. Daylight shone through the windows, but the late afternoon was rainy and the room dim. Employing few lamps in his studio allowed his houseguest to paint in natural light while securing privacy.

That privacy came more easily now that all of Edinburgh believed the man who owned the house to be a diabolical ravisher of maidens.

Gabriel had not actually lived in this house since returning to Edinburgh. No purpose in keeping an entire staff for the mammoth place when he had used it to entertain only once in three months. The hired house in Leith was small, required few servants who could carry stories to newspapers or the police, and it was close to the docks.

“You’ve smudged the features o’ every one o’ them,” he said, stepping closer to the nearest painting.

“Not all features,” the prince clarified.

“Only the facial features.” Gabriel gestured toward the canvas. “Who is this one?”

“I do not know.” Ziyaeddin spun a long, thin paintbrush between his fingers. “I have no interest in painting portraits. Only in studying the human form.”

“An’ your models, what is their interest in it?”

“It is a harmless game to them, innocent dallying with the devil. They believe I am you and they enjoy it.”

“They’ve never seen your face or heard your voice?”

“I go and come from the house at Leith cloaked, and remain covered during the sittings.”

Gabriel returned his attention to the painting. He peered closer. “I think I danced with her at that ball.”

Ziyaeddin chuckled.

It loosened Gabriel’s chest a bit. The exiled prince had no pleasures except his art. His ploy to entice models to his studio in this house had taken advantage of the rumors that circulated in Edinburgh, rumors that identified Gabriel as the so-called Devil’s Duke. It was a clever ruse, and successful.

“Wasn’t that the ball at which you lost the heiress to that other fellow?” Ziyaeddin murmured around the pointed end of the paintbrush between his teeth. “The heiress you never actually intended to wed.”

“Didna I?” He studied the next picture, yet another nude woman reclining on a divan. Ziyaeddin’s talent was prodigious: even without facial features, each woman was at once alluring yet subtly distant.

Memories of an English maiden—her soft, damp skin and scent of desire—threatened the edge of Gabriel’s sanity.

“Tell me, my friend,” Ziya said, “what did you hope to gain from your brief courtship of Lady Constance Read? The friendship of the heiress’s noble English friends, or perhaps of her ducal father?”

Gabriel hid his grin. “Do they teach court intrigue to young princes in your kingdom, or do you learn it by trial and error?”

“Error, obviously on my part,” Ziya replied with a tap of the brush’s handle. “You admit to intrigue?”

“No intrigue.” Constance Read’s friends were powerful men with interests throughout the seas, men who would rebuff a stranger, but who might partner with a man nearly betrothed to an intelligent woman they admired. “I had hoped to court her friends who are in trade.” It had been a gamble from the outset, and had come to nothing.

“Therefore you courted her? You truly are a barbarian, Scot.”

“An’ you are a prince without a crown, Turk. Which o’ us is the worse, do you imagine?”

The young man’s smile was slow.

Moving to the window, Gabriel looked out onto the rainy village that flanked one side of his property. So close to both palace and castle, it was tiny, no more than six shops built a century ago to serve this house in which the lairds of Haiknayes resided while in Edinburgh. Now a flare of brilliant orange shone through the blacksmith’s doorway.

In thirteen years at sea, the only creature comforts Gabriel had ever missed were the great big blazing fires that had burned in the massive medieval hearths at Haiknayes.

Five years ago, with a head full of arrogance and blood full of heat, he had dreamed of taking Amarantha Vale there—actually taking her, before the great hearth—stripping off her delicate garments, caressing her skin that glowed in the firelight until she moaned, doing away with her maidenhood to the music of her pleasured cries, and then making her his again till, exhausted, they fell asleep entwined on the fur rug there.

That a randy, youthful fantasy was the principal reason he had not yet moved to Haiknayes, although he had been master of it for two years now, was most certainly his greatest idiocy yet.

The estate was barely twenty miles distant. Now its lands were in poor condition. Distracted by his studies that had tempered the grief of losing his wife, his father had allowed Haiknayes to languish. Fortunately the castle itself was in better repair than the land, still full of the modern comforts his mother had installed to make it home.

If he could afford to restore Haiknayes to its former glory, he would in an instant. But Kallin required every guinea he could scrape from four merchant cargoes a year. His gambit to court Constance Read’s wealthy friends had not worked. He simply must find more funds somewhere.

He turned to face the young prince.

“How would you like to move to Haiknayes?”

“The fortress?” Ziya replied. “You intend to sell this house, don’t you?”

“I am giving it thought.”

“What about another heiress? I understand that Britain is seething with wealthy gentle-maidens seeking noble titles.”

“No more heiresses for me.” No women for him, period. Not while his head was still full of a memory.

“Then I shall do as Your Grace wills it.” The prince bowed in regal assent.

Gabriel laughed and started toward the door.

“Leave the house on occasion, Ziya. At least go to the park.”

“Why? What is in the park?”

“None o’ these”—he gestured to the paintings—“an’ more o’ the real thing.”

“You cannot convince me that naked women cavort about in the parks of Edinburgh.”

“No. But you can invite them inside an’ take care of the clothing fairly quick. Devilishly tricky, all those buttons and fasteners, but no’ impossible. ’Tis all in the wrist.”

Ziya tapped the brush handle to his fingertips again. “I believe the idiom of this land that most suits now is the pot which calls the kettle black.”

Gabriel grinned. “I’m off to London.”

“Not to Kallin to repair the leaky roof?”

“Not yet.” While his original partner, Torquil Sterling, had lived, Gabriel had not been involved in the mercantile side of their joint venture. The man that had taken on Tor’s role after his death, Xavier Du Lac, coordinated it all now from Portsmouth. Since Xavier’s brown skin and Haitian origins rendered negotiations with some Brits tricky, they had agreed that Gabriel would pursue business opportunities as well. It was either that or endanger Tor’s most cherished project: the community of women currently residing at Gabriel’s Highland estate.

Kallin needed money. Selling this house or Haiknayes, in which his mother had made homes full of laughter and joy, would be his last resort. But no woman would supply the funds needed. He had far too many females in his life already.