Chapter One
September 1, 1818
London, England
The Honorable Caroline Storme huffed in annoyance when a couple drops of rain splattered the page of her drawing notebook. One of them stained the ivory paper while the other smeared the charcoal she used to sketch. It made a few lines of the drawing out of order, and in some irritation, she dabbed at the spot with her sleeve. That, of course, made an even bigger mess of things, so she furiously frowned at the page in disgust.
Though she forgot names with alarming regularity, she never forgot a face, and for the past few months, the subject of her drawings—when she did them of people at all—had been the same man: barrel chest, big frame, golden brown hair that curled just above his collar, tawny eyes like a lion, and a sensual mouth that when curved in a specific grin had the power to flutter her heartbeat. Which was odd because she was never allowed to be in the same room with a man alone… not that any had shown interest in her. Sometimes she would sketch him in wintertime clothing. At others, she would portray him rigged out in ballroom finery. Every once in a while, she portrayed him shirtless to the waist, but that wasn’t an accurate depiction, for she’d never seen any man in such a state of undress. Long ago her mind had buried his name, but her heart never wished to give him up.
Not that she minded. Once she’d done the preliminary sketches and she deemed them worthy enough, she took to her canvas and recreated the art using oil or watercolor paints depending on where the whim took her. Already, she had three such portraits hanging in the rooms of her London townhouse. Her cousin Andrew’s to be precise, and when that same cousin had questioned her as to who the man in the paintings was and she couldn’t say, he’d ordered her to cease drawing him.
She hadn’t followed through with that order. Instead, she’d merely moved the paintings into her dressing room and made certain they were hidden away from his prying, judgmental eyes. The man in her paintings gave her a sense of peace and calm; she had the impression that she’d met him somewhere before, but since her mind often jumbled things up—people, places, things, locations—she had no idea where to put him in those recollections. Perhaps if she ever saw him again, the memories would float to the forefront, and everything would make sense again.
Not that anything made sense. Or rather, it made sense to a point in her mind, but not to the people around her if she should try and explain.
It made for a lonely world.
Another few drops of rain fell to further mar her sketch. Giving into the ever-present anger that simmered in her chest, she ripped the page from her drawing pad, wadded it up, and then hurled it with a cry into the Serpentine River from her position on a large boulder in Hyde Park. It bobbed upon the constantly moving water and the current carried the paper away from her, only to become snagged in a cluster of water plants. A pair of ducks came over to investigate but eventually grew bored.
Caroline sighed. She’d come here to paint in the relative privacy and quiet of the park, for Andrew’s home was often mired in chaos and noise now that he had an infant daughter.
Not that he wasn’t loud on his own—he often reminded her of a bull stomping his way through London—but he’d been the one to remove her from the institution for the insane when no one else in the Storme family had cared. Odd, that, for she’d always thought of him as quite selfish. She’d spent twenty long years there, for her mind didn’t work like other people’s and her parents hadn’t known what to do about that. Twenty years of her life had been locked away from society, from her family, from anything that would have brought her joy, but now she lived in London, at a Mayfair address in her cousin the earl’s home, yet it still felt as if she were a prisoner, still waiting on the day when someone—anyone—would rescue her and set her free.
Like in the storybooks Isobel used to read her.
Were there such things as heroes and knights of old in the modern age?
When the rain began in earnest, Caroline closed her notebook and then slid from her perch on the boulder. Drat, drat, drat. Perhaps it hadn’t been the wisest decision to send the Hadleigh carriage back to the house, but she’d been intoxicated with a freedom of sorts, for her cousin had finally consented to let her take an outing by herself. Of course, she would not say no to being out of the townhouse. Andrew had been distracted with his babe as well as demands to his title, which had no doubt precipitated the decision, and truly, she was always someone’s responsibility.
Which never failed to annoy her. But she’d declined the accompaniment of her maid, and her cousin would bluster once he discovered that. There was too much pressure to talk and make her mind work correctly when others were with her. So, she’d come to Hyde Park alone, for it had sounded thrilling, and there’d be inspiration everywhere.
