Read On.
Continue the Trust Trilogy with Grantham’s story in The Cost of Command.
Colonel Marcus Grantham has spent his life obeying orders, reading danger, and acting before hesitation can cost lives.
But when he abducts the wrong woman from a moonlit garden, his most carefully planned operation becomes something far more dangerous: a battle of wills with Miss Sophie Hartwell, a woman who has spent her life being overlooked and is beginning to discover she has no intention of remaining so.
Here is a first look at The Cost of Command.
***
Sophie Hartwell hung halfway out the window, balanced between a life of agonizing boredom and a sudden death in the rosebushes.
Sophie would never have considered herself prone to daring adventure, but she was, she thought, managing this quite well.
Quite well indeed. She was midway through her escape when she discovered that her plan lacked one essential element.
Dignity.
One slippered foot searched blindly for the trellis.
The other stayed planted inside the drawing room, braced against the sill in a pose that would have struck any respectable headmistress dumb.
The night air came up cold and green-smelling, a shock after the drawing room's cloying perfumes, and somewhere below, a rosebush waited with what she could only describe as personal animosity.
Behind her, Mr. Edwin Larkins droned on with the solemnity of a man narrating his own funeral. "I admire a quiet lady. So restful. So—"
Sophie adjusted her weight.
Amenable.
The trellis groaned — a long, splintering protest of dry wood under strain.
She froze, fingers white on the lattice, heartbeat loud in her ears.
To die while fleeing someone who considered restful a compliment would be an intolerable embarrassment.
They would put it on the stone. Here lies Sophie Hartwell. She found the window too late.
Three minutes earlier, the window had presented itself as divine intervention. Ten minutes earlier, her mother had deployed the smile. Sophie knew that smile. It meant disaster.
"You mustn't drift, my dear," her mother had hissed, steering her through the crowd with a grip that left no room for argument. "Mr. Larkins has expressed interest."
Interest, in Sophie's experience, migrated. It began with polite inquiries about the weather, advanced through unsolicited opinions on a woman's constitution, and settled, by the time the musicale ended, on the small of her back.
She tightened her grip on the lattice. A thorn caught her sleeve with a vindictive pop, and the smell of crushed leaves rose sharp around her.
"Oh, don't be dramatic," she muttered to the roses.
Below, the garden waited to receive her face-first. Above, the drawing room hummed — heat, perfume, the scrape of chair legs, and mutual delusion conducted in candlelight.
Her sister Lucinda's laughter floated through the open window, bright and utterly effortless, untouched by timber digging into anyone's hip.
Her sister had always carried that effect.
Lucinda entered a room and the whole room faced her as flowers turned to sun.
Sophie entered a room and people never really paid her or her feelings mind.
That had never particularly troubled her — she had privately considered the invisibility useful, a kind of freedom, almost. She had imagined she might do something with it someday.
Go somewhere. Find something, though she couldn't have named what.
Only when Mr. Larkins's thumb began an unauthorized survey of her corset seams did she understand, with sudden clarity, that waiting for life to become interesting from inside a drawing room was not a strategy.
"I have always preferred quiet ladies," he had murmured, breath warm and faintly vinous at her ear. "They understand their place."
Sophie eased her trailing foot over the sill.
Her place, she decided, was not beneath a wandering thumb.
Her place might also not be on a thorny wall, climbing down in evening slippers, but it was at least a place she had chosen herself.
And it was, she thought, with something almost like hunger — outside.
She inched lower. The window frame scraped her hip through three layers of silk.
Her skirt caught on something — she stopped to free herself.
Her mother would be cross if she ruined one of her good dresses beyond repair.
She reached a lower rung. The ground no longer felt alarmingly distant. It felt muddy and unwelcoming, which was an improvement.
Fragments of speech drifted through the glass above.
"…call tomorrow…" Larkins said, his voice rich with unearned confidence.
Sophie doubled her pace. Tomorrow was a speculative concept, and she had no intention of participating in his version of it. As she picked up speed, suddenly a hard corner jabbed her between the ribs, forcing her to slow.
