Early July 1816

Crowhurst Castle, Cornwall


“How the devil did they break the mill?” Gervase Tregarth, 6th Earl of Crowhurst, paced before the hearth in the elegant drawing room of Crowhurst Castle. The exasperation of a man driven to the limits of frustration colored his face, tone and every long-legged stride. “And am I to surmise that they were also behind all the rest? The broken fences, the damaged boats, the mix-up with the grain, the unexplained ringing of the church bells at midnight?”

Swinging around, he pinned his stepmother, Sybil, with a sharply interrogatory, hard hazel gaze.

Seated on the chaise, a silk shawl about her shoulders, Sybil returned his stare with a blank look, as if she hadn’t fully comprehended his meaning.

Gervase knew better. Sybil was wondering how to answer. She knew he was one step away from losing his temper, and would much rather he didn’t. He narrowed his eyes even further. “They were, weren’t they? Of course they were.”

His voice had lowered to a growl; the past months of futile traveling to London only to be summoned back within a few days to deal with some inexplicable calamity flashed across his mind-and frayed the reins of his temper even more. “What in all creation do they think they’re about?”

He wasn’t shouting, but the force behind his words was enough to overset a more robust female than Sybil; he drew in a breath and tamped down his welling fury. The “they” he and she were discussing were her daughters-his three half sisters-currently featuring as the bane of his life.

Belinda, Annabel and Jane took after their father, as did he, which was why Sybil, mild, sweet Sybil, fair-haired and gentle, was entirely unable to control them. Or comprehend them; all three were more intelligent, clever and quick than she. They were also more vigorous, bold and outgoing, altogether more confident.

He, on the other hand, shared with the three the affinity of character. They’d always been close; as their adored older and only brother, he’d grown accustomed to them being on his side.

Or at least operating on some form of Tregarth logic he could understand.

Instead, over the past six months they’d apparently transformed from lovable if mischievous hoydens of whom he was deeply fond to secretive, demon-inspired harpies whose primary focus in life was to drive him demented.

His last question had thus been rhetorical; if he couldn’t fathom what had possessed his dear sisters to stage what amounted to six months of guerrilla mayhem designed to overthrow his sanity, he didn’t imagine Sybil would.

Yet to his surprise she looked down, and picked at her shawl’s fringe. “Actually…” She strung the word out, then glanced up at him. “I think it’s because of what happened to the Hardesty girls.”

“The Hardesty girls?” He halted, frowned, struggling to place them. “The Hardestys of Helston Grange?”

Sybil nodded. “Robert Hardesty-Lord Hardesty now his father is dead-went to London last September, and came home with a wife.”

Gervase’s recollection of Robert Hardesty was of a wet-behind-the-ears whelp, but that memory was more than twelve years old. “Robert must be…what? Twenty-five?”

“Twenty-six, I believe.”

“A trifle young for marriage perhaps, yet if, as I suppose, he has his sisters to establish, a wife seems a sensible addition to his household.” His sisters’ futures rated as one of the many reasons he himself felt compelled to wed. Gervase tried to recall the Hardesty girls, but drew a blank. “His sisters are about Belinda’s age, aren’t they?”

“A year or two older-eighteen and seventeen. Everyone thought Melissa and Katherine would be presented this past Season, and with Robert marrying…well, we all imagined that the new Lady Hardesty-a young widow said to have been a London beauty-would, naturally, take the girls under her wing.”

From Sybil’s tone it was clear the generally held expectations hadn’t been met. “What happened?”

“Robert brought his lady home just before Christmas.” Sybil’s rosebud lips tightened into an expression of severe disapprobation. “In January, with the snows still blocking the roads, Robert dispatched Melissa and Katherine to visit their aunt in York. It seemed his new wife wanted time to settle into her new life without the distraction of having to deal with the girls. However, it’s now July and the girls are still in York. Meanwhile, Lady Hardesty spent the Season in London, then returned to the Grange a week ago with a bevy of London friends in tow. I understand she’s told Robert that it would not be wise to have the girls return home while they have so many London gentlemen under their roof.”

Gervase stood before the fireplace staring at Sybil while he grappled with the implied connection. Then he blinked. “Am I to understand…” Lifting his head, he looked past Sybil, trying to see the Hardesty story from his sisters’ perspective. “They can’t possibly be equating me with Robert Hardesty.”

His tone made it clear he found the notion inconceivable. He refocused on Sybil’s face in time to meet her widening eyes.

“Well, of course they are, dear. The parallels are rather obvious.”

He felt his face harden. “No. They’re not.” He paused, then growled, “Good God! They can’t seriously imagine-”

He broke off and looked toward the main door as it opened to admit his half sisters. He’d sent for them the instant he’d stalked into his front hall, having been met in the castle forecourt by Gregson, the local bailiff, with the news that the three had been discovered creeping away from the mill just after midnight. Subsequently, it had been discovered that the mill was no longer functional.

Despite the best efforts of the miller, it still wasn’t.

In the wake of the string of strange accidents that had plagued the estate for the past six months, Gervase and Gregson had set up a secret watch. But the very last culprits they’d expected to catch were the three schoolgirls who marched into the room.

Belinda, the eldest, led the small procession. At sixteen she was already taller than Sybil and bade fair to turn men’s heads with her lustrous light brown hair and long, long legs. But if the expression on her heart-shaped face was any guide, any man would have his hands full with her. Defiant determination oozed from every pore and flashed in her hazel eyes.

