Since the Surrender by Julie Anne Long Page A

and from beneath her bed pulled a latched wooden case. The hinges had a good long creak when she pushed up the lid, as though the thing were yawning after satisfying sleep. It hadn’t been opened in years.
    The pistol still gleamed in its velvet nest.
    The stock and barrel were of blued steel, the delicate network of engraved silver vines untarnished. Beautiful thing. A big pistol. A proper pistol—not the sort of pistol one could slip into a reticule or a boot. She knew Captain Eversea kept an appropriately compact one in his boot at all times, though given what the boy Liam had described, it hardly seemed necessary. Trust Chase to handily use his walking stick as a weapon.
    But she wouldn’t be making a move without this pistol from now on. She latched the case and set it aside.
    And then she opened up the trunk she’d brought with her to London and lifted out a dress of pewter-colored lutestring—a kind of shimmering silk. Cut low at the bosom, trimmed at the neckline in sleeves in a lighter satin, it was simply but elegantly cut, unobtrusive in its timelessness, and still quite flattering to her trim figure. Like the pistol, it hadn’t been unwrapped in quite some time. She was glad she’d impulsively brought it with her to London. Ironically, the pistol and the dress were complementary colors. Tentatively, with a wry quirk of the mouth at her own expense, she laid a hand flat against the back of the gown, at the waist, remembering the last time she wore the dress: at a d’Aligny ball. All the men had vied to dance with her. But the only one she the men had vied to dance with her. But the only one she remembered dancing with—the waltz—was Captain Eversea. She remembered how his hand had fit just so, right there above her waist, where her hand rested now.
    It was the night he’d simply stopped talking to her. The night she realized and truly understood for the first time the magnitude of her own power as a woman and her power over Chase.
    Likely Chase didn’t dance anymore. And she wasn’t that girl anymore.
    But the dress, and the gun, were talismans.
    My battle uniform, she thought dryly. The uniform she would wear to Callender’s tomorrow night to confront Kinkade.

    Chase awoke the next day and lay very, very still, trying to decide whether he preferred being shot to how he currently felt. Something inside his head was struggling to hatch.
    Why did he always forget that whiskey was a terrible idea?
    A brisk knock sounded on his door. The sound was visceral agony, but he was too incapacitated to groan.
    “I have coffee, Mr. Eversea!” sang the housekeeper cautiously, damn and bless her eyes. “A lot of it,” she added a moment later when she heard nothing. “You needn’t eat anything. ’Tis just coffee.” She wheedled a few moments after that.
    He almost smiled. Moving his lip muscles caused him grave pain, so he decided against it.
    “Mr. Chase?”
    She sounded worried. He would need to make a sound to reassure her.
    “Guh,” was the sound he finally made.
    Was he dressed? He rolled his eyes—which seemed to have been replaced by hot sandy lead balls in the night—very carefully down to his torso to investigate. He was wearing all of his clothes. Including his boots. And his coat. He wasn’t even under his blankets.
    He waited another moment to absorb this.
    “In,” he rasped.
    She swung open the door, bearing an urn of coffee steaming such thick black fragrance it was purely a miracle he didn’t double over and cast his accounts. She deposited it on the writing desk near the window, paused to regard him prone there on the bed, shook her head, and left again, gently closing the door behind her. It took him long seconds to recover from the pain of the sound of the door being closed.
    Why had he gotten into this condition? Ah. Of course. Bloody Rosalind March.
    Encounters with Rosalind, he decided, would inevitably end with pain and inconvenience. He ought to have known better. But a