After a couple of hours wandering the grounds in unabated solitude, she’d decided to sketch for a bit. Then the dratted rain had ruined a perfectly good afternoon, and that meant a return to her gilded prison.
With another huff of annoyance, Caroline reached into her reticule. She yanked out a map of the area she’d drawn to help jog her memory and remind her of where she’d been and where she needed to go. Though she’d thought she had put clues and landmarks onto the paper to encourage her broken brain to identify her location, they were nowhere to be found on the map now. Perhaps she’d been distracted when she’d drawn it, or perhaps she was too flustered by the unexpected rain to locate them on the drawing.
Oh, yes, that was it. There’d been a pair of white swans on the water, and she’d wanted to sketch them. Then she’d let her mind wander back to her childhood when her sister Isobel would read fairy stories to her about brave knights who’d rescue trapped princesses from high towers and such. Sometimes there’d been swans in those stories. And then she wondered where the swans had spent their days when not on the water…
But none of that helped her now. The rain-spotted paper quickly lost its integrity, so it too was wadded up and hurled into the river.
“Why I cannot normal be?” she asked of no one in particular as the rain came down in earnest. Caroline cried out in frustration, for once again, the words that came out of her mouth had arranged themselves into an awkward pattern.
But she wasn’t and she never would be.
Having no choice except to run along the many pathways that intersected and crisscrossed through the park, all too soon Caroline was lost and disoriented. The rain had seeped through her spencer. The sensation of wet cloth against her skin wasn’t pleasant, and it took every shred of control not to rip the clothes from her person. Every direction she looked seemed unfamiliar. There was no clear way to proceed. Hot panic rose in her throat, for she didn’t know what to do.
And the rain kept coming down. Being wet had knots of worry pulling in her belly. Water had the tendency to bring on terror, for in the asylum they often dunked patients’ heads into tubs full of it in an effort to gauge their reactions and emotional responses for no reason Caroline could fathom. She was fine looking at water, but the second too much of it touched her skin, memories assailed her and often brought more confusion with them.
The panic intensified until it threatened to choke her. Blindly, she ran down paths and indiscriminately through shrubbery and landscaping in an attempt to find her way out of the park. As she spared a second to glance back over her shoulder, her forward momentum was abruptly halted when she ran bodily into the chest of a large man who promptly enclosed her into a protective embrace.
“Oh!” Immediately, the comforting scents of salt, sun, a breeze laden with exotic things, and beneath that leather and man. I’ve smelled that before. Some of her anxiety calmed. When she curled her fingers into his lapels, determined to hang on until the memory could surface in her brain, the man moved his hands to her shoulders to steady her.
“My apologies, miss. I sometimes need to be more careful as to where I’m going, but in an area as beautiful as Hyde Park, that’s a difficult endeavor.”
As much as she didn’t want him to talk and disrupt a delve into her mind, the rumble of his deep voice paired with that scent and the golden-brown eyes she stared up into yanked them from the jumbled attics of her mind. Excitement shuddered down her spine while at the same time, an odd sort of awareness prickled over her skin. Of course! “Mr. Butler, correct?” He was the man she’d met while at a Christmastide house party for the Stormes in the Derbyshire countryside, the man who had treated her with kindness and respect.
And he was the man she couldn’t stop painting. Perhaps now she would discover the answers as to why.
“Yes!” He bent his head and peered into her eyes, and she knew a moment of profound peace in those golden-brown—almost tawny—pools. Oh yes, she remembered those eyes! “Well, if this isn’t providential, I don’t know what is.” As his lips curved with a wide grin, butterflies set up a ballet in her belly. “Miss Storme. Imagine that.” Though the rain fell steadily onto both of them, he didn’t seem to mind. Neither did she, not now that he was there. The prickling panic regarding water wasn’t as prominent now that she could concentrate on something else. “How are you, aside from being wet and from the looks of it, frightened?”