She lifted her chin as she halted behind the chaise, facing Gervase, meeting his hard gaze with her own Tregarth stubbornness.

Annabel, fairer in coloring, with almost blond hair and blue eyes, ranged alongside Belinda. There was less than a year between them, and barely an inch; while Belinda had started to wear her hair up, Annabel was content to let her long pale tresses ripple over her shoulders in a romantic veil.

Gervase met Annabel’s eyes, and saw the same trenchant purpose infusing Belinda repeated there.

Increasingly wary, he shifted his gaze to the third and youngest of the three, lowering it to her sweet, delicate face, still very much that of a child. Jane was barely ten, and had always been devoted to him. Confined in neat plaits on either side of her small face, her hair was a darker brown than the others’, more his coloring, but her eyes were Sybil’s blue.

Meeting those usually innocent orbs, Gervase was faintly stunned to encounter unwavering, resolute determination-further accentuated by the set of her little chin.

Keeping his own expression impassive, he glanced again at the other two, mentally at sea. What on earth had changed them? Why…why had they lost faith in him?

He suddenly comprehended that he was treading on ground that wasn’t as firm as he’d thought. He had to go carefully.

Where to start?

He let the silence stretch, but while Sybil fidgeted, her daughters were made of sterner stuff. They just waited for him to speak, their gazes locked on him.

“I’ve just heard from Gregson that the three of you were caught leaving the mill last night, apparently after sabotaging it. The mill is still out of action, and John Miller is in danger of losing what little hair he has left. I’ll admit I’m having trouble believing that the three of you could be so unthinking as to deliberately cause Miller and all those who rely on the mill so much unnecessary trouble for no good reason. So I assume you have an excellent reason for what you’ve done-I hope you’ll share it with me, so I can explain your actions to the rest of the neighborhood.”

Belinda’s chin tilted a fraction higher. “We do have an excellent reason-for the mill and all the rest.” She briefly scanned his eyes, confirming that he had, indeed, guessed about “all the rest.” “However,” she continued, “you might not wish to make that reason public. We had to find ways to bring you back from London, and preferably keep you here, although as of yet we haven’t managed the latter.”

“We thought we’d be able to make you stay by creating a mystery by ringing the bells,” Annabel said, “but you just took away the ropes. So we had to think of something else.”

“None of the other things we did kept you at home.” Jane looked at him severely, as if that were his fault. “You just came home and fixed them, and then left again-back to London.”

It was, apparently, his fault.

He was starting to feel a little disoriented. “Why do you want me to stay at home?”

Belinda shifted, lips pressing together; he could see she was hunting not for just words but for how to explain. The other two looked at her, deferring to her. Eventually she met his eyes. “We asked you to stay, each of us every time, but you always just smiled and insisted that you had to go back to town. We suspected-well, everyone in the neighborhood knew-that you were going there to find a wife. We didn’t want you to do that, but we couldn’t just say so, could we? You wouldn’t have listened to us, that was obvious. So we had to find some other way of stopping you.”

He stared at her. “You don’t want me to find a wife?”

“We don’t want you to find a wife in London.” Belinda capped the statement with a definite nod-repeated by the other two, one after the other.

It was, indeed, as Sybil had guessed. Compressing his lips, he battled to shore up a patience that six months of mayhem-let alone all the futile racing back and forth-had worn wafer-thin. “Sybil has just told me about the situation with the Hardestys.” He managed to keep his tone even, his diction not so clipped that it would cut. He was still very fond of them, even if they’d temporarily turned into bedlamites. “You can’t seriously imagine that I would marry a lady who I would subsequently allow to send you away.”

Yes, they could. Yes, they did.

They didn’t say the words. They didn’t have to; the truth was writ large in their eyes, in their expressions.

He felt positively insulted, and didn’t know what to say-how to defend himself. The idea that he needed to was irritation enough.

“I’m older, and wiser, and far more experienced than Robert Hardesty. Just because he’s married unwisely is no reason whatever to imagine I’ll do the same.”

The look Belinda bent on him was as contemptuously pitying as only a younger sister could manage; it was mirrored to an unsettling degree by Annabel and Jane.

“Gentlemen,” Belinda stated, “always think they know what they’re doing when it comes to ladies, and they never do. They think they’re in charge, but they’re blind. Any lady worth the title knows that gentlemen, once hooked, can be led by the nose if the lady is so minded. So if an attractive London lady gets her hooks into you, and decides like Lady Hardesty that having girls like us to puff-off isn’t a proposition she wants to take on, where will that leave us?”

“Living in the North Riding with Great-Aunt Agatha,” Annabel supplied.

“So it was obvious we had to take action,” Jane concluded. Her eyes narrowed on Gervase. “Drastic action-whatever was necessary.”

Before he could even think of a reply, Belinda went on, “And there’s no use citing your age as any indication of your wisdom in such matters. You’ve spent the last twelve years out of society-it’s not a case of your skills in this regard being rusty so much as you’ve never developed the relevant skills at all.”

“It’s not the same as if you’d spent those years in London,” Annabel informed him, “watching and learning about choosing a wife.”

“This is not a battlefield on which you have any experience,” Jane declared in her most serious voice. “In this theater, you’re vulnerable.”

She was obviously reciting arguments they’d discussed at length; just the thought was horrifying. Trying to assimilate their unexpected and peculiarly female point of view was making Gervase giddy.