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  CHAPTER ONE

  London, May 1815

  HE WAS THE unluckiest man alive.

  Awareness of his ill-starred fate hovered over him as he lunged, once again, for the chamber pot. When would it end! he wondered as his stomach heaved all over again.

  Groaning, he managed to yank the cord beside his bed that would summon the footman. He would replace the soiled pot with yet another fresh one. Surely this next one would go unused, he told himself, hope laced with desperation. Surely this last debilitating episode would be the end of it.

  The footman entered and withdrew in silence, having learned during the long night that even a single word of sympathy or offer of assistance would unleash an uncharacteristically harsh tongue-lashing from his master, who lay sprawled on the bed, his usually powerful body as weak as a kitten’s.

  It was an intolerable state. Weakness of any kind was anathema to Christian Lowell, the newly ensconced eighth earl of Blackmoor, renowned rake, legendary war hero, idiot.

  Christian turned his head and scowled at the small green bottle on the nightstand. Now empty, it had recently held a potion that cost him an amount damn near equal to Napoleon’s plunder. And worth every shilling, he’d thought as he’d eagerly gulped it down.

  Belatedly it occurred to him to wonder what the hell the potion had contained. Perhaps nothing more lethal than tree bark, turnip juice, and mint water, if he were lucky. Which he clearly was not. In which case he might well have ingested a costly concoction of minced lice, dragon’s blood, and cobwebs. Whatever had been in the potion prepared on his behalf, it was no worse than he deserved for resorting to a folk remedy in the first place.

  He was not by nature a superstitious man and it was only through discreet inquiries that he had been put in touch with Lillith, the aging sprite who called herself a magician healer and whom some considered to be a sorceress, others a quack. It mattered little to Christian what she was. She was his last hope, and while he had expected her to respond to his dilemma by issuing a spell of some sort, he had been willing enough to accept the potion she sent him. What choice had he?

  He was hardly about to consult his personal physician about such a matter. Not unless he fancied a long stay at Bedlam, which was doubtless what he would get if he appealed to a member of the modern scientific community for help in reversing a hex.

  He sighed with relief as his stomach quieted and the dizzying rush of nausea passed without incident, surely a sign that the worst of it was over at last. Cautiously he straightened and reached for the damp cloth on the washstand, running it over his face and neck. The effort cost him and he had to grip the solid wood stand with both hands to steady himself. Damn, he thought, despising the weakness and everything that had brought him to it.

  His gaze narrowed and his vision blurred until he saw neither the porcelain basin nor the oiled oak washstand, but rather, the narrow, hawkeyed, beak-nosed face of the old French crone who was the cause of all his troubles. Now, as when he had first set eyes on her, he found her to be a most unpleasant and unwelcome intrusion into what, until then, had been his rather charmed life.

  The crone’s visage was soon joined by that of a beautiful young woman. On that fateful afternoon three months ago, the voluptuous seductress had been writhing beneath Christian in the candlelight.

  Fresh from the latest battle between Wellington’s forces and Napoleon’s, he had been flush with victory and restless with excitement, and the enticing French flirt whom he’d encountered on the way back to camp had been eager to help him celebrate.

  He had just lowered his weight onto her when a high-pitched shriek tore through the hayloft.

  He rolled to his back and reached for his saber in one motion, prepared to defend himself from a stray French soldier bent on revenge.

  There was no soldier in sight, however, only a withered old woman dressed in layers of swaddling black who stood poised at the top of the ladder. Their eyes met and a shiver danced up Christian’s spine.

  “What the hell?” he muttered.

  “Ma mère,” cried the woman beside him, clutching her dress to her full bosom.

  “‘Ma mère’? This is your mother. Mon dieu.” He kept his eyes on the spot where the old lady’s hand disappeared inside the folds of her skirts, hoping she wasn’t going to pull a weapon on him. You never knew with these peasants and he wasn’t about to be done in by an avenging mother.

