Nicholas and Fred had been enemies for as long as he could remember, but in the past year their dislike of each other had escalated to raw hatred. As usual, Maggie Honeywell was at the heart of the matter.

The thought of her caused Nicholas’s heart to wrench painfully. She was his best friend in the whole world. The one person he trusted. The only person he loved. A blood oath taken years ago had bound them together forever, when at Maggie’s request Nicholas had gamely cut his hand and pressed it firmly against the matching cut in hers, although he needed no ritual to bind himself to Maggie Honeywell. She was everything to him.

Unfortunately, she was also everything to her widowed father, and as the years went by and she began to bloom into a strikingly beautiful woman, she became everything to Fred Burton-Smythe as well.

Sir Roderick and Squire Honeywell had long ago agreed that one day their offspring would wed, thereby joining the two greatest estates in the district. Nothing had ever been formalized, as far as Nicholas was aware, but that didn’t prevent Fred from behaving as if Maggie were already his own personal property. So when he’d come upon her and Nicholas in Burton Wood earlier that day, laughing gaily as they whirled about the clearing in each other’s arms, Fred had seen red.

Maggie hadn’t helped matters. At the best of times she was an impudent mix, and at the worst, a veritable hellion. Raised by Squire Honeywell as if she were his son and heir instead of his gently bred only daughter, she could outride, outhunt, and outshoot most of the young men in the county. Her temper was legendary and she’d learned at her volatile sire’s knee that a profusion of oaths and various threats of violence were the means of solving most any problem.

“Nicholas is helping me practice my dancing,” she’d said in that imperious, toplofty way of hers. “So you can bloody well piss off, Fred!”

And then Nicholas sealed his fate.

He burst out laughing.

On any other occasion, Fred would have charged him, intent on thrashing him within an inch of his life. Maggie would have leapt between them as she always did, verbally eviscerating Fred for attacking someone that he knew very well wasn’t permitted to fight back.

Not that that had ever stopped Fred before.

In Maggie’s absence, Fred had no qualms about cuffing Nicholas on the head and ears, brutally shoving him to the ground, or striking him on the back with his riding crop.