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Caro’s shadowy seducer did sound a wee bit intimidating. He was not going to like it one bit, she supposed, that she would soon arrive at
Revell Court
to snatch her sister-in-law out of his arms.
Alice was not a particularly bold creature, but she knew she could stand up to anyone for Harry’s sake.
    Pulling on her prim white gloves, she stared hard into the looking glass and squared her shoulders, ready to do battle. Enjoy your escapades, Lady Glenwood, for they are about to come to an end. As for you, Lord Lucien Knight, whoever you are, you, sir, are in a great deal of trouble with me. With that, she picked up her satchel and marched out of her room.
     
    CHAPTER
TWO
    A thousand hours later, or so it felt,
Alice sat tensely in her jostling carriage, steadying herself with a cold-sweating grip on the leather hand loop. They still had not found the place. The full moon led them along the bumpy, winding road through the moors like a sly links-boy with his lantern—one of those dubious London street urchins who, for a coin, would convey a pedestrian homeward through the city after dark, but who were just as likely to deliver one into the hands of thieves.
    She glanced constantly out the windows, certain that she and her two servants were going to be set upon by highwaymen in this desolate waste. They were hopelessly lost in the Mendip Hills, far from any sign of civilization: up another slope through woods of oak and beech, to a rough, wind-blown heath like the one they now traversed; down again, into the plunging combes and gorges, up and down, again and again. The weary horses strained and stumbled in their traces; the night air wrapped them in a clammy, vaporous chill; and it was anyone’s guess how much longer they might be on the road. The only thing, in fact, that
Alice knew for certain was that she was going to wring Caro’s neck for this.
    She exchanged a taut look with her frightened maid, Nellie, but neither spoke aloud what both women were thinking: We should have stayed the night in
Bath.
    Alice was beginning to wonder if the maitre d’ at the elegant Pump Room, where they had stopped for tea, had deliberately lied to her when he had said that Revell Court was only fifteen miles to the southwest. Perhaps it had only been her imagination, but she thought she had detected a faint, disapproving sneer in his countenance when she’d asked for directions to the place. Given the urgency of their quest, and confident that they could cover the distance within two hours, Nellie, Mitchell, and she had unanimously agreed to press on in spite of the fact that the October sun had already set.
    Now, with the night growing blacker by the minute, she realized uneasily that if they ever succeeded in finding
Revell Court
, they were going to have to spend the night there, accepting Lucien Knight’s hospitality—provided, of course, that he offered it. Who could say for certain what to expect from a man who seduced his brother’s chosen lady? She only prayed he was not heathen enough to turn travelers away in the dead of night, for she and her servants were ravenous, bone-tired, and full of aches and pains from being battered and bounced over the coaching roads of
England all day.
    Looking back over the day’s journey, she shook her head. There had been the queerest traffic on the roads since they had left
Bath. Nearly twenty carriages—some flashy, some gaudy, some elegant—had passed them at breakneck speeds, but the passengers had all seemed either mad or intoxicated. Adults—male and female—had actually pulled faces at them like rotten children as the carriages went careening by, sticking out their tongues, yelling taunting abuses. She shook her head to herself, still puzzled.
    Gazing out the window as the road descended into the gloom of another hidden valley, she studied the trees raking the indigo sky with their stark, brushy silhouettes. Moonlight polished the eerie, majestic limestone outcrops until they