  Slowly, still holding his gaze, she lifted her hand, but there was no weapon, only her crooked crone’s finger, which she pointed at his naked chest as she invoked her curse.

  Christian’s French being more of the Parisian than peasant variety, he didn’t understand every word she screeched at him, but he was able to decipher something about a pox on his descendants and a dearth of luck forever.

  He didn’t believe in hexes, and since he had no plans to marry and spawn descendants it hardly seemed to matter in any case. But why spoil the old hag’s fun by saying so? He simply stood, fastened his breeches regretfully, and laughed.

  He wasn’t laughing now.

  In the months since that fateful day he had learned to take seriously the power of all sorts of things at which he had once scoffed. First had come the dizzy spells that forced him to leave his vaunted position at Wellington’s side. Relegated to a desk at the support base near Gijon, he had promptly found himself challenged to a duel, of all things, by an irate husband. Worse, he’d lost, or at least had feigned defeat sufficiently to satisfy his opponent’s honor. Even so, the ridiculous skirmish over the lady’s nonexistent virtue may have cost him his right eye. He fingered the black patch. The doctors had told him it would be six months before they could remove it and ascertain if the damage was permanent.

  It was shortly after the duel that he received word of his older brother’s death. In one swift blow fate took from him the only family he had left and passed to him the title earl of Blackmoor, with all the duties and responsibilities it entailed.

  If Christian had not already been convinced of the power and legitimacy of the crone’s curse, he was then.

  He’d immediately returned to London, and ever since, his life had been a continuing deluge of bad luck that had him constantly looking over his shoulder and wondering what would go wrong next. He was unwilling to risk something as innocuous as picking up a deck of cards or crossing a busy street, much less getting on with his life as earl of Blackmoor.

  Aside from the fact that such an excess of caution made for a hellishly boring existence, it was bloody inconvenient to be always losing things and tripping over his own feet and being trailed around town by black cats … when he dared to venture from his house, that is. He, who had never encountered a risk he wouldn’t take, was becoming a prisoner of his own fear, and he didn’t like it one bit.

  Clearly something had to be done. Lillith had assured him she could remove the curse, he had paid her handsomely to do so, and by God, he was going to hold her to it.

  And this time he wouldn’t send a servant on his behalf, Christian decided, reaching for the empty bottle. This time he would go himself.

  THE DOOR of the small stone cottage on the city’s northern outskirts was bolted from the inside and the windows were dark. Christian gave the door handle a final jiggle, knowing that it was useless. Lillith was gone. He contemplated waiting, reasoning that her absence might prove to be brief, but given his luck of late, it made more sense to expect the worst. There was no telling where Lillith might have gone or for how long.

  Frustrated, he started back to his waiting carriage, barely fitting his six-foot-two frame beneath the vine-covered trellis that sheltered the path. Tall, prickly shrubs bordered the stone walkway on both sides; stray branches snagged his sleeves and scratched his face as he passed; ghostly vine fingers clung to his shoulders and dark hair.

  The whole place made him shudder and want to get away as quickly as he could. Between the overgrowth and the heavy spring fog, he couldn’t see a foot in front of him and he was l
amenting the fact that he hadn’t brought along a lantern when he nearly collided with a cloaked figure hurrying along the path from the opposite direction.

  The figure was too tall to be Lillith, about five foot seven, Christian judged, but he could tell from the willowy build beneath the cape that it was a woman.

  “Pardon me, madam,” he murmured and stepped aside to let her pass, his right foot landing between stones and sinking ankle-deep in mud. Christian didn’t curse. He didn’t even flinch. He was growing accustomed to such mishaps, he observed with disgust.

  “Thank you,” came the voice from beneath the hood.

  It was a uniquely clear, feminine tone that tripped something in his memory, making him strain for a closer look as the woman turned sideways to squeeze past him. There was just enough moonlight filtering through the trellis to reveal a flash of gold hair and a slant of green eyes and reconfirm what Christian already knew.

