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ring was far too small. Not his then, but obviously something he dropped and would miss. But would he know he lost it here? And would he come back for it? She wrapped it tightly in a handkerchief and placed it in her reticule. She would hold on to it for now.
    She ate and washed up, focusing her worry on the more immediate problem to her mind—the overdue rent. Mysterious intruders scaring her with tales out of a faery book would have to wait. A tightness knotted her stomach. Her meeting with Mr. Porter hung above her like a cloud. She’d donned her best gown, hoping it gave her an air of respectability. Her landlord was a stickler for propriety, but she wondered if after last night she had any reputation left to protect. She tugged on her gloves. Mr. Porter knew her. He should know she didn’t entertain strange men in her home.
    And Conor Bligh was as strange as they came.
    Her cheeks grew hot remembering his kiss. After twenty-two years following the drum with her father, she knew men, how they thought and how they acted. Conor Bligh was a prime example of all the worst characteristics of the male species. The kind of man her father had always warned her about. After the heated kiss she and Conor had shared, she could understand why. It was far too easy to get lost in that swooping wild joining of lips and tongues. To be teased into thinking that heady pleasure signified something more.
    The hazy blue sky and the twittering of larks in the hawthorn trees around the cottage had dispelled the last lingering shadows of the night before, but stepping out the front door, she was brought up short. The bushes and flowers beneath both front windows lay crushed and scattered. And in the lane and garden hundreds of footprints had churned the drying mud into ruts. A muddy handprint dirtied one windowsill, as if someone had stood and peered into the cottage. Waves of heat and then cold washed over her, and she swallowed over and over, trying to calm herself. Keun Marow , Conor had called them. Hunters from the faery world sent to find her.
    Suddenly, the empty lane seemed ominous and the quiet morning felt oppressive. She needed normal. She needed people and the comforting surround of the village. She hurried down the harbor road toward Carnebwen, thinking even the dreaded company of Mr. Porter would be welcome now.

Chapter Four
     
    By the time Ellery left the milliner’s, the day’s warm weather had given way to evening’s dirty gray clouds and a chill breeze. Disapproving stares and barbed comments followed her up the harbor road toward home, but she refused to feel ashamed. She’d lived her whole life in the shadow of such unjustified cruelty. At least it was her own supposed sin she was being scolded for this time and not the guilt of her parents.
    A crowd of young women watched her pass, a flurry of whispers springing up in her wake. One girl, bolder than the others, spoke in a carrying voice. “Her brother, he says. I’m wishin’ I had a brother or two like him.”
    The giggles that followed this jibe almost made Ellery whip around and answer the accusations. She was saved from doing so by the approach of a lanky, round-shouldered gentleman dressed in a fashionable coat of dark blue and a cravat tied up to his long jowls, a huge pearl nestled among the folds. “Haven’t you anything better to do, Miss Yeovil, than to mock your betters?” He shook a dismissive hand at the group. “Off with the lot of you!”
    He eyed the women as if they had crawled from beneath a rock, his demeanor as well as his words scattering the group like a fox among hens. Shifting his attention to Ellery, he sketched her a bow. “Your pardon for that display of incivility, Miss Reskeen.”
    Not sure whose incivility he was speaking to, she merely gave him a grateful smile while inwardly wishing him to the devil. “My thanks, Mr. Porter. I’m sure they meant no harm.”
    “Low-born trollops, and no better than they should be,” he