Prologue #2
The lady sucked in a sharp breath. “The only villain I see is the one insulting me, sir.” She succeeded in tearing her arm from his grip.
The pins that held Andromena’s Apollo top-knot, and six full-red roses and vibrant combs threaded throughout her tresses failed her.
Her coiffure tumbled from its creation, filling her mouth and eyes with tight ringlets and littering the hard earth with some of her newest hair accessories.
Off they went: pink topaz, rose quartz, and blush coral, disappearing with little plinks into the snow, a treasure for some eventual passersby.
“Blast!” She shoved her curls out of her face but her gaze came only as high as his chest bone and that bloody enraged her. No lady liked being made to feel like a tiny slip of a thing. “Look at what you’ve made me do-ooh?” that syllable dissolved like one of her breaths in the air.
“I am. Such…spirit.” With eyes as dark as the Devil’s own, he raked his gaze over her from her tumbled curls to her—previously—shivering toes. Toes that strangely felt no cold. “For nature made her what she is, and never made another…”
And there with the snow building all around her, and the winter winds howling, under the heat of his eyes and the whisperings of Scotland’s own Robert Burn’s, she melted.
Everything about his look oozed, ‘I’ll devour you like a dollop of sweet cream and we’ll both enjoy the feast I make of you’.
Andromena shivered.
“I d-do not re-require help, sir.” But her retort held neither the sting of before, or any conviction, at all.
“Ah, but receive it you shall, Andromena. Forgive me, For my part, I may speak it to my shame, I have a truant been to chivalry…”
He breathed her name into the frost, stripping away the safety of his anonymity, making his seduction intensely personal. That voice she recognized. It harkened to a warm, candlelit dinner table.
“…I daresay no one understands the rules of chivalry more than a privateer.” His voice boomed around the chambers of her mind; thumped in with the answering table thumps from the fellow McQuoid-Smith sailors around them.
The same dashing gentleman who’d come ’round when Lord Culross courted Andromena’s sister, Linnie and dazzled her at the end of the dining table where they’d been seated next to one another.
Viscount Kerr.
“When you finally make your come-out, you would tempt even an old privateer like me to cast his anchors ashore…”
She swallowed. Or would have, had her throat not forgotten the reflex. She’d been a girl smitten at the ease with which he commanded an entire dinner party. But there was no word to describe how he made her feel as a woman.
His rogue’s eyes glittered with arrogance and approval; he knew her thoughts and reveled in them. This, then, was why ladies tossed away virtue and good names.
“Lord Kerr!” She gave him the coquette’s smile she’d been practicing in preparation for her Come Out. “It is so very good to see you.”
He released her quick—just as he let go all of the McQuoid-Smiths when Linnie chose another over his friend. After Lord Culross tricked Linnie into running off with him, there hadn’t been a mention of the gentleman, and by nature, anyone associated with him.
Hot with humiliation, she struggled to meet his eyes. “Why would they send you to,” retrieve. “save us?”
His eyes narrowed.
Did he think she meant the scars he brought back from the sea?
It was a fair assumption. The gossip pages constantly wrote that the once-handsome Lord Kerr now inspired only dread, save for the most scandalous women of Polite Society.
Andromena longed to tell him he was still whole.
She wanted to say the cruel tales comparing him to a beast were lies, and that she did not fear him at all.
She gave him a tender smile. “I merely expected they would have sent one of my brothers or c-cousins or crewmen or—”
“They didn’t send me.” He cut her off like the only person he was saving this day was himself from her chattering.
“They didn’t?”
Viscount Kerr said nothing; his meaning clear. He’d rescued her all on his own.
“Were you passing by or also on the way to Meghan and the Duke of Hartwell’s wedding?”
“Yes,” said Kerr.
“I’m not sure it can be both of those.” She dazzled him with a smile.
Or tried to. His jaw stayed locked.
Her mirror-practiced coquetry was in dire need of work.
The muffled bells chiming the hour of Meghan’s supposed-to-be-wedding rescued her from further embarrassment.
Andromena fiddled with the lace on her glove. “I-If you’ll excuse me, my lord. My family will be along shortly to collect us.”
Everything happened in a flash. She took a step to go, the same moment Lord Kerr took a jarring step towards her. Naturally, Andromena responded as any sane person would at finding themselves charged with it, and stepped aside. Which, unfortunately, sent the viscount stepping off into the thin air.
