That a piece of the past could be before him now seemed unreal to Charlie.

But there she stood, exactly the same; from her golden hair neatly plaited about her head, to her intelligent eyes and pretty lips, to the simple gown that hid her figure, she was the same Esme Astell he had seen every Wednesday when she came to the shop to collect her friend Gabrielle for lunch—the same Esme who had always greeted him with a glimmer in her eyes that suggested more beneath the blue-gray, and a “Good day, Mr. Brittle,” yet barely ever another word.

Never before had he heard the hushed shock in her voice that had jolted him into looking clearly at her the night before.

Hours later, the brilliant idea had occurred to him.

Now she stared wide-eyed, candlelight making her eyes almost violet.

“I need your nose,” he repeated. He had spent all day tracking her to this boardinghouse, and another three hours waiting across the street to discover which room she stayed in.

“My nose?” Her voice was crisp and clear, nothing like the stuttering of the previous night. “Charles Westley Brittle, where have you been for two years? Everybody has been worried sick about you!”

The transformation from shock to indignant fury was so complete, he nearly laughed aloud.

But he never laughed anymore. Ever.

“Have they?” he said.

“Of course they have! Actually, truth be told, we all thought you were . . .” She blinked several times very swiftly. “Dead.”

In fact he had nearly been dead, on any number of occasions.

“Listen,” he said, “I haven’t time to explain now. I—”

“Oh, haven’t you? Then have you time to thank me for saving you from the police? Or to apologize for—for accosting me?”

“I beg your pardon,” he said between clenched teeth. “That was a mistake.” An impulse born of relief so thick he had acted before thinking.

Good God, for the first time in twenty-one months he had acted before thinking. That miserable pirate Pate would be proud. Pate had not christened him Scholar, after all, out of admiration.

“A mistake?” Her cheeks had turned a bit dusky. “What has happened to you, Charlie?”

“More than you can possibly imagine.” The words sounded like an animal’s snarl.

She had turned her face slightly askance and was looking at him as though he were little more than a dog. Of course she was. He was a dog. In fact, he had learned lately that he was worse than a dog.

“Now,” he said. “Will you help me, or not?”

She faced him squarely again. She had a sweet little figure, with breasts that could fit entirely in a man’s palms and a slim waist hidden by her dress.

But he knew the shape beneath that dress; he had glimpsed it once before, when she had volunteered to assist Gabrielle with a filing project in the office. Esme had crouched in front of a box on the floor, tightening the fabric around her soft buttocks and cinching it around her hips, and he had gotten hard in an instant. He’d had to sit at his desk for an hour to hide it until the women finished their work. But the following morning while shaving he had recalled the vision of her round behind, imagined that softness brushing against him, and his hand had gotten so busy he’d missed breakfast.

Callow dolt.

Now, as thought of the curves beneath her shapeless gown made his cock twitch to life, he met her gaze with a hard stare. A feral dog, after all, did not break a sweat over a pretty girl.

“All right,” she said with only a trace of hesitation, but her fingers played restlessly in her skirt, as though they wanted to reach for the door handle again. She was nervous.

Good.

Keep a man off balance, Scholar, and you can knock him over easier.

Charlie had no intention of knocking Esme over. But he would not leave here without her promise to help him.

“All right?” he said.

“I admit that I am interested in hearing how and why you need my nose,” she said, “by which I assume you do not mean my actual nose, rather my sense of smell.”

He folded his arms.

Her sweet pink lips tightened.

“I will hear you out,” she said. “But first you must answer one question.”

He hiked up a brow. “Must I?”

“Yes, you must.”

He’d had no idea her eyes could spark like that. Intriguing.

He tilted his head forward.

“Why do you—” Her nostrils flared as she drew in a visibly deep breath. “Why do you look like . . . that?”

“That?”

“All of—” She waved a hand roughly toward his midsection. “All of that hair and tanned skin and . . .” Her throat jiggled in a little swallow.

“And?”

“Muscles,” she said quickly. Her gaze flitted away for an instant then returned even more direct. She folded her hands before her.

“I’ve been at sea,” he said.

“At sea?”

“Yes. Interview over?”

“No.”

“Pity, because I’m in some haste here, Esme—”

“I did not give you permission to call me Esme. Nor did I give you permission to enter my room. If Mrs. McDade discovers you here, in the morning I will be tossed out.”

And if this woman did not help him, in a sennight he would be dead. Or worse.

He returned to the window and lifted a foot to the sill. “Meet me at the pub on the corner in ten minutes.”

