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He hoped he wasn’t staring at Anne Sutton like the lighthouse who could guide and safeguard his path.

She—an utter stranger—somehow felt like the one person who could translate all this strangeness for him.

Make it legible, this land he’d returned to.

Put things back in their proper order, and make him believe his path wasn’t lined with mines or shrapnel waiting to come at him from some hidden angle.

But she’d seen how the Earl of St. Vincent had hailed him. And so had everyone else.

“Ought I congratulate you?” Hew asked finally.

She lifted her chin. “On what?”

“Your engagement.”

She turned her face toward the cloudy glass of the window. “Save your felicitations, please.”

What a profile she had. Comely was a staggering understatement for the beauty that Anne Sutton possessed.

It might be a word used of her face were she captured in a portrait or even in a cameo.

But with the living spirit of the woman to animate it, that face was the stuff of legend, of epic poetry.

She could launch a thousand ships and a hundred more.

That bold, straight nose would no doubt, to some, pose an argument against the full measure of beauty, at odds with the sweet slope of her brow, the delicate cheekbones, the pert chin.

But Hew liked the indication of strength in that noble nose and the straight line of jaw that hinted she was clenching her teeth.

Good teeth, white teeth, cared-for teeth.

With her milky skin and glorious hair and the sweetly rounded bosom tucked under a modest lace kerchief, she was the image of English womanhood, everything he was sworn to protect.

All that beauty meant for his worthless, petulant brother.

He’d found her savagely tearing apart myrtle, declaring marriage was a trap and a lie. Clearly, Anne Sutton did not anticipate wedded bliss with Calvin. “But why?”

His mother, sitting beside Hew on the forward-facing seat, spoke for the first time. Till now she’d been staring at Hew with her mouth moving in silent expressions, of what, he didn’t know. Curses? Prayers of protection?

Hew knew he wasn’t the cocky, handsome lad who’d sailed away five years ago with the rank of an officer sewn on his sleeve, and he wasn’t the slightly graver young man who’d been granted a brief leave a year later.

The years of wear and danger had left their mark; every ugly choice he’d made, he wore on his face.

“Calvin has rather a bit to do to mend things with Miss Sutton,” his mother said. “There has been a misunderstanding.”

Anne raised her brows. They were chestnut brown, like her lashes, a contrast to her guinea-gold hair. Hew sensed, from her expression, that his mother had delivered a magnificently inappropriate gloss on a tricky situation.

“I should think you’d wish better for him than me, madam,” Anne said flatly. “Given my father has lost all his fortune and left Daron and me with nothing.”

“All his fortune?”

He was too used to the bluntness of soldiers and knew the remark was inadvisable even before she scowled. Yet he’d been under the impression that the Sutton fortune was large. One would have to approach the squandering of it with a degree of concentration, or outrageous bad luck.

“Now, now.” His mother toyed with her chatelaine as if she might resort to her smelling salts once more. “Calvin esteems you for your own self, Anne.”

“Does he?” Anne replied, and turned a wooden face toward the window.

She was holding something back, though with the greatest of restraint, given the way her knuckles clenched the reticule in her lap.

Hew wondered what Calvin had done. He’d hoped time and years would mature his brother, bring out some hidden vein of honor.

Surely with Hew gone, after their father’s death, Calvin would have come to some sense of responsibility.

“You could say no.” Hew’s voice came out roughly, scraping like an iron chain over stone. A sound he knew well. “Refuse to marry, if you don’t wish to.”

“Oh, good heavens, how simple a solution. I wonder I did not think of it.” She returned to the window in a huff.

Being in the army roughened a man. Acre wasn’t a place where the officers dined their ladies or entertained diplomats and their wives.

All Hew had known in the last few years was artillery blasts and the noise of battle, hot, dry, and filthy, and then a cold prison that stank of plague and despair.

He might have become careless of the finer points of etiquette.

But he was certain Anne Sutton was treating him as rudely as possible without hurling direct insults into his face.

Hew looked to his mother for an explanation.

She plucked at the ruffles about her waist, flipping them in and out of place. “Calvin has had a difficult time,” she said weakly. “After the passing of your father.”

“Difficult how?”

His mother’s eyes flitted to Anne, who held herself stiffly, but Hew could almost see her little ears pricking.

“His behavior has … not been as I might wish. No need to discuss it here.” His mother forced a smile. “Let’s get you home and settled first, shall we? The dinners and parties I must plan! All our friends will want to see you, Hew.”

Home . He’d forgotten what home felt like, looked like.

He’d forgotten what safety meant. For so long he’d lived with the shuddering jolts of artillery thudding into the pocked earth, long mindless stretches of time interrupted by surprise attacks, the day framed by the muezzin’s ululating call to prayer.

The English countryside was so bloody pastoral.

Bullfinch and pipits peeped from the leaves of the alder and wych elm climbing the slope of the old fort built before the time of the Romans.

A breeze stirred shushing waves on the River Ebbw as they passed Pye Corner and Bassaleg, turning up the track toward Tregwilym.

The leather and wood creak of the coach, the clop of the horses’ hooves on the roadway, was a lullaby compared to the throaty cacophony of a ship under full sail.

Prison had not been silent either, not with the wails of the despairing, the screams of the tortured, the whimpers of the starving, and the dragging chains of the mad who could not keep still.

The quiet here might well drive Hew out of his head.

