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beach and sucked in a shaky breath.
    “Know why that is, Miss Stanton?”
    “I . . .” She retreated a step. Then two. Then three. “You weren’t meant to notice me behind you.”
    He advanced. “Not notice a beautiful young lady all by her lonesome without a soul watching over her?” He allowed his meaning to sink in, then stepped forward, towering over her, and then lowered his mouth to her ear. “If I see you trailing me again, I promise to show you exactly what those conscienceless blackguards do when they catch unmarried young ladies unprotected and all alone.”
    He watched her.
    She swallowed nervously, her eyes wide and her body frozen. Except for the pulse pounding wildly at her throat.
    He framed her face with his hands, his ungloved fingers cradling her skull and sinking into the rich softness of her hair. He leaned back down until his mouth was a millimeter from her skin. The unshaven edge of his jawline brushed against the smooth curve of her cheek. She gasped.
    “If that’s what you fancy, Miss Stanton—to experience firsthand the despoiling of an innocent young lady caught very far from home—then I might have a little time to kill this morning after all.”
    She trembled. “I—I—”
    “Shhh.” He dragged his mouth to her ear. “I’m going to walk down the beach. If you’d like a taste of the kind of trouble I can provide, feel free to follow me again.” He let his lips linger against her cheek. “If you don’t, then I suggest you return to Moonseed Manor while I still find it amusing to allow you to do so.”
    In one fluid movement, he straightened, let go, and faced the opposite direction. Before his enflamed body could talk his brain out of behaving, he strode forward without a backward glance.
    God help them both if she followed.

    Susan turned and ran.
    This was a nightmare. For the second time in her life, she’d been discovered whilst spying. Also for the second time in her life, a man’s lips had touched her face. The first such occasion had been that return-to-life-from-drowning incident with the river water and the horrible algae. Since she’d been unconscious, the contact was unavoidable. What did she have to say for herself this time?
    He’d caught her. Figuratively and then literally. But that was no excuse.
    She could accept being an incompetent spy (although of course she wasn’t). She could accept being stuck in Bournemouth a few more days until her money arrived. (Actually . . . no. That’s why she’d kept following him—in the hopes he’d pass by a carriage she could rent or borrow or steal.)
    But what she could not accept was the notion that Miss Susan Stanton, an accomplished young lady of unimpeachable marriageability, had behaved like a common slut.
    Untenable. She would return to London, to a life of crowds and gaiety and comfort. She would marry a rich, titled aristocrat with a busy social schedule at the first available opportunity. To do so, she had to remain untouched and uncompromised. She knew this. She’d always known this. What the bloody hell had she been thinking, standing cheek-to-cheek with that—that—
    She stopped dead.
    There. Up ahead. An abandoned village.
    Or, most likely, Bournemouth proper. But one could scarce tell the difference. Susan stared, eyes widening in horror. It was worse than she’d dreamed.
    Boxlike structures sprang up along the pale curve of the shore like rotten teeth from a giant’s jaw. Bone-white sand separated the ramshackle contraptions. The red of the rising sun gave the wooden exteriors a blood-tinted glow.
    No posting-house in sight.
    Even if she had a trunk full of gold, how the dickens was she supposed to get back to London with no posting-house from which to rent horses? How was one supposed to escape Bournemouth at all?
    Is Miss Stanton at home? Always.
    No.
    She refused to be stuck here the rest of her life. She would not dally in this miserable hovel a moment longer than necessary. Her carriage driver