The viscount disappeared so quickly, his fall so silent, she thought she might have dreamed up their meeting. Only the deep tracks of his boots proved it was real.
Heart beating fast, she forced herself to look over the ledge, and her heart dropped all the way down with it.
Yes, he was there, five feet below her. All six feet two inches of him, clad in black, stretched with his arms and legs out on either side of them like the Devil frozen mid-snow angel, his tricorn cap flown some two yards behind him, and only his face covering protecting him from the elements.
Blast and damn.
He shouldn’t have rushed at her. It really was his own doing that he’d possibly killed himself. That was no consolation.
Andromena eyed the fastest and safest path down. “J-Just a moment. I will save you.”
The soft heel of her footwear broke the ice coating with a crunch and sank through until the snow swallowed several inches past her ankle.
Andromena wrenched her foot free and took uneven steps to reach him.
A gale snatched her hood back, and the snowy specks of ice battered Andromena’s face.
Her breath came in quick spurts, leaving puffs of white as she slipped and slid all the way down, until she reached him.
She stared down at his motionless body.
A cold knot of dread twisted in his stomach. “Wh-What have you d-done, you f-foolish man?”
Silence alone answered.
Her teeth chattering a frantic rhythm, Andromena rubbed her numb arms, shivering as the freezing wind stripped the last of her warmth.
“K-Kerr?”
The wind howled a low, mournful sound.
Check him. Do something, Andromena…
Past blurred with present.
Do something…!
Around her, the ice-studded snow suddenly whipped like a cyclone about them, faster and faster, into a violent whorl that ripped her hood off completely and snatched her curls free of her face.
The Fairy Queen commanding Andromena: Look!
Look what you have done to this great sea captain, you banshee. You will pay for your sins.
Shoving the hair from her eyes, Andromena dropped onto her knees beside the viscount.
She gripped his heavy shoulder, her voice shaking. “You can’t lie down here, not like this. Please, get up.”
Confound it all!
She lowered herself onto her haunches beside him. Taking her lacy satin glove between her teeth, she fought in vain to free her fingers. Panic coiled tight in her stomach.
With a final, desperate tug, she got the covering off.
A hiss escaped her lips and hung in an eerie break in the howling winter wind.
“Kerr,” she whispered. And yet, at the same time, it wasn’t. Only three-quarters of the stranger’s face bore any recognition of the charming gentleman who’d come to supper once at Aunt Catherine’s. The other…a stranger.
It was as if God fashioned a masterpiece, then decided no mortal should possess such perfection, and had sabotaged his greatest work. Taking a blade to the right side of his face, He marred the pristine flesh with deep, pitted scars.
His face was startling. At first glance, it was jarring and, by conventional standards, ugly.
But as a connoisseur of the beautiful, Andromena knew there was nothing conventional when it came to beauty.
This warrior, marked with a rugged gravity to his features, stood as proof of that.
The scars pitting him made him undeniably, strikingly beautiful.
Andromena played with her head’s positioning to find the artist’s light upon him, and took in the no longer straight line of his Greco-Roman nose—broken, at some point.
The hollowing under his cheekbones and the jut of his angular jaw lent him a defiance, even in silent stillness.
The bold slash of his lips set his face into a scowl at odds with the sunshiny gentleman who’d sketched her a bow and placed a kiss atop her hand.
She had never painted the human form. People were vapid—particularly members of the ton—especially members of the ton. Young ladies all in white. All the men in cravats, tailcoats, and trousers from Schweitzer and Davidson with shoes by Hoby.
But this man made her regret not trying her hand at the human form. Not the Impeccably Handsome Lord Kerr of the past, but the Lord Kerr of the present. This battle-scarred version felt more human than the god-like figure who’d captivated every McQuoid—including prim Aunt Catherine.
Her throat clutched. Beautiful though he may be—and he was, very much so—the pain he’d endured to bear such marks.
Swallowing around a flood of emotion, she returned her stare to his and gasped.
Lord Kerr stared at her. Glared, more like. Darkly. Terrifyingly. With the slight narrowing of his eyes, he’d become the wolf who devoured lasses in the woods.
“Do you have something to say?” he jeered.
Surrounded by male kin of all ages, she learned early on that men were proud creatures, stubbornly and bothersomely so.
Wind blew about them; her hair tangling with his face. “Indeed. I-I thought you’d gone and gotten yourself killed—eep!”