Freyja sighed and settled for sleep. The bed was somewhat lumpy. The pillow was worse. There was a constant noise from the yard below and the inn about her. The blankets did not block out all the light. And there was Bath to look forward to tomorrow. All because going home had become a near impossibility to her. Could life get any bleaker?

Sometime soon, she thought just before she drifted off to sleep, she really was going to have to start looking seriously at all the gentlemen-and there were many of them despite the fact that she was now five and twenty and always had been ugly-who would jump through hoops if she were merely to hint that marriage to her might be the prize. Being single at such an advanced age really was no fun for a lady. The trouble was that she was not wholly convinced that being married would be any better. And it would be too late to discover that it really was not after she had married. Marriage was a life sentence, her brothers were fond of saying-though two of the four had taken on that very sentence within the past few months.

Freyja awoke with a start some indeterminate time later when the door of her room opened suddenly and then shut again with an audible click. She was not even sure she had not dreamed it until she looked and saw a man standing just inside the door, clad in a white, open-necked shirt and dark pantaloons and stockings, a coat over one arm, a pair of boots in the other hand.

Freyja shot out of bed as if ejected from a fired cannon and pointed imperiously at the door.

"Out!" she said.

The man flashed her a grin, which was all too visible in the near-light room.

"I cannot, sweetheart," he said. "That way lies certain doom. I must go out the window or hide somewhere in here."

"Out!" She did not lower her arm-or her chin. "I do not harbor felons. Or any other type of male creature. Get out!"