“No.”

One boot on the ledge, he paused. “Why not?”

“I cannot go to a pub alone to meet a gentleman,” she said as though he were daft.

“That’s fine, then. Because once you meet me there you won’t be alone.” He swung his other leg out, balanced on the ledge, and ducked his head to peer at her beneath the frame. “And I’m not a gentleman.” He winked. “Ten minutes, Miss Astell.”

Dragging the window shut, he gripped the sill and dropped to a foothold below, then peered into the lamp-lit alley in each direction. Certain it was free of Edinburgh’s finest, he swung down to the ground, hunched his shoulders, tucked his chin, and headed toward the pub.

At the door of the public house, a boy fell into step beside him.

“Got her, Scholar?” he said around the stick between his teeth, his freckled face turned up to Charlie.

“Yes, Rory. Now be about your business. And if you tell the others where she’s lodged I’ll have your guts for garters.”

“Aw, Scholar.” He kicked his toe into a cobble. “The lads wouldna tell Pate. They’re all one hundred percenters for you!”

“It is for her safety and theirs, Rory.”

The boy bared his teeth in a quick grin. “Aye, aye, sir.” He scampered off.

Sir. As though he were still a gentleman.

He pushed open the door, scanned the taproom for potential danger, and, seeing nothing amiss, slid onto a chair in the corner.

She would meet him here. She had a much fierier temperament than he’d known. And an independent streak too; from what he had observed, she was on her own in Edinburgh. But she was still Esme Astell, Gracechurch Street shopgirl who with pretty smiles peddled cologne to men who thought they needed to smell like lilacs to get between a woman’s thighs.

He knew that the lion’s share of what she, Gabrielle, and their bosom bows, Mineola and Adela, gossiped about was men—his brother, typically, and the swells who patronized the shops on Gracechurch Street. When the four friends occasionally gathered for lunch in the pressroom, he had overheard them often enough.

Of the four, Esme was the most self-possessed. Her quiet reserve spoke of confidence and self-reliance. But the glimmer ever present in her eyes spoke of an irrepressible spirit.

The fewer words you say, lad, the less rope they have to hang you on.

Nobody from that pleasant world—his former life—would ever know the truth about what he had been through, the hell he had endured, the hell he himself had wrought.

A man could only go so far before the path behind him got washed away forever. He had long since crossed that point of no return.

This unexpected detour into the past was necessary, but it would be brief. He needed one thing from her, and when he got it he would leave again. This time, though, he had a plan: a new name, a new city, and a new profession. Once and for all Charles Brittle would disappear forever.

The following morning when he stepped out from behind a carthorse at the side of the road and took her arm firmly in his, Esme swallowed her gasp. The narrow footpath was crowded with people on their way to shops in the rain.

“What are you doing?” she rasped, tugging at her hand pinned between his hard biceps and equally granite ribs. She was not accustomed to being held in this manner by a man—or anyone. And this man was so . . . hot, despite the cold rainy morning.

She had never imagined Charles Brittle would be hot to the touch. And the most unnerving thing: she realized now that she had been covertly studying men’s buttocks to compare them to his.

She fumbled her umbrella, and he snatched it from her fingers and held it firmly above her head.

“Why didn’t you meet me?” he growled.

Today he wore a hat smashed down over his brow, and she could only see his nose and lips and whiskers. Even those looked displeased.

“I told you I wouldn’t.”

“Miss Astell,” he said, navigating her around the corner as though he knew her destination. “Perhaps I did not make myself perfectly clear last night.” His voice was like gravel. “I need your help. And I will have it, whether you wish to give it or not.”

“That’s high-handed of you, isn’t it?” she said with more confidence than she felt. This man of extraordinary strength and rough vocals and threatening declarations was not the man for whom her dearest friend Gabrielle had worked for eight years. Obviously more had changed since he had left London than his hair and muscles. “I don’t suppose it has occurred to you that I have a purpose here I cannot jeopardize,” she said.

“I do not intend to jeopardize anything about you.”

A little shiver of nerves scurried straight up her center.

“That is a relief,” she said without any internal conviction whatsoever. She had spent hours the night before trying to fall asleep and instead imagining what might have happened had he not climbed back out of her window but had remained in her bedchamber—imaginings which had inevitably run to more mistakes.

“Name the place and time,” he said. “If you do not meet me, I will come through the window again.”

“The mews behind the old print shop at the base of the castle.” Fantasy mistakes or no, she could not afford to lose the money she had already paid Mrs. McDade for the sennight’s room and board. “Six o’clock.”

