He was desperate, unlikely to stick at anything. Ladies across the land were being careful to stay in their homes at night unless escorted by a gentleman, and men were going about armed until the fellow was caught. As he would be; it was merely a question of when. He could be anywhere in England, although the authorities were most particularly scouring the coastal areas, certain that the man would try to flee the country. And Lands End was one of those areas under constant surveillance.

Not that Amanda was unduly worried about coming face to face with a murderer. Of all the places in England that he could choose to run to, it seemed unlikely that he would pick her own small stretch of beach. No, she had more pressing worries on her mind than a madman who was probably hundreds of miles away. Only last evening she had received word from her half brother, Edward, the sixth Duke of Brookshire, that he had made final the arrangements for her marriage-arrangements that had been undertaken with nary a word to her. In four months’ time, he had written to her, just a week to the day before her eighteenth birthday, she would become the bride of Lord Robert Turnbull, a plumpish, balding forty-year-old, nephew to Edward’s late mother, the first wife of Amanda’s father, and cousin to Edward himself.

She would not do it. Oh, she knew she had to marry, and marry well. There was no other course open to a lady of her background and breeding, and she had long since come to accept its inevitability. But not to Lord Robert. Why, he was old and fat, and had already buried one wife-who had been a considerable heiress, if she remembered correctly. Amanda knew that she would, upon her marriage-if that marriage met with Edward’s approval-come into a tidy fortune of her own. With that as her dowry and her own not-inconsiderable charms, she had thought to be able to look as high for a husband as she chose.