And now he’d be marrying a proper society woman if that woman would have him.

Wasn’t life unexpected?

He lurked across the way from the Shaw house, surprised by the number of lights still on inside. Comfortable in the shadows, he crossed the main thoroughfare on the north side of the square and walked down a side street, curious to see if the Shaws’ garden was accessible. He wanted to know who was awake. Who would be using gas lamps so late at night? Surely not one of the servants. Was it old Mr. Shaw himself, worried about his company and his failing health? Or perhaps it was Miss Shaw, unable to sleep or discomforted by her illness.

Either way, Tom was curious. And a curious Tom was a stubborn thing.

He walked across the muddy road behind the house where delivery carts had left deep grooves in the mud. A light mist was falling, and he drank it in, replete with the surge of power it lent his amnis. Unlike Murphy, who preferred fresh water, Tom felt most at home near the sea. But any water would do. He’d never been a particular man.

Following the lights led him past numerous walled gardens until he finally arrived at the back side of the stately redbrick Georgian home belonging to John Robert Shaw. It was handsome but not ostentatious. Respectable but not ancient. He’d watched Shaw exit the front of the house on more than one night, but he’d never investigated the gardens. Declan might have looked through the Shaw books, but it was Tom who gathered information on the ground.

That night, Tom Dargin scaled the garden wall and dropped into another world.

Far from the well-tended, orderly garden he’d imagined from Shaw’s tidy appearance, this garden was a wild tangle of trees and flowers. Statuary hid among rocks tumbled artfully around the bases of trees, giving the dark garden a fantastical appearance. A miniature glass house lit up the center of the lawn, sparkling from the inside with candlelight. Tom felt as if he’d slipped into one of the fairy stories his grandmother had been fond of telling.

For standing in the center of a lush lawn, dressed in a white dressing gown, was a tall woman, as willowy as the trees that lined the garden. She stood, swaying a little, her pale skin touched by the moon’s silver light as she held a book in her hand and turned in place. Her feet were bare, her dark hair fell past her waist, and her long gown was drenched in the evening dew.

It must be Miss Shaw. No servant would take a book out into the garden in the middle of the night. Certainly not in their dressing gown.

“‘But dreams come through stone walls…’” She held up the book to the moon’s light and spoke quietly, though his immortal hearing could pick up the words easily. “‘…light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.’”

She twirled on the lawn, lifting the book over her head and humming a tune as her hair lifted while she spun.

“Dreams come through stone walls…,” she whispered into the night as Tom watched from the dark shelter of a drooping willow.

“Oh, feck me,” he muttered under his breath, letting out a sigh. “She’s mad as a March hare.”

Chapter Two

JOSEPHINE ROBERTA DOYLE SHAW was a practical woman. Despite her rather eccentric writings, she ran her father’s household with quiet efficiency, though she was wise enough to bow to the expert opinion of Mrs. Morse, the housekeeper her mother had hired before her untimely—and, Josephine preferred to think, tragic—death. As her mother had died in childbirth, Josephine had never felt her loss, though she liked to imagine she and her mother would have been the closest of confidantes and the dearest of friends.

As it was, Eloisa Shaw had left her daughter with an excellent and loving nanny, an efficient housekeeper, and an extensive and not-at-all proper library with books in Italian, French, and Spanish, as well as all the more conventional writings. This had motivated Josephine to excel early in languages, and by the time she was thirteen, she could explore the forbidden tomes her mother had left behind.

Josephine had not been disappointed.

As well as firing her imagination in very improper ways, her mother’s own notes in the margins of the most scandalous books gave Josephine a peek into the mind of the woman she must have been.

Which was why when she embarrassed her father—as she inevitably did—Josephine reminded him that he had been the one to marry Eloisa Francesca Dioli Doyle in the first place. Therefore, if any scandal resulted from her reading Italian romances and French philosophy, it was entirely his own fault.

She was sitting in her library when her father presented his latest idea to ensure her future.

“You want me to what?” she said, laughing lightly so as not to provoke her lungs. “Marry him? One of your business partner’s brothers?”

He leaned toward her, her gentle father who had always indulged her every whim. If she were a petulant child, he would have ruined her. Luckily, Josephine was eminently good-natured and had been blessed with a very strict nanny.

“Jo, you know you must.”

“No, I don’t know I must. Father, in addition to the rather large fortune you have worked very hard for, I also have my own income, modest though it may be. I will never be destitute. You are fretting for nothing.”

“And when I die? When your cousin tries to take the house?”

She shrugged. “He could try. But if you should pass before me—though I think you are not quite as ill as you imagine—I will sell the house to some eager buyer with Mr. Macon’s help, then I shall take Mrs. Porter and Mrs. Morse with me to the house in Bray. You know I don’t like society.” She let a sad smile touch her lips. “And you know it will not be for long. I am happy as I am.”