“Royce! Dalziel-whatever you call yourself these days-stop!”

He kept walking.

“Damn it, I am not going to-refuse to-scurry after you!”

He halted. Head rising, he considered the list of those who would dare address him in such words, in such a tone.

The list wasn’t long.

Slowly, he half turned and looked back at the lady, who patently didn’t know in what danger she stood. Scurry after him? She should be fleeing in the opposite direction. But…

Long-ago recollection finally connected with present fact. Those rich autumn eyes were the key. He frowned. “Minerva?”

Those fabulous eyes were no longer wide, but narrowed in irritation; her lush lips had compressed to a grim line.

“Indeed.” She hesitated, then, clasping her hands before her, lifted her chin. “I gather you aren’t aware of it, but I’m chatelaine here.”

Contrary to Minerva’s expectation, the information did not produce any softening in the stony face regarding her. No easing of the rigid line of his lips, no gleam of recognition in his dark eyes-no suggestion that he’d realized she was someone he needed to help him, even though, at last, he’d placed her: Minerva Miranda Chesterton, his mother’s childhood friend’s orphaned daughter. Subsequently his mother’s amanuensis, companion, and confidante, more recently the same to his father, although that was something he most likely didn’t know.

Of the pair of them, she knew precisely who she was, what she was, and what she had to do. He, in contrast, was probably uncertain of the first, even more uncertain of the second, and almost certainly had no clue as to the third.

That, however, she’d been prepared for. What she wasn’t prepared for, what she hadn’t foreseen, was the huge problem that now faced her. All six-plus feet of it, larger and infinitely more powerful in life than even her fanciful imagination had painted him.