  He really was the unluckiest man alive.

  And she was the last woman in all of London whom he wished to run into unexpectedly this way, or any other way, for that matter.

  She was well-named, he’d give her that. Delilah. Lady Delilah Ashton Moon, to be precise, and as he stood there, inhaling the cool night air spiced with her scent, Christian felt a new kinship with that poor Biblical sap Samson. He contemplated escape, retreat, call it what you would, discretion was the better part of valor and all that. But by the time he’d yanked his foot from the mud and lurched back onto the path beside her, it was too late.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHRISTIAN?” THE HOOD of Lady Moon’s ivory cape fell away as she tipped her face up, exposing a dazzling amount of blond hair and flawless porcelain skin. “Is it really you?”

  Christian was suddenly thankful for the heavy shadows. He never blushed, never, but damned if he didn’t feel his cheeks heating now. And well they might. After all, Lady Moon represented an exquisitely mortifying moment in his past. His distant past, he reminded himself, resisting the urge to cringe from her searching gaze. Just because the memory made him wince was no reason to let his discomfit show. Why, for all he knew, she had forgotten it ever happened.

  Not bloody likely, spoke the voice of reason.

  Regardless, at such moments a rational man had but one possible course of action: feint and parry.

  “I beg your pardon, madam,” he said, as if struggling for a clear view of her in the dim light. “Are we by chance acquainted?”

  He watched as she absorbed the deflection, regrouped, and rearranged her front line, all in a matter of seconds.

  “It appears it is I who must beg your pardon, sir,” she replied, mimicking perfectly his tone of polite detachment. “I spoke impulsively and on first impression, but on closer perusal I can see that I mistook you for a much younger man and one who, if I may be so outrageously blunt as to say so, does not wear a patch over his right eye.”

  A much younger man? Christian bristled, insolently examining the lady for similar evidence that seven years had passed since their last meeting and finding none.

  “Why, Christian Lowell, it is you after all,” she exclaimed with mock amazement. “I’d know that sinister scowl anywhere.”

  “Lady Moon,” replied Christian as if recognizing her for the first time. “And I would know your charming manners and ladylike restraint anywhere.”

  She smiled, revealing gleaming white teeth that were perfectly even but for a small chip at the back of one that you couldn’t see. You had to find it with your tongue. That chip was only one of the myriad of small, fascinating details about her that Christian had never quite managed to forget.

  “I was so very glad to hear that you had returned home,” she blurted, then bit her bottom lip and quickly added, “I mean to say I was happy to hear you had returned safely. So many men do not. You’re very fortunate.”

  Fortunate? Him? It was all Christian could do to keep from snorting. “Appearances are sometimes deceiving.”

  She sobered instantly. “Please forgive me. I don’t know what I was thinking of. Naturally I was terribly dismayed to learn of Charles’s tragic demise.”

  “It was tragic,” Christian agreed, “for all concerned. A little cough turns into pneumonia and suddenly Charles, the rightful and fitting master of three centuries of Blackmoor tradition, is gone and I’m left a bloody earl.”

  “I understand how you must feel,” she said. “A title is no recompense for the loss of a brother.”

  Among other things, thought Christian. Charles was not only a brother, but also his closest friend and a safe port in times of trouble. Beyond that, however, Charles’s death meant the loss of freedom and irresponsibility and living for the moment, the only way Christian knew how to live. He’d lost it all. And on top of all that, he was cursed.

  “You’re right,” he said to Delilah, “a title is no recompense at all. But I’m not the only one who has suffered a grievous loss since last we met. I was equally saddened to learn of the deaths of your father and husband. Please accept my deepest condolences.”

  “Thank you,” she said, her eyes downcast.

  “Your husband died at Coruna, did he not?” he inquired, naming a battle that had taken place nearly three years ago.

  “Yes. He slipped from his horse in the thick of things and was trampled.”

