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actually given her permission to follow him into possible danger. She glanced behind her at the house. All was dark except the candle burning in her upstairs bedroom. She saw Mora’s pale face pressed against the glass. The girl hardly inspired confidence that she would be helpful in any way should Amelia be attacked again.
    Gabriel was already halfway to the stable. Even in nothing but a nightshirt, his long legs bare, he was a formidable sight. She’d take her chances with him.
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    The lady baffled him. Gabriel knew she followed. She wasn’t like any society miss he’d met before, not that he had met many. She wasn’t like his perceived notions of a society miss. Perhaps the brandy had given her courage, for he expected hysteria and constant vapors would be more the norm after having been attacked and widowed in the same night. Instead, the woman stalked after him in the dark, wearing nothing but a thin robe that revealed more than it hid.
    His shoulder and thigh hurt, but he tried to concentrate
on the task at hand. The lady’s scent distracted him. The lady in general distracted him. Everything about her baffled him. From the fact that he had seen her before and hadn’t been able to forget her, to the way she stirred him as no other woman had stirred him to date. He’d been attracted to her from the moment he saw her upstairs, and in circumstances that made feeling anything besides worry for her safety and sorrow for her loss ridiculous.
    Gabriel shouldn’t be having such thoughts about a woman barely married and now widowed … one who had been wed to his childhood friend, Robert Collingsworth. If she was bent on following though, Gabriel wanted to know where she was. He paused before the stable doors, which were now thrown wide since the horses had been turned out of their stalls. Once Lady Collingsworth reached his side, he pressed a finger to his lips to warn her to keep quiet. Together, they crept into the stable. There were no lanterns lit and it was deathly quiet.
    Gabriel glanced around, his hand trained upon the pistol he’d rushed off without. It embarrassed him that he hadn’t thought to take the weapon, but then, he got on well enough with his fists in most confrontations. He heard the scurry of mice in the loft—the creak of leather as harnesses and bridles swung in the breeze of the open doorway. A coach sat inside. He’d noticed it earlier when he’d ridden inside but hadn’t thought much of it.
    Where were the coachman and the footman? Gabriel had a very strong feeling he knew. He turned to Lady Amelia. “Stay here,” he said; then he walked to the
coach and opened one of the side doors. Two bodies lay inside, both men’s throats slit. He quickly closed the door and returned to Lady Collingsworth, took her arm, and steered her toward the open stable doors.
    â€œWhat is it?” she whispered. “What did you see?”
    He didn’t answer. Something was terribly wrong at Collingsworth Manor. He had to get the lady back inside the house and bolt the doors again. He nearly had her there when the howling began. Both he and Lady Collingsworth froze in their tracks.
    The noise came from the surrounding woods. Close. Too close. Wolves? To Gabriel’s knowledge, wolves had long been extinct from England. And wolves did not open stalls and run horses off. They did not crawl into bed with a new bride and pretend to be her husband. They did not murder men for no good reason.
    â€œIt sounds as if there are a hundred of them,” the lady whispered beside him.
    Sound, Gabriel knew, traveled easily in the woods around Collingsworth Manor. He doubted if there were as many wolves as it sounded like. He also knew from listening to the direction each answering howl came from that they were surrounded.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Amelia opened her eyes to a confusing sight. She wasn’t in her bed at home in London. Across the room, a man