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questioning horror to the maligned pistol, he lunged toward her. His movement was so unexpected that Anna squeezed the trigger automatically. The gun went off with a deafening boom. Then he was wresting the pistol from her grasp and flinging it aside. She gasped, struggling, as his hands closed on her arms and yanked her toward him, twisting her at the same time so that she was falling through space. Her fingers scrambled frantically for something, anything to break her fall.
    Anna was too shocked even to scream as she hit the floor with a jarring force that bruised her hip and rattled every bone in her body. Already he was looming over her, making good his threat to stuff his handkerchief in her mouth. She choked, spluttered, struggled, gagged, but he rammed the dry linen in and twisted her around, meaning, no doubt, to bind her hands before scooping her up again. She was lying on the floor, half on her side and half on her back, one of his large hands and a knee holding her down. He was in an awkward position, a kind of half crouch, his hands busy with the knot of his cravat. No doubt he meant to use it to tie her hands. Soon she would be helpless, and he would carry her away—to do what with her? Murder no longer seemed such a strong possibility, but ravishment, or rather his particular brand of seduction, did.
    To her eternal shame, the thought of enduring such, with him, brought with it not fear but a shivery excitement that heated her blood and quickened her heart.
    “Next time, Green Eyes, don’t be so gullible.” The amusement in his voice rankled more than his words. So his distracting comment about the gun had been as much a bluff as her holding the gun on him in the first place, had it? She’d been a fool to look down. The knowledge that she’d actually had a loaded, working pistol in her hand and let him trick her out of using it lit her temper. Not that she would have actually shot him—at least, not on purpose. Although, had she the thing to do over again, the grinning creature might very well end up a headless corpse.…
    She was at his mercy—again. At the realization she went cold all over. And then Anna realized that she held the key to her own salvation in her hand: the heavy silver candlestick that had stood on the table beside the display case. She had instinctively grasped it as she felt herself fall.
    Her hands were hidden by the cloak. His hold on her was loose, his attention half distracted as he sought to wrench the cravat from around his neck. Anna clutched the candlestick, shut her eyes, and waited.
    The game was not quite played out yet.
    Then, when he had his cravat free and was lifting her to her feet, she struck. Her hand clutching the candlestick snaked from beneath the cloak with desperate speed. Arcing toward his head, the candlestick was a mere silver blur. His eyes barely registered surprise before weapon and temple connected with a sound that at any other time would have turned Anna’s stomach.
    Chest heaving, eyes huge, Anna stared into the rogue’s widening eyes for a timeless instant as he continued to loom threateningly over her.
    Then, with a little grunt, his eyes rolled back in his head and he crumpled soundlessly at her feet.
    At last she managed a real, full-bodied scream. As she stared down at his motionless form, the hysteria she’d held at bay for weeks finally claimed her. Ear-splitting cries emerged from her mouth of their own volition. Had she wanted to, she could not have stopped.

V
    “F or the Lord’s sake, Miss Anna, what is it?”
    “Miss Anna, Miss Anna, is you killed?”
    Anna’s screams still echoed off the stone walls when Davis, the grizzled, portly butler who had been with the Traverne family since before Paul’s birth, burst into the front hall accompanied by Beedle, the first footman. Both men were less than fully dressed, with Davis’s shirt hanging out of his breeches and Beedle barefoot. They were armed, Beedle with an ancient axe that