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a haughty, superior look to hurry him along. Because the halberd was growing intolerably heavy—her wrists ached.
    “Thank ye.” He almost bowed, all gracious acceptance of her generosity. “I’ll just go the way I came, shall I?”
    She was all gracious condescension. “Please.”
    “Lovely. Don’t mind if I do.” He rested one long booted leg on the window ledge. “And I must say, ye’ve been an absolute sport.”
    And then he winked at her.
    “Sport?” The cheek of the man. “Get out,” she ordered.  
    He swung his leg over the sill, his imminent departure assured.
    Relief sagged through Mignon with such swiftness that she not only let down her guard, but dropped it entirely, like a fireplace coal. She intended to raise the halberd, and prop it against the wall. Instead, the heavy weapon slipped from her numb fingers, and the tall blade tottered over, like a tree slowly falling in a forest.  
    And headed directly for the back of her gentleman thief’s sandy, English head.

Chapter Five

    Rory went down so hard, the wind was knocked clean out of him. His ears rang and his lungs burned with the need to breathe, but all other sensation was soon drowned out by the searing ache that swamped him like a bucket of scalding water—a great big wallop of heat and misery emanating from the back of his head.
    He instinctively grabbed his skull, as if he would contain the pain. But it was impossible—he was quite literally stupefied.
    Eight feet away, Miss Blois looked just as dazed. She stood with her hand over her mouth, looking just as astonished, but utterly horrified at what she had done.
    Rory pushed himself upright against the short wall under the window, and tried to take stock. Blood was seeping out of his head and soaking his collar. “Well,” he said to no one in particular. “Turns out ye were willing to strike me after all.”  
    Not only willing, but capable. He never would have thought.
    Neither, it seemed, did she. “I did not mean to,” she protested with a voice as sweet and innocent as a Christmas pudding, as if she had never had any thought in the world of cracking his skull.
    “And yet ye did.” Rory gingerly felt for the cut on his scalp, and came away with a hand stained red with blood.
    Which was not at all a good idea, because at the sight of so much blood, the edges of his vision crowded in, and the world narrowed itself down to the small piece of parquet upon which he sat, stunned and dizzy, and perhaps even dying, judging from the amount of warm stickiness that poured down his neck.  
    But if he had to go, he supposed he didn’t mind being done in by the elfin Miss Blois, because the truth was he had been half-way to heaven the moment he had laid eyes upon her, looming up at him in her night gown, like the ghost of bed partners past.  
    Or more hopefully, like the ghost of bed partners yet to come.
    Either way, he felt decidedly weak at the knees.
    Strangely enough, it was tiny Miss Blois who brought him back, patting his cheek, and fanning him in the face with the helpfully transparent skirts of her linen sleeping gown, all modesty forgotten in the crisis.  
    “ Assez de bêtises,” she said in her native tongue, thinking he wouldn’t understand that her tart instruction to end his foolishness was belied by her worried tone. “You cannot be allowed this unbecoming faint,” she said in ever-so-slightly-accented English. “You’re a burglar—show some fortitude.”
    “I’ve got plenty of fortitude,” he muttered. “I’m the one who’s bleeding.”
    “Yes, I am sorry. I did not mean at all to hit you. I was trying to put the halberd away.”
    “Slipshod weapons work, Miss Blois. Ye’d never make it in the army.”
    “Of a surety, Monsieur Thief.” She plied the inside of his wrist to feel his pulse, all helpful, competent nurse—another thing he would not have thought her. “I would not know about such things, not being a gentleman—even a gentleman