He released her.

“Until then.” With a bow that bent his big muscular frame more gracefully than she had thought a man of his present size could bend, and which was entirely at variance with his rough clothing and hair, he disappeared into the crowd.

The day at the perfumers’ meeting passed as the previous day, in a whirlwind of lessons and scents that the masters had brought with them from their various homes. Of them all Esme preferred a delightfully subtle musk made from a base of Seville almonds and Provençal avocado oils, which a master from the Languedoc region of southern France presented. But when Monsieur Poe turned up his nose at it, she kept her opinion to herself. Later, when the Parisian perfumer asked her thoughts on another scent, and listened to her for a full minute before turning his attention to someone else, she felt so elated she wanted to dance.

At the end of the final lecture, though, she sought out Monsieur Cadence, the Languedocian perfumer, and complimented him on the perfume. A Frenchman, he had crinkle lines around his eyes and mouth, and the kind twinkle in his eyes reminded her of Mr. George in London, although several decades older; Monsieur Cadence was at least seventy.

“You are too kind, mademoiselle,” Monsieur Cadence said. He had thin, oiled moustaches and a mother-of-pearl-rimmed lorgnette that reminded her of the great noble matrons who occasionally stopped into the Gracechurch Street shop. “It is a French name, Astell, n’est-ce pas?”

“It is. My grandfather was French. He married an Englishwoman, and then my father married an Irishwoman. So you see, monsieur, I am a mongrel.”

He laughed.

“You remind me of my own granddaughter, who—hélas—I have not seen since she sailed to America. There is a delightful café on the corner. May I treat you to an aperitif?” He offered an arm clad in very fine gabardine. Monsieur Poe might not be impressed with his southern colleague, but Monsieur Cadence was clearly doing well for himself.

“If you promise to someday share with me the recipe for that divine scent,” she said with a responding smile, “I would be more than happy to—Oh. No. I cannot. I’m afraid I have a previous engagement.” With a criminal. “Tomorrow, perhaps?”

“Tomorrow it shall be, mademoiselle.” He tipped his hat and she headed off to meet the man for whom her heart had broken two years earlier.

At present, however, that organ felt far from broken. Perhaps it was due to the knowledge that Charlie was alive. Or perhaps it was because she smelled like Sevillian almonds and had spoken directly with her idol without having first thrown a bottle of perfume on him. Or perhaps it was simply that she had spent three entire days soaking up not only scents but knowledge and ideas that she was eager to put into practice.

The rain had let up and the cobbles before the abandoned stable sparkled beneath the setting sun. Charlie was standing in a shadow, his back against the wall, the hat pulled down over his brow.

Despite the muscles that showed through the taut shirt fabric of his crossed arms, he looked less intimidating than he had that morning and the night before. A trick of the light, she supposed.

But when she neared and he unfolded, she realized it was not the light, rather that it must be his intention to diminish the appearance of his size. She had seen him do the same after she ran to her window to watch him descend from it to the street like an acrobat. She had never before seen a man try to make himself appear smaller. He did it so effectively, like a magician’s trick. She supposed he was, after all, still hiding from the police.

The Charles Brittle she had known in London had been the most respectably staid shop proprietor on Gracechurch Street. His elder brother, Josiah Junior, was entirely unlike him: a flirt and profligate of the worst order, with golden curls and a winning smile that teased customers and shopgirls alike. Charlie had been the rock, the honest, admirable heart of the print shop.

Now as he approached he removed his hat and his gaze fixed upon hers as it had in the dark and rainy alleyway. Another little spark of nerves raced up her torso.

Pleasure.

The tingly sensation flinging itself about in her stomach was, unmistakably, pleasure.

Adoring him in hopeless silence for three years had not been pleasurable. It had been occasionally wistful and at times painful and always frustrating. But never pleasurable.

This was new. It was no doubt on account of the muscles. And the whiskers. A woman was bound to respond to all of that blatant masculinity with natural awareness.

Esme’s passion and talent were entirely about the human senses. Also, she was half Irish and another quarter French. As such, unlike some of her English friends, she was not shy of physical sensation. Rather the opposite.

She liked this pleasure.

“So you decided to come,” he said.

“Good evening to you too, sir,” she said, tucking her hands into her pockets. “For what task do you need my nose?”

“Straight to the purpose,” he murmured. “Good girl.”

“I am not a girl. I am twenty-four.” And on her way to becoming a world-renowned master perfumer. “What do you want of me, Charlie?”

