“What is it?” he said. “A gift from an appreciative patron?”

She seemed to recoil. “No.”

“He has poor taste to give you his ring instead of purchasing a piece for a lady. You should have thrown him off much earlier. Or haven’t you? Are you going to him now?”

The cornflowers shuttered. “This ring is none of your business.”

“It is if you intend to carry it aboard my ship. That’s no mean trinket you have there. Where are you going with it?”

She stuffed it back into her dress. “I am traveling to a house near Saint-Nazaire to take up a new position at which I must report before the first of September. And what do you think you’re doing, reaching down a helpless woman’s gown? You should be ashamed of yourself, Captain.”

“If you are helpless, madam, then I’ve something yet to learn about women.”

“Perhaps you should learn generosity and compassion first. Will you take me aboard?”

Beautiful face. Gently bred. Desperate for help. A rich man’s cast-off mistress. Eager to leave Plymouth. Had she stolen the ring?

He didn’t need this sort of trouble.

“No,” he said. “Again.” He headed toward the door.

A GREAT STONE seemed to press on Arabella’s lungs. It could not end like this, rejected in a seedy tavern by a man that looked like a pirate, and all because she had been foolish enough to miss her ship.

But she could not have left those children alone, the little one no more than three and his brothers trying so valiantly to be brave while frightened. The eldest, dark and serious, reminded her of Taliesin years ago, the Reverend’s student and the closest to a brother she had ever known. She could not have abandoned the children like their mother did, even if she had known it would cause her to miss her ship.

The ship that would take her to a prince.

He would not remain at the chateau long. The letter of hire said the royal family would depart for their winter palace on the first of September. If she arrived after that, she must find her own way.

She always sent all her spare funds to Eleanor; she had no money to spend on more travel. And she simply must make an excellent impression. She would prepare the princess for her London season. Then perhaps—if she were very lucky and dreams came true—the prince would come to admire her. It would not be the first time one of her employers had turned his attention toward her, liking the pretty governess a bit too much. Not the first by far.

This time, however, she would welcome it.

She twisted her way through the crowded tavern in the captain’s wake. His back was broad, his stride confident, and men made way for him.

“I beg you to reconsider, Captain,” she called to him as he passed through the door to the street. Her fists balled, squeezing away panic. “I must reach the chateau before the first of September or I will lose my new position.”

He halted. “Why didn’t you book passage on a passenger ferry?”

“I did. I missed my ship.” She chewed the inside of her lip, the only bad habit from childhood that she had not been able to quell. The public coach from London had rattled her bones into a jumbled heap. But anticipating the sea voyage proved so much worse. For two decades her nightmares had been filled with swirling waters, jagged lightning, and walls of flame. She’d been tucked in a corner of the posting inn’s taproom, struggling to control her trembling, when the call for her ship’s departure sounded. She had forced herself to her feet and out the door by sheer desperation to know once and for all who she really was.

Then, in the inn yard, she encountered the children.

“I had a matter of some importance to see to,” she evaded.

Lamplight cast unsteady shadows across the captain’s face. Probably it had been a very handsome face before the scar disfigured it, with a strong jaw shadowed now with whiskers and a single deep green eye lined with thick lashes. His dark hair caressed his collar and tumbled over the strip of cloth tied about his head.

“A matter of more importance than your new position at a chateau?”

He did not believe her.

“If you must know,” she said carefully, “I have three children I must take to their father this evening before I travel to France.”

He looked blankly at her. “Children.”

“Yes.” She turned and gestured to the curb beneath the eave of the tavern. Three little bodies huddled against the wall, their eyes fixed anxiously upon him. “Their father awaits them across the city. While I was attempting to contact him, my ship departed without me,” taking with it her traveling trunk, another trouble she could not think about until she solved her first problem. But the daily cruelties of the foundling home had taught her resourcefulness, and working for spoiled debutantes had taught her endurance. She would succeed.

“I am relieved—” Captain Andrew’s fingers crushed his hat brim, the sinews of his large hand pronounced. “I am relieved to learn that you take pride in your progeny even as you abandon them.”

“You have mistaken it, Captain,” she said above the clatter of a passing cart, making herself speak as calmly as though she were sitting in an elegant home in Grosvenor Square recommending white muslin over blush silk. “They are not my children. I encountered them only in the posting inn yard. Their mother had abandoned them, so I determined to find their father for them.”

The captain turned toward her fully then, his wide shoulders limned in amber from the setting sun that lightened his hair with strands of bronze. In his tousled, intense manner, he was not commonly handsome, but harshly beautiful and strangely mythic. His dark gaze made her feel peculiar inside. Unsolid.

His lips parted but he said nothing, and for a moment he seemed not godly but boylike. Vulnerable.

She tilted her head and made herself smile slightly. “I can see that I have surprised you, Captain. You must reevaluate matters now, naturally. But while you are doing so I do hope you will reconsider the plausibility of me being mother to a twelve-year-old boy.” She paused. “For the sake of my vanity.”

He grinned, an easy tilt of one side of his mouth that rendered a pair of masculine lips devastatingly at the command of a grown man indeed.

“How callous of me.” He crossed his arms and leaned his shoulder against the doorpost. “I beg your pardon, madam.”

“Without any sincerity whatsoever, it seems. I pray you, sir, will you take me to Saint-Nazaire?”

The grin slid away, leaving the vibrant scar dipping over his right cheek yet more pronounced. He must have suffered the injury recently. The war had been over for a year and a half, but he bore the erect carriage and authoritative stance of a naval commander.

It wouldn’t matter if he were the head of the Admiralty and his vessel a hundred-gun ship of the line, as long as he carried her swiftly to her destination.

“How did you determine the location of their father’s home?” he said.

“I asked about. I can be persistent when necessary.”

“I am coming to see that.” He pushed away from the doorway and started off along the street. “Come.”

“Come?” She gestured to the children and hurried after him.

He looked down at her as she awkwardly tried to match his long strides, and he halted mid-street. He did not seem to heed the traffic of horses and carts and other pedestrians, but stood perfectly solid before her like he owned the avenue. His eye glimmered unsteadily, a trick of the setting sunlight, she supposed. It was a very odd sight. He seemed at once both in thorough command and yet confused.

He pointed at a building across the street. “Give my name to the man that you find on the other side of that door and tell him that I said he is to escort you to the children’s home and return you to your inn tonight.”

“But— No.” Arabella’s cold hands were pressed into her skirts. “You needn’t. That is to say—”