LITMIR.BIZ

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by blood.

      But they’d always been together, for as long as Fanny could remember. From that day when, at no more than three years old, she had knelt beside her mother in the pretty, whitewashed island church, and the priest was holding up the chalice, and her mother bowed her head, striking her breast three times, once for each time the bell was rung on the altar.

      Just as the bell rang that third time, the cannon had exploded all around them, and Fanny had looked up, seen the blue sky, seen bits of the roof raining down on them before being pushed to the floor, her mother lying on top of her, protecting her.

      That’s where the man later to christen himself Ainsley Becket had found her, still half-crushed beneath her mother’s lifeless body. There were others, other survivors of the Spanish pirate’s attack that had come from the sea without warning, Rian among them. Three of the women still lived in Becket Village, but other mothers and their children, and the four other orphans of that day, had survived only to die several months later, when Edmund Beales attacked their island.

      Pirates. Brigands. Warm white sands and clear blue waters. Death. Death everywhere; once, and then again. Fanny barely remembered any of it. Just watching her mother beat at her breast as the bell rang, calling down the roof onto their heads…and Rian, only a few years her senior, but always there, always holding her hand, protecting her, swooping her up into his own thin arms that last day and carrying her deep into the trees, away from Edmund Beales’s treachery.

      She’d do anything to protect him, as well.

      Even see if he was right, that she was pretty. A pretty girl.

      Fanny tested the knot holding the colored scarf around her head, hiding her badly butchered blond hair, and flipped the edges of her cloak back over her shoulders, the better to display the rumpled gown she’d donned over her breeches once reaching Dover.

      “Don’t follow me, Molly,” she admonished the mare that hung her head as if she understood, and she probably did, for Molly was very intelligent, and Fanny had trained her well.

      Then Fanny stepped out of the shadows, heading directly toward the slim young boy in the scarlet uniform of the 13th Regiment cavalry. She’d chosen him for his regiment, for his youth, for his size.

      “You’re to be sailin’ off tonight, is it, you pretty thing?” she asked him, circling around both him and his horse, effectively cutting the youth from the herd of his fellow soldiers, all of them exhausted after sailing from Cove, their ship damaged enough that they’d had to put in at Dover for both repairs and provisions before following their two other ships to Ostend.

      It had been unbelievable good luck, an omen, Odette would have said, that she’d found some of the 13th here, on this overcrowded dock. Rian’s own regiment; fine, brave Irishmen from County Cork, and beyond. It had seemed fitting to Rian that he fight with the Irish, even if the only thing still Irish about him was his blood, and his name. For the past seventeen years, since the age of nine, since that bell had rung a third time, he had been a Becket.

      The young boy Fanny had singled out—he seemed such a child—dipped his head at Fanny’s question, swallowing down so hard that his Adam’s apple seemed ready to collide with his chin. “And that we are, Miss. Off to chase Boney back where he belongs, give him what for.”

      Fanny measured him with her eyes. Yes, this was good. He topped her own not inconsiderable height by only a few inches. “Well, God bless you then, boyo,” she said, pushing even more of a lilt into her voice. “And would you be wanting somethin’ to take with you then? A last kiss from a grateful lass late of County Clare? Mayhap a bit more than a kiss?”

      The young soldier looked about him, wetting his lips. “I’m not supposin’ you’d be offerin’ such a thing for free.”

      Fanny smiled. “And what are you takin’ me for, boyo? One of them loose wimmen?” She reached up, stroked his smooth cheek that had only a hint of peach fuzz. What was he? Sixteen? “No brave man should be goin’ off to fight without first bein’ with a willin’ lass, now should he?”

      “I been,” the soldier protested, his cheeks going red. “I been plenty.” He clasped his rifle with one hand and took her elbow with the other, even as she deftly grabbed on to his mount’s bridle, steering her toward the alleyway, which was right where she wanted to go. “But it’s quick we’ll be, a’fore the Sergeant-Major misses me, you hear?”

      Fanny felt herself pushed rather roughly against the wet brick as the boy fumbled, one hand holding her still even as he propped his rifle against the wall and began unbuttoning his breeches.

      That was helpful. He was giving her a head start, in a way, or so Fanny thought as she closed her eyes, whispered a quick “I’m so sorry” and brought the heel of the pistol she’d extracted from the pocket of her cloak down hard on the soldier’s temple.

      Fanny might be young, and slim, but she was also tall, and fairly strong. Bending only slightly beneath the dead weight of the soldier, she dragged him deeper into the alleyway and lowered him gently to the ground.

      She worked quickly, stripping the boy to his last little bit of clothing, for she was wearing Rian’s underclothes, and didn’t much care to exchange them for drawers that looked, even in this dim light, capable of standing up by themselves.

      Five minutes later, leaving behind a small purse of coins, as well as a rough pair of trousers and a shirt for the boy to cover himself with when he awoke, and with her white braces in place across her now red-coated chest, the rifle slung over her shoulder, as well as the heavy pack containing the best of the soldier’s gear and her own, Fanny emerged from the alleyway once more, leading Molly and the black gelding by the reins of their bridles.

      She stayed between the two horses and kept her head down as she joined the men just now being formed up to go aboard, wondering if she’d just saved one young Irish life, but never doubting her own fate.

      Ostend awaited. Brussels awaited.

      Rian, although he didn’t know it yet, awaited.

      CHAPTER THREE

      RIAN BECKET sat alone at a back table in a small roadside tavern in an area he believed was called something akin to Scendelbeck, the top button of his uniform opened, his overlong black hair damp and plastered against his forehead above bright blue eyes that hadn’t seen more than a few hours of sleep in several weeks.

      So much for the romance and glory of war.

      Thus far, that war consisted of a prodigious amount of parading under a hot sun or a drenching downpour, a good deal of tending to his horse, a measure of drinking, and much too much sitting and waiting.

      At least at long last Rian had seen the man he’d been cheated out of meeting last year in London, as the Duke of Wellington himself had just today inspected their forces, along with the Prince of Orange, the Duc de Berri, the Duke of Brunswick and even Field Marshal Blücher, the man, it was said, who had drunk half of London under the table when there last August for, it turned out now, the premature Peace Celebrations.

      “Lieutenant Rian Becket?”

      Rian looked up at the tall man standing in front of the table, about to rise if that man had been wearing a uniform. But as he wasn’t, and looked very much as if the clothes he did stand up in were the same clothes he’d laid down in several nights in a row, Rian only slipped lower on his spine in the wooden chair and motioned for the fellow to join him.

      “I’d offer you some of my wine,” Rian said, hefting the dark blue bottle in front of him, “but as you can see, alas, I’ve finished the last of it. You know my name. If you’d now return the favor, perhaps we can then split a new bottle.”

      The sandy-haired ruffian—he did, truly, look the ruffian—smiled as he sat down and extended his hand. “Valentine Clement, Mr. Becket, at your service. Jack Eastwood wrote to me, asked that I—”

      “Jack? Oh, bloody hell,” Rian swore, sitting up straight while ignoring the man’s outstretched

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