  “What rotten luck.”

  “What a senseless waste is more like it,” she countered with all of the impulsive intensity he remembered so well. “He never should have been there in the first place. He was far too young and inexperienced.”

  Christian responded with something about the horrors of war in general and the Peninsula struggle in particular, ending with a small, rueful smile.

  “Forgive my manners,” he said, “I shouldn’t keep you standing here on a damp night discussing such melancholy matters. If you’ve come to see Lillith, I’m afraid you’re as out of luck as I am. She’s gone.”

  Delilah frowned and glanced down the path to the unlit cottage. “Gone? But that’s impossible. I need her.”

  Christian nearly chuckled out loud. Her belief that the whole world turned on her whim was something else he remembered. He fully expected her to pout and stamp her foot over Lillith’s disappearance and was taken by surprise when instead she sighed and squared her shoulders.

  “Oh, well,” she said. “I shall simply have to try again tomorrow.”

  “My thought exactly,” he responded, eyeing her with new curiosity. Since returning home he’d been so preoccupied with his own dilemma that he’d paid little attention to gossip, but he vaguely recalled hearing something intriguing about Lady Moon. He wished he could remember what it was.

  “Well,” she said as he stood searching for a polite way to question her more closely. She was toying with the ties on her cape with an awkwardness that struck him as most unlike her. “I should be going.”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s just … I wonder…” She let go of the ties and her chin came up. “Enough beating about the bush. I shall ask you outright. That is, if you’ll forgive me for posing a terribly indelicate question?”

  Christian braced himself behind a careless shrug. “I can’t pledge forgiveness until I hear the question. Ask it anyway.”

  “All right.” Her sheepish expression gave way to curiosity. It sparked in eyes the bright, clear green of a summer meadow, illuminating her whole expression in a way Christian remembered all too well. Delilah had always been far too curious for either of their sakes. “How did you injure your eye?”

  “Oh, that,” he said, touching the patch. He wasn’t sure what he had expected her to ask him, only that he was greatly relieved. “I received a slash wound and the doctors said that six months of resting the eye and surrounding muscles might restore my vision.”

  “How horrid. So it is a battle wound. I had heard … rumors.”

  “It’s more or less a battle wound,” he replied with a shrug, which only served to revive that damn glint of curios
ity in her eyes. “Oh, all right, if you must know, it happened during a duel.”

  “Why on earth were you fighting a duel?” she asked.

  “Because I’m an idiot,” Christian retorted.

  She chuckled and that was it. No prying, no silly feminine display of shock or disapproval for him to endure. She was, and always had been, one of a kind.

  “I see,” she said. “And if six months’ rest doesn’t revive the eye? What then?”

  “Then I suppose the ton shall grow weary of seeing me at every masquerade ball dressed as a pirate.”

  She laughed outright at that, a bright, infectious sound that captivated him now as much as it had the first time he’d heard it.

  “I rather doubt they will weary of you anytime soon,” she assured him dryly. “Your heroics are legendary. And the patch adds a rakish touch. I daresay there will be any number of ladies who prefer you this way to the devil’s disguise you used to favor.”

  “That wasn’t a disguise,” he retorted.

  “No, I suppose it wasn’t. You made a splendid, utterly believable devil.”

  “Thank you.”

  Their gazes held, like the locked blades of two swordsmen taking each other’s measure, until she blinked and they both spoke at once.

  “I should…”

  “May I…”

  “You first,” she said with a sweep of her hand.

  “I was going to ask if I might escort you back to your carriage.”

  “Thank you. I would be most appreciative.”

  As she turned something fell from inside her cape, hitting the mossy ground with a small thud.

  Christian bent to retrieve it, surprised to see that what she had dropped was a bottle identical to the one in his pocket, right down to the silver chasing on the cork.

  She thanked him for retrieving it. “I shouldn’t want to lose this before I have a chance to return it to Lillith.”