He seemed to study her, a glimmer of something she did not recognize in the gold flecks of his beautiful hazel eyes. In the fading daylight she could see tiny white lines radiating out from the corners of his eyes, tracks in the tan.

“You never called me Charlie before.”

“I didn’t? I must have,” she said.

“Not before two nights ago.”

“Perhaps it is because before two nights ago you had never kissed me,” she said with what she hoped sound like asperity.

“You didn’t resist.” It looked as though he smiled, but through the whiskers she couldn’t quite tell. “Do you typically welcome kisses from strangers in alleyways, Miss Astell?”

“No. And you are singularly outrageous.”

“When you lied to the police, you didn’t yet know who I was.”

“And when you left London you were deathly afraid of the sea.”

His eyes shuttered.

“To the purpose, Miss Astell,” he said in the low voice from that morning.

“I see. You are permitted to speak of the past and question me about kisses but I am not allowed to ask about your sudden disappearance and two-year silence or the astonishing information that you have been at sea?” It was impossible to stand so close to him and not be continually tempted to stare at his arms, which still lacked a coat despite the chilly night, and his sinew-corded neck, and even dip her gaze to his remarkable thighs. “I don’t know what you have been doing for two years, Mr. Brittle, but it certainly has not had a particularly good effect on your manners.”

“We can agree on that,” he said.

Pinning her gaze to his face that somehow was much handsomer because of the tiny lines around his eyes, she saw now a slight bump on the bridge of his nose that had not been there before, as though his nose had been broken.

Someone had struck him. Harmed him. The idea hollowed out a little empty place in her belly.

“What do you need of my nose, sir?”

“I need it to find a dog.”

Her eyes widened, the lashes fanning outward.

“A dog,” she said. “An actual dog?”

He nodded.

“Any dog?”

“A specific dog.”

“You wish me to sniff out a specific dog in the entire city of Edinburgh?”

“The dog’s owner will be at a party in Leith tomorrow night.”

“Leith. The port?”

“Two miles up the road. I’ll provide transportation, and I will return you to the boardinghouse before your curfew.” The tendons in Charlie’s knee were strained against the impatient jitter that wanted to overtake his leg. But he had learned the hard way how to control that jitter; his back bore the scars that proved it.

Still, if she did not agree to this, he would have to devise a method of convincing her. That kissing her popped into his mind was proof of how little remained in him of Mr. Charles Brittle.

There was only Scholar now. And Scholar was short on time.

In the time before Pate returned to Leith, Charlie had a simple list of tasks to accomplish: find the dog, return it to its master, attend an auction at which a valuable collection of antique books was to go on the block, purchase the collection with every shilling he had managed to save over the past twenty-one months, then get the hell out of Scotland or anywhere else Pate could find him when he discovered the dog had been nabbed from its new owner.

The money or the dog, Scholar. Hand over either to me, and I’ll give you the freedom you’re so keen on.

Pate would discover that he’d stolen the dog—again. And he would come after him. But after he spent the money on the books, he’d have none left to pay Pate for his freedom.

He had to get that dog.

Any tactic that would secure the goal now would suit.

“Will you do it?” he said.

She blinked. “Mr. Brittle, unfortunately I cannot—”

He heard himself growl.

“Mr. Brittle,” she said even more firmly. “Unfortunately, I cannot assist you in this task.”

Men twice her size had cowered at his growl. But he hadn’t time now to marvel at her fortitude.

“I have no money.” None he could use for this. “I’ve nothing to buy your compliance.”

“Buy my compliance? For goodness’ sake, what are you—”

He stepped forward and grasped her elbows.

“If you do not assist in this, matters will proceed very poorly for me. Very poorly. I beg of you, Esme. Help me.”

She tilted her face up and for a moment she simply stared at him. Then, with a flicker of her lashes, her attention dipped to his mouth. Longing shone in her eyes.

Longing? In this woman’s eyes? No. Curiosity, perhaps. Uncertainty. Even skepticism. Not longing.

Yet if there were any emotion Charlie knew particularly well, it was longing. And Esme Astell’s intelligent eyes were now full of it.

She wanted to be kissed.

He drew in a slow breath. If she wanted kissing to be convinced, he would do it. He had done much more for much smaller stakes before. And this time he suspected he would actually enjoy it. Her fragrant, unsmiling lips were a breath of freedom from a distant world.

Steeling himself for one last taste of sweet civilization to carry back into hell, he bent his head.