Front Cover

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Books. Change. Lives.

Copyright

Copyright © 2022 by Amalie Howard

Cover and internal design © 2022 by Sourcebooks

Cover art by Alan Ayers/Lott Reps

Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks

P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

(630) 961-3900

sourcebooks.com

Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Epilogue

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Back Cover

For Ally,

namer of the Willingtons,

and a real-life unicorn.

One

The SS Valor, Atlantic Ocean, 1865

Lady Bronwyn Chase gasped for breath, tucking her body into the narrow alcove and not daring to breathe. He was here. On her brother’s ship. She had only met the Duke of Thornbury once, during her stepbrother’s wedding ball last season in London, and it had been enough to make a lasting impression. He’d struck her as sharp and intelligent, a man whose piercing gaze missed nothing.

And handsome too, she reminded herself.

Her memory wasn’t wrong. In the year since she’d seen him last, his striking looks hadn’t changed. They’d grown more pronounced. Or maybe that was because she’d idolized him in her dreams…an unreachable fantasy lover with tawny hair and citrine eyes. Bronwyn let out a silent breath to calm her racing heart that was pounding for a variety of reasons—fright, fatigue…and pure womanly fascination. He should not be here.

Why was he here?

Had she made a mistake? Perhaps she’d mistaken him for someone else. But even as she thought it, she discarded the notion. It was him, no doubt of that. That thick, sun-gilded, tawny-brown hair still curled around his angular face in unruly locks, a jewel-gold stare and a hawklike nose combining to make most people wary of the hunter prowling in their midst. The duke was attractive in a throat-drying, fierce way; everything about him made her silly heart thrum. Even dressed in formal evening wear, he stood out like a tree in a field of pretty flowers.