“Well then, that won’t work,” she said, her voice fading. “You’ll just have to strangle me.” She closed her eyes again, muttered something about rope burns, and drifted to sleep.

Ned watched her breathe for a while longer, then went about the room, turning off the lamps, removing his coat and boots, almost tripping over her corset, before approaching the bed. There was enough space that she’d never realize he slept beside her, and in the morning he could rise before she woke. Granted, this was rather unprincipled logic, but after all, he reasoned, what else could one expect from a pirate?

He turned back the quilt . . . then abruptly reversed the action, took a pillow, and tossed it on the floor. With a rug beneath him and his coat as a blanket, he made a bed that turned out to be as uncomfortable and intractable as his honor unexpectedly was. Up on the actual bed, cozy and warm, Cecilia muttered about dynamite, obviously having a pleasant dream. Listening to her, Ned felt his heart soften. He would keep her safe, he vowed—including from himself. Even if it left him with bruises and good grief was that a nail beneath his hip?

Shifting from side to side, trying without success to get comfortable, he finally sighed and went frustrated, noble, like a gentleman, to sleep.

11

a sudden awakening—cecilia disappears—the senselessness and insensibility of readingwuthering heights—flaccid faculties—they are introduced—the danger of hair combs—whispers in the dark—the herald of the dawn

The feeling was not like a gas explosion, but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling: it acted on Ned’s torpid senses and forced him awake. He did not wait for the sense of alarm to ease into understanding before he reached beneath his pillow for the knife he always kept there. He found nothing. Instantly rolling to his knees, he groped under the rug for a gun that was also absent, before realizing that he wasn’t under attack—he’d simply forgotten to arrange his weapons the night before. Considering he woke every morning in the same manner (an occupational hazard, since pirates, secret policemen, and traitorous henchmen of mad poetic tyrants were all at risk even when fully conscious and not bleary-eyed and, ugh, drooling a little), it was remarkable he’d not prepared his comfort knife as usual. And then he remembered.

Cecilia Bassingthwaite.

He stood up, pushing the tangled hair from his face, and looked at her sleeping in the bed. Except she wasn’t—sleeping, or in the bed.

She was gone.

“Damn,” he said.

Striding across the room, he noticed her gown was no longer on the floor, although the corset was, like the shell of propriety she had discarded last night. Ned stepped around it and knocked on the bathroom door.

“Madam? Are you in there?”

Silence.

Opening the door, he ascertained that she was not inside, and swore again.