Looking at Anne Sutton, for some reason, made the sudden tension in his muscles recede. The gathering noise in his head subsided. There was something so calming about her. She soothed his fretting like the hot milk posset his nurse used to make him at bedtime.

He couldn’t deny the parts of him stirred by her beauty, but he had learned, through long deprivation, to ignore those baser urges. It was her civilized demeanor that called to him, that mixture of grace, intelligence, and fortitude, a balm on his raw and wounded edges.

He didn’t deserve such soothing. He’d been a savage for far too long; there was no redeeming him now.

And Anne Sutton wasn’t for him. She was trapped in this carriage with his mother and a war-scarred, bitter soldier, and somehow, though it seemed she disliked the idea, she’d been claimed by his brother.

Who, it seemed, had not improved from the sulky, arrogant boy who threw a tantrum at watching his favorite playmate go to war.

They passed the iron gates leading to Tredegar Park and its acres and acres of elegant landscaping, with the enormous red-brick house nestled at its heart like a jewel.

That was the place for a woman like Anne.

A stately mansion, embossed with the elegance of a past age more mannerly and courteous than this one.

Greenfield, for all its grandeur, was a poky dower house compared to Tredegar.

She likely knew this, and perhaps it was one reason she resented her obligation.

She was going to marry Calvin. The thought twisted Hew’s gut as if a grappling hook had caught him there.

It was time to bring his mind away from Anne Sutton and back to his mission.

Back to the reason he had returned to Wales, aside from the wish to quiet the roaring in his head, aside from the hope to redeem himself, which apparently was as vain as all his other dreams had become in the last few months.

“Are the Goulds in residence?” Hew asked his mother. “At Tredegar House, that is. I imagine Sir Charles, the old judge, is and always will be MP for Breconshire.” Sir Charles could be a formidable ally in Hew’s cause.

His mother pursed her lips. It had been one thing when Gould inherited the Morgan estate and adopted the surname as well as the house.

A new knight in the area was on her footing, the knight’s lady her equal.

But then George III made Sir Charles a baronet so he might have a title worthy of the Morgan wealth, and that rankled.

Never mind that the family had seen their share of troubles, if Hew’s memory served. One son had died young, another in action when he was barely twenty, and a daughter’s first husband, a naval captain, had left her widowed a few years ago.

“And the heir, Charles,” Hew added. “Where has he been kicking about, now that he cashed in his colors and retired?”

The baronet’s eldest son and heir, a captain in the Coldstream Guards, had been taken prisoner at Yorktown during the fight with the American Colonies and was fortunate to return home.

Hew would categorically deny that any of Charles’s stories had fed his imagination about seeing new lands and peoples, even down the barrel of a gun.

He had run away to enroll in the Royal Military Academy by his own lights, and not to impress his friends, a neighbor he looked up to, or a father who would not, under any circumstances, admit that his eldest son and heir would ever be worthy of his approval and commendation.

When Hew passed the difficult entrance examination and was admitted as a Gentleman Cadet, first class, all Sir Lambert was heard to remark was that of course Hewitt would not simply buy his colors, as was the done thing, but would instead choose the one segment of the army, the Regiment of Artillery, where a man had to work his way up, prove his worth, and earn his commission as an officer.

Lady Vaughn shifted on her seat, gazing out the window at the squared brick expanse of St. Basil’s church in Bassaleg, home to generations of Tredegar’s honored dead and, more recently, Sir Lambert Vaughn.

Hew hadn’t been present for his father’s death or interment; he wasn’t allowed leave.

And he knew his mother would never forgive him for that.

“Charles is MP for Monmouthshire now,” his mother said. “He’ll inherit Tredegar, and his wife, Mary Magdalen, can talk of nothing else. But then she was only the daughter of a naval captain, so this is quite a step up for her.”

Anne winced, and Hew wondered what accounted for the expression that drew together her brows.

Unplucked brows, with a delicate arch, giving her an innocent, vaguely surprised expression.

Her lips must naturally be that coral color, since she would long ago have rubbed off any paint by the way she pressed them so tightly together.

And the flush on her cheek that rose, then faded, told him she was wearing neither rouge nor lead paint.

She didn’t need anything to accent her native beauty. The longer he gazed at her, the brighter she blazed, until now it almost pained him to look upon her.

His brother would escort this woman on his arm at parties and dinners, and perhaps a drawing room of the Queen’s, if he took her to London to celebrate their marriage. He would behold her down the dining table from him at breakfast and dinner.

He would have the liberty of her bed.

Hew had thought, as the frigate ferried him and the last of the troops and guns away, leaving Acre nothing but a golden-brown line on the distant horizon, that the breeze over the Mediterranean might blow away the haze of acrid smoke that had filled his lungs and his head for so long.

He’d been certain, as the ship passed Gibraltar and nosed into the cold Atlantic, that the worst of the torture lay behind him and in time would fade only to nightmares.

He’d thought he could leave it all behind.

He’d imagined, all this time, that home in Wales, with the green hills and the dreamy valleys and the very different kind of sea, would be a refuge, a haven, a paradise after the dry, flat land of the Levant.

That with British food and British songbirds and the staunch, stolid sounds of the English language in his ears, he’d forget the scars he bore and the pain in his body would fade, eased by the damp breezes and the thick sky and the thinner, gentler sun.

Now he saw that a worse fate awaited him, a torment he could never have imagined. This creature was staying in his home, belonging to his brother, and Hew would live within sight of a glory he had never thought to long for, but now would be reminded every day he could never have.

The real torture was only beginning.