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“This one is beautiful. I won’t want a new ring, all I want is you,” she said, kissing him lightly.

“Your parents won’t be happy, especially your mother,” he warned.

It was true. Her mother had been trying for months to place her in front of all the “eligible” bachelors of Eyemouth. Andrew, Mamma never ceased telling Lavinia, did not rank in their numbers. Not for a gentleman’s daughter.

“You should never have allowed her to run around half-wild with that Colter boy,” she’d overheard Mamma scold her father. “There are already rumors about the two of them.”

“Rumors?” her father had said sharply, in a way that made Lavinia even more determined than ever not to give Andrew up.

Her mother, however, was proving to be equally as determined. The day after Lavinia had turned sixteen, Mamma had begun to talk about taking her to Edinburgh to give her a proper season—a prospect that horrified her. She didn’t want a season. The man she loved might be gone for months at a time, but she wanted to be in Eyemouth whenever he returned.

“I’ll weather the rumors,” she said, cupping his face with her hand. “Just promise me you’ll come back to me.”

“I promise. I love you.”

He kissed her then, slowly untying the shawl from around her shoulders as she pushed his jacket down his arms, and they lost themselves in a tangle of clothes and love and promises of the future.

A few hours later, Lavinia fell back into her bed with a smile on her face. There were few things certain in life, but she knew that she could rely on the ocean’s tides, the rising of the sun, and the simple fact that Andrew Colter would always come back to her.

Chapter One

London, sixteen years later

ANDREW COLTER WAS tired. Exhausted. Fatigued. Done through. Twenty years of sailing would do that to a man. Journey after journey, he’d worked his way up from messboy to able seaman to first mate before finally becoming the captain of the Endeavor, a fast ship that had transported everything from gold to silk to rum at a healthy profit for company, captain, and crew. Now, however, as he gazed out over the docks of London from the Endeavor’s bridge, an incredible calm settled around him. That, he supposed, was what the promise of retirement did to a man.

Andrew knew he was young to be giving up his captaincy, but then, most men hadn’t seen the things he’d seen or done what he’d done to survive. He was a living myth among sailors, whispered about when he walked into taverns in far-flung trading ports. He’d stood down pirates and enemy ships. With a good wind behind him, he’d broken records, sailing from port to port and winning hefty bonuses in gold for his troubles. But it was the shipwreck in the thrashing waters of a storm off of South America that had solidified his legend.

Now he was finished. The young sailors would have to find another man to watch with wide eyes over their grog in every anonymous tavern from here to Tortuga.

He pushed back from the balustrade and rolled his shoulders. The shipping company he sailed under had already been informed of his decision to go to shore, but there was one last thing he had to do. One last i to dot before he could settle into an easy life with a little sailing dinghy he could take out during the day before ending his night in front of a roaring fire, a book in his hand, and a loyal dog at his feet.

The scrape of wooden clogs on the deck brought his attention to the stairs leading up to the bridge. A small boy with a bleached white straw hat jammed on unruly black hair waited and watched.

“Yes?” Andrew asked.

The boy scrambled up the rest of the way, a letter gripped in his hand. There was hardly any dirt under his blunt, short-clipped nails. Whoever employed him must demand a degree of personal hygiene not often seen on the docks.

“A letter for you, Captain Colter, sir,” the boy said.

He took it and retrieved a coin from deep inside his jacket pocket. “For your troubles.”

The boy bobbed a bow, gripping the coin as though it were as precious as a Tahitian pearl.

Andrew flipped the envelope over and cracked the plain circle of stamped wax with a creeping sense of dread. Scribbled on the paper was no salutation or signature, just the words Eleven o’clock at Home.

Andrew crumpled the paper into a tight ball and dropped it over the side of the ship, watching the water soak it before dragging it down into the Thames along with the rest of London’s refuse. He’d been summoned and, even though Home was exactly where he needed to go to finish the last of his business, it grated. They were reminding him that no matter how many steps ahead he thought himself, they were always better informed, faster, cannier.

Well, he’d be damned if he was going to be their pawn any longer.

After a word to his first mate, he mounted the gangway and strode onto the docks. Smatterings of Cantonese, Portuguese, and Dutch mixed with English as people streamed around him, some hauling cargo to be loaded onto ships and other, hawking their wares. The chaotic bustle of a working port had once excited him, but now he just put his head down and walked.

This is good, he reasoned as he wove his way out into Freemasons Road and waved down a passing hansom cab. If they were to meet at Home, Rickman would be there and likely so would Admiral Perry. He’d hear them out, refuse whatever insane mission they wanted him to execute, and then tender his resignation. Home had never been filled with reasonable men, as a rule, but now that he had no ship under his command they could have very little use for him any longer.

The cab jostled along through the dirty streets of Whitechapel, the City, and Covent Garden before coming to the broad boulevards of St. James’s. On Pall Mall, in front of an imposingly grand and suitably somber building, the driver pulled the horse up short. Andrew paid the man, tugged on the edge of the coat that made up his best suit of shore clothes, and steeled himself before mounting the steps up to Cumberland House.

Inside, the marble hallways were cool and quiet. It had been eighteen months since he’d been here last—before he and the Endeavor had been dispatched to Constantinople to support the British blockade keeping the Russians out of the city during the fighting with Turkey—but nothing had changed. There was still a preternatural calm about the place that belied the hum of activity behind heavy oaken doors, for while London might sleep, the War Office never did.

Up two flights of stairs and down a twisting maze of corridors, Andrew found the small, unmarked door that was Home. He let himself in and nodded to the reedy young man sitting behind a broad desk before pushing open the door to the back office.