One week later

The sky outside the open windows was a shade lighter, and Grace knew the dawn was about to break. Gently, she lifted Hugh’s arm from around her waist and slipped from his embrace. He stirred slightly, and she felt the temptation to curl back into his warmth.

There was so much on her mind. The rest of the Pennington siblings—Gregory, Phoebe, and Millie—were arriving today, but Grace no longer felt reticent about meeting them. She looked forward getting to know them before the rest of the family and their guests started to trickle in.

This year, the annual summer ball was to be preceded by a wedding. Grace looked over her shoulder at the groom’s tranquil face. He was just the same during the waking hours, while the tumultuous demands of planning and choosing and preparing were going on around him. Calm, happy, satisfied, and clever about stealing Grace away when his mother and Jo were looking the other way.

Like the scent of the early roses drifting up from the gardens, a feeling of happiness wafted on the soft breeze of her life.

Our wedding, she thought. Only a week away.

Her father’s face came into her mind, and with it came that pang of missing him. How he would have wished to see the day! How much she wished she could tell him how well he’d succeeded in everything he set out to do for her.

Pulling a quilt around her, Grace padded across the floor to the window and gazed out at the fields beginning to glisten with dew. The pale sliver of a moon had dropped low in the sky, and her mind turned to the letter she’d received yesterday.

Queen Julie wrote that she felt great pain at the loss of Grace’s father. He was a fine man and a loyal soldier. It had been her honor to see that he received the rites of a proper burial. She only wished that Grace had been there. The queen told her that she’d already written to share the tragic news with her husband in America, and that he too would be grieved at the loss.

Finally, Queen Julie addressed the matter of the diamond. The stone is yours, ma chérie. No doubt, your father intended it for your start in life . . . or, as you tell me you are about to marry, for your dowry. Enjoy it, sweetness. I know you will put it to the best of uses.

Grace knew exactly what she was going to do with it. That diamond would fund a fine expansion of the tower house.

“You’re up early.”

Hugh’s voice was a warm whisper in her ear. Grace’s breath hitched in her chest as she felt his warmth close around her. “I couldn’t sleep. I have so much on my mind. But you promised me a ride at dawn. If we’re going to slip away before your mother and sister awaken, we’ll need to go soon.”

Last night, he’d suggested that the two of them escape for a couple of hours before the commotion began anew.

His hands gently pulled the quilt from her shoulders, and Grace felt his naked body press against her own from behind.

“Perhaps a ride right here before we ‘slip away’?”

Grace felt his teeth scrape over the sensitive skin beneath her ear, and she shivered with excitement.

One hand cupped her breast while the other moved down over her stomach and slid into her sex. She leaned her head back against him as his teeth nibbled her earlobe.

“You already know that I can’t refuse you.” She smiled. The play of his fingers in and out of her flesh had her body humming to the most tantalizing song. She leaned to one side and dug her fingers in his hair, kissing him deeply.

He turned her toward the mirror standing by the wall, allowing Grace to look at their reflection as he entered her. She watched through a thick haze of passion how one expert hand caressed her breast while the other continued to coax the pleasures within her. He moved with exquisitely timed strokes, sliding into her again and again, and Grace stared with utter disbelief at the image of two people rising together on undulating waves of passion before finally coming apart in an explosion of ecstasy.

Moments later, still breathless, still wrapped in his arms, she gazed out the window at the sunlight advancing across the fields and chasing away the remaining shadows of night.

“And now,” he whispered in her ear. “We go for the ride I actually promised.”

* * *

The sun was a bright orange ball behind them when they reached the ruin of a church. Grace was surprised to see the half-dozen men waiting, but she was shocked to see the inflated balloon rising above the securely tethered gondola.

Truscott, Darby, and several grooms were standing by it and turned as one to greet them.

“Fine work,” Hugh called out, jumping from his horse and helping Grace dismount. “Did it take the whole night to fill the envelope?”

“Most of it, m’lord,” Darby said. “As you predicted, positioning the opening to take the gas took some doing.”

Truscott pointed to the long rope running from the ruined church steeple to a tripod of timbers sunk into the turf some distance away. “Darby’s idea of rigging this line and hoisting the bag up to it was brilliant. Once the men got the bloody thing up and in position, it filled quick as a sheep’s bladder.”

Grace’s eye took in the vessel. The varnished material of the envelope glistened in the morning sun, and the blue cloudless sky beckoned. The idea of rising above the earth, disconnected from the world and humanity, to go where few people had ever gone, thrilled her beyond measure.

It felt like an eon ago since she promised to go aloft with him, but she never expected to be so excited at the prospect of flying . . . until now.

“It’s magnificent,” she whispered.

Hugh took her hand in his. “So . . . are you ready?”

Truscott came up and joined them. “You don’t need to do this, Miss Grace.”

“I believe I do, Mr. Truscott.”

“Your fiancé’s last flight went off in a stiffer breeze than we have this morning, and every villager and farmer for twenty miles about was quite entertained. But the rest of us, after riding pell-mell ten miles on the other side of Baronsford, only got there in time to witness him dragged like a stone over walls and hedges for another half mile. We thought he was a dead man.”

“Not this time,” she said. “Last autumn, he tells me, he didn’t have the help of our excellent Mr. Darby, who has fashioned a valve that will allow him to control our altitude and our descent.”

Truscott walked with them as they moved toward the balloon. “Remember, Hugh, it’s only a week before your wedding, and if anything were to happen to you—but more importantly to her—the earl will have all of our heads on poles on the ramparts. And that’s after your mother has us skinned alive.”

“I’ll take good care of him,” she said, smiling.

They’d dragged an empty chest to the gondola, and Hugh helped her climb in. As those on the ground got ready to release the ropes, Grace braced herself against the side and looked around her. Thick lines and rope netting rose from the sides of the gondola, securing it to the balloon above them. A flying ship.

She thought of the last time she’d been in this basket. Exhausted by her run through the murky alleyways of Antwerp. Stunned and torn inside at the sight of her father’s murdered body. Afraid for her own life. Ripped from everything she had ever known and propelled into an unknown future.

Grace closed her eyes and ran her hands over the wicker walls and the rawhide lacing. She let her fingers trace the woven patterns, recalling the darkness and gradually diminishing hope of ever breathing fresh air, or seeing daylight, or breaking out of what she’d come to accept as her coffin.

Hugh’s arm stole around her. “Shall we?”

She smiled up at him and nodded.

As the ropes were released, Darby saluted them and the others let out a shout. The basket rose smoothly, and in a moment the ruined church and the hill and the fields grew smaller and more distant. They were sailing toward the sun, the balloon rising higher over cottages and ponds and meadows. Animals in their enclosures looked like toy figures. All around, the world was a rolling patchwork quilt of green and earth tones. A river snaked along through meadows and forests.

She put her arms tight around Hugh and he leaned down and kissed her.

At one time this basket had been a casket, a vehicle of darkness and misery and death. No longer. It was now a soaring bird, carrying Grace and the man she loved into a crystal-clear future of light and life and joy.

“Look,” Hugh said, pointing.

In the distance, beyond a broad green forest, ringed with a lake of sparkling waters, a fairy-tale castle rose up to greet them.

Baronsford, her home.