2. Chapter 2

The second his horse reared, Callum knew it was his fault.

Near asleep, he'd only seen the slightest flash of white before his stallion jerked, flinging its front hooves upward and doing its damnedest to throw him off the saddle.

He needed to be done with this damn mission.

All he'd been doing for the last half hour was staring at the rocks in the roadway, thinking about sleep.

Sleep.

A full night's worth. That would be nice.

He was accustomed to squeezing in sleep at any time—day or night—whenever there was a chance to sleep, he had to take it in his line of work. Guardians didn't need sleep—or at least that was what he always told new recruits.

Told himself.

Been told.

But the last eight months had started to take their toll on him three months ago, and he would near slit a man's throat for his bed and twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep right now.

This damn job had stretched on far too long. He hated missions that went on for months with no end. Hector knew that, yet he'd still stuck him on this assignment, tromping after a wastrel of the ton without a speck of sense.

He needed something new—anything new that would stop rotting away at his brain.

It'd been months of the same thing. Gambling and drinking every night in London. Gambling and drinking every night from there to Scotland and back again. Back and forth. More and more gambling. More and more drinking.

An unending cycle he could see no way out of.

Hector, head of the Guardians of the Bones, had said Callum would be able to sort out everything quickly—whether or not this younger brother was after the older brother's earldom.

Whether or not those three random accidents that had nearly killed the earl were truly accidents or if something else was afoot. In the first accident, a stairway along the edge of the cliffs by his castle had given way during his morning walk down to the ocean. With the second accident, a carriage wheel had randomly come off the earl's curricle while he was in it. The third accident was the most suspicious, when a billet of his saddle had been cut half through and snapped while he rode—his new saddle.

The earl, Lord Hedstrom, was convinced three accidents where his neck was on the line couldn't possibly be happenstance, and he approached the Guardians of the Bones for help.

Callum tended to agree with Hector's initial assessment about the younger brother, Charley, being the likely suspect. So Callum had wormed his way into Charley's life, becoming his new favorite friend. Always up for carousing. For late nights in seedy clubs. For dragging Charley's dead drunk ass home morning after morning.

Charley thought he'd found a new best friend. While Callum couldn't wait to call this job posing as Charley's new confidante done.

Eight months he'd been waiting to call this mission done. Investigating every thin thread that could possibly implicate Charley, and never uncovering any solid evidence. Nor had Charley said a word about his brother that indicated he was trying to off the earl.

Charley was mischievous to a fault. A boy who'd never grown into a man. But a killer? Callum had his doubts.

Still, Hector and Lord Hedstrom weren't convinced. And since Lord Hedstrom was paying the Guardians of the Bones a hefty sum to sort the threat out, Callum was stuck in place, sticking close to Charley to protect Lord Hedstrom from his own brother.

He was sick of it.

And now this bizarre turn of events.

Lord Hedstrom had requested that Callum focus on an entirely different matter—guarding his distant cousin, a spinster of all things, who had recently been abducted from the road by her home, but had escaped unharmed.

Probably a play for attention, if he had to guess. Spinsters were rarely abducted.

Whatever it was, it was a completely unwelcome distraction. Especially because it was rather hard to protect the older brother from the younger brother when one was twenty miles away.

He was awake now, at least.

Trying to keep his horse from killing a slip of a woman, yes, but awake.

The woman scrambling on the road out of the way of Pharaoh's hooves was rambling, saying something to him that he couldn't hear over Pharaoh's snorting and thundering as Callum tried to control him.

It took a moment for Pharaoh to calm and Callum stared down at the woman splayed out on the road, glaring up at him. A wood nymph if he'd ever seen one. No regard to propriety of dress or hair in place or common courtesy. A flitty, little dragonfly quick to scare the beast under him. For all of Pharaoh's might, dragonflies had always made his horse skittish.

Below her wild, dark red hair she wore only a shift. A wet white one that clung to her breasts in an indecent way that he had a hard time averting his eyes from.

Hell.

It'd also been eight months of celibacy, because with Charley, there was never a night off.

And the image of this nearly naked wood nymph he wanted to lock into his memory for later.

Except that there was the look on her face.

The look that always undid him. Made him feel every inch the monster that he was.

Fear in her blue eyes.

His look jerked away and his hand whipped out. "The lane is yours."

She scrambled to pick up the boots she'd dropped. "No need. I'm just passing through."

Then the flash of white darted off the roadway and into the forest.

She looked to be limping.

Funny, he didn't think wood nymphs limped.