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rest of their family fortunes since her father’s death, so it was only too easy to pry the tumblers loose with a hairpin. Having packed all her jewelry and the pin money she’d been hoarding for her planned elopement with Robert, she’d made her escape past the sleeping guard who’d been placed in their house.
    From there she’d gone to Robert’s house, where a post boy had told her of overhearing his lordship ordering his driver to take him to the docks, for a ship called the Bon Venture. Olivia passed the boy’s directions to the hackney driver she’d engaged and in no time found herself at the gangway of a merchantman. But it had just slipped free of its moorings, and with it all her hopes, all her dreams.
    Worse still, just then she saw Robert on deck, extending his hand to a woman nearby and drawing her into his embrace.
    “Come, my love, let us go below,” he was saying, his voice carrying over the water. “Now that I am well rid of that boring baggage, we have much catching up to do.” Olivia could only stare after them as they made their way out of sight. She’d staggered away from the docks, stunned and in shock, and only hours later did she find herself on the coach to Kent without any real memory of how she’d gotten there.
    But as luck would have it, there she had met Lord Finch. The poor man was returning home from London without the lady’s companion his wife had sent him to fetch. Apparently the real Mrs. Keates had learned about her future employer’s unpleasant nature and begged off the position, leaving Lord Finch empty-handed.
    And so Olivia had offered herself for the post, taking the lady’s name so that Lady Finch would be none the wiser.
    It had seemed the only thing to do at the time.
    So she’d done exactly as the dying stranger had advised. Hide. Hidden from her ruination, hidden from the scandal that rocked London for weeks with the publication of her letters to Lord Bradstone and the mad speculation as to the dead man’s identity.
    Then her precarious position had been made easier by the sinking of the Bon Venture. Since Lord Bradstone had been seen in the company of a woman aboard ship, everyone assumed it was her—so the search for the murderess had been given up.
    And so for seven years, Olivia Sutton had lived as Mrs. Keates, poor widow of a mythical army officer and companion to Lady Finch. Really, how could she leave? She was wanted for murder, and even if she told the truth, that she hadn’t killed that man, who would believe her, when the only other witness was also dead?
    Now the question remained, how would she live with the memory of that horrendous night, knowing that the Marquis of Bradstone, the man who’d brought about her ruin and murdered that innocent man, still breathed?
    She glanced over at her narrow bed, where underneath she still kept stashed the small valise in which she’d carried away her meager possessions that night. Pulling it free from its hiding place, she slid her hand into the lining until her fingers wrapped around the ancient bit of bloodstained parchment there.
    Then there was his gold ring. She wore it on the silver chain her father had given her for her sixteenth birthday. The ring dangled over her heart, her personal talisman and remembrance of what that brave stranger had lost and what she owed him.
    Give this to no one but Hobbe.
    Hobbe.
    She had thought of this mysterious man every day since, prayed for a way to find him, scoured Lady Finch’s newspapers for any hint of his existence and had found nothing. She didn’t even know if Hobbe was a man, but something told her he was.
    For if the boy had trusted this Hobbe so implicitly, he must be a man of impeccable honor and integrity.
    And in her mind he’d become her own personal knight in shining armor. Her hero. A man of action and decisive power. Hobbe was handsome, darkly so. Not with Bradstone’s black-hearted nature but with a rakish appeal. The kind of man who would sweep her