He groaned as splinters of memory shot through his mind. Someone had bashed him over the head with a rifle.

He opened his eyes and looked around. He appeared to be in the bedroom of an abandoned cottage. The furnishings were old and dusty, and the air smelled of mildew. His hands and feet were tied, which didn't surprise him.

Frankly, what did surprise him was that he wasn't dead. Obviously someone wanted to kill him. What was the point of kidnapping him first? Unless, of course, his enemy had decided he wanted Charles to know his identity before delivering the final blow.

But in doing so, the would-be killer had granted Charles a little more time to plot and plan, and he vowed to escape and bring his enemy to justice. He wasn't sure how he would do it, bound as he was and with a sprained ankle to boot, but he'd be damned if he'd depart this world mere weeks after discovering true love.

The first order of business was clearly to do something about the ropes binding his hands, so he scooted across the floor to a broken chair sitting in the corner. The splintered wood looked sharp, and he started rubbing the rope against the jagged edge. It was clearly going to take a long time to break through the heavy rope, but his heart lifted with each tiny fiber that snapped under the friction.

After about five minutes of rubbing, Charles heard a door slam in the outer room of the cottage, and he quickly brought his hands back to his side. He started to move back to the center of the room, where he'd been dumped unconscious, but then decided to stay put. He could make it look like he had moved across the room simply to lean up against the wall.

Voices drifted through the air, but Charles couldn't make out what his captors were saying. He caught a snatch of a cockney twang, and deduced that he was dealing with hired thugs. It just didn't make sense that his enemy would be from London's underworld.

After a minute or two, it became apparent that his captors had no intention of checking up on him. Charles decided that they must be waiting for whomever was in charge, and he went back to work fraying the rope.

How long he sat there, moving his wrists back and forth across the jagged wood, he didn't know, but he was barely a third of the way through the rope when he heard the outer door slam again, this time followed by a distinctly upper-class voice.

Charles yanked his hands back to his body and pushed the broken chair away from him with his shoulder. If he guessed right, his enemy would want to see him right away, and—

The door opened. Charles held his breath. A silhouette filled the doorway.

“Good day, Charles.”

“Cecil?”

“The very one.”

Cecil? His mealy-mouthed cousin, the one who had always tattled when they were children, the one who had always taken an inordinate amount of pleasure in stepping on bugs?