The book.
Of course.
She shoved the slim French novel more securely into her bodice. She had always maintained that if a woman was obliged to flee a drawing room under cover of darkness, proper reading material was essential to pass the time.
Another careful step. Then another. The trellis held.
Her left slipper struck the garden path with a sharp crunch that echoed in the cold air.
Sophie drew in a long breath — the first full one she'd managed all evening — and straightened, gathering what dignity she could after descending a trellis in satin shoes.
She smoothed her rumpled skirts with brisk practicality.
The roses rustled behind her, catching at her lace in what she chose to read as farewell.
"One simply requires air," she informed the night, half defiant, half explanatory.
That was, after all, what she had said before her strategic withdrawal from the drawing room.
Her mother had dismissed the claim, insisting the evening was perfectly temperate.
Sophie had long since learned that temperate was society's preferred word for suffocating, dressed in candlelight and better refreshments.
What she required was not air, precisely.
She knew that. What she required was something to happen — something not arranged by her mother, not choreographed around eligible men, not designed to deliver her, neatly packaged, into a quieter life than the one she already had.
She required, if she was honest, which she tried to be, at least with herself, in the dark — adventure.
The real kind. The kind that arrived without an invitation and did not care whether you were dressed for it.
She slipped behind the hedge and patted the hidden book with satisfaction.
Ten minutes, she told herself. Ten minutes of starlight and freedom from Mr. Larkins's advancing hands, then she would return with a headache of magnificent severity.
If she arranged her expression correctly and pressed one hand to her temple with suitable delicacy, even her mother might concede the field.
The plan, Sophie thought, was flawless.
The gravel path curved away from the house in a pale ribbon between tall elms, their bare upper branches combing the dark sky.
Sophie moved down the path with the particular lightness of someone who had, for the first time all evening, ceased to exist for the benefit of other people.
The world improved when one removed men like Mr. Larkins from it.
The air bit cleaner. The gravel felt friendlier.
Even the elms appeared to approve, swaying slightly in the wind as she passed, like a row of tall, sympathetic witnesses.
She had just reached the bend when a gloved hand closed around her wrist.
Not clumsy. Not suggestive. Not damp with the particular presumption she had spent the evening evading. This grip landed with speed and purpose, efficient and perfectly calibrated, efficient enough to annoy her on principle.
She stopped — less from terror than from the sheer inconvenience of interruption.
A tall man stepped out from the hedge. He moved without rushing, which was somehow worse than if he had. He smelled of cold air and horse leather and something faintly metallic she couldn't immediately name and didn't entirely like.
"You will come quietly," he said.
His voice carried the flat cadence of command — a voice that had issued orders and received them, and had long since stopped distinguishing between the two.
Sophie squinted at the silhouette, sorting details.
For one stray, optimistic instant she entertained the possibility that she had offended an extraordinarily assertive gardener.
The notion expired quickly. Gardeners, in her experience, seldom possessed shoulders built for suppressing rebellions before breakfast, nor that particular stillness — watchful and coiled — of a man accustomed to being the most dangerous thing in a room.
"I beg your pardon?" she asked.
The grip on her wrist tightened.
"You were expected. Don't waste time with denials."
Expected.
Sophie considered that with real interest. Behind her, Lucinda's laughter drifted from the house, light and musical and entirely untroubled by abduction. Mr. Larkins was no doubt inside, expounding on the virtues of quiet women to anyone too slow to escape him.
She returned her attention to the stranger.
Tall. Military posture — the kind that didn't leave even when the uniform did. No scent of wine. No rake, then, unless a more disciplined breed existed than any she had previously encountered. Failing that, perhaps a criminal with expensive habits and a tailor who asked no questions.
"I fear," she said, in the calm tone she reserved for the confused and the potentially armed, "that you have mistaken me for a woman of far greater consequence."
His features stayed mostly obscured by the shadow of his hat brim, though what little showed offered no sign of humor. None at all.