Darling Beast (Maiden Lane 7)

Apollo pounded on the right-hand door, then paused and placed his ear to it. He heard a faint rustling and then a groan. He reared back and thumped the wood again.

“D’you mind?” The left door popped open to reveal a shriveled elderly man, a soft red velvet cap on his head. “Some like to sleep of a morning!”

Apollo turned his shoulder, shielding his face behind his broad-brimmed hat, and waved an apologetic hand at the man.

The old man slammed his door shut just as Makepeace opened his own.

“What?” Makepeace stood in his doorway, swaying slightly as if in a breeze. “What?” His tawny hair stood out all around his head like a lion’s mane—assuming the lion had been in a recent cyclone—and his shirt was unbuttoned, baring a heavily furred barrel chest.

grimaced. She should’ve never let Indio out to play by himself, but it was hard to keep an active young boy inside. She started down one of the paths, slipping a bit in the mud, wishing she’d stopped to put on her pattens before coming outside. If she didn’t see her son soon, she’d ruin the frivolous embroidered slippers on her feet.

“Indio!”

She rounded what once had been a small thicket of trimmed trees. Now the blackened branches rattled in the wind. “Indio!”

A grunt came from the thicket.

Lily stopped dead.

There it was again—almost an explosive snort. The noise was too loud, too deep for Indio. It almost sounded like… a big animal.

She glanced quickly around, but she was completely alone. Should she return to the ruined theater for Maude? But Indio was out here!

Another grunt, this one louder. A rustle.

Something was breathing heavily in the bushes.

Good Lord. Lily bunched her skirts in her fists in case she had to leg it, and crept forward.

A groan and a low, rumbling sound.

Like growling.

She gulped and peeked around a burned trunk.

At first what she saw looked like an enormous, moving, mud-covered mound, and then it straightened, revealing an endlessly broad back, huge shoulders, and a shaggy head.

Lily couldn’t help it. She made a noise that was perilously close to a squeak.

The thing whirled—much faster than anything that big had a right to move—and a horrible, soot-stained face glared at her, one paw raised as if to strike her.

In it was a wickedly sharp, hooked knife.

Lily gulped. If she lived through the day she was going to have to apologize to Indio.

For there was a monster in the garden.

THE DAY HADN’T been going well to begin with, reflected Apollo Greaves, Viscount Kilbourne.

At a rough estimate, fully half the woody plantings in the pleasure garden were dead—and another quarter might as well be. The ornamental pond’s freshwater source had been blocked by the fire’s debris and now it sat stagnant. The gardeners Asa had hired for him were an unskilled lot. To top it off, the spring rains had turned what remained of Harte’s Folly into a muddy morass, making planting and earth moving impossible until the ground dried out.

And now there was a strange female in his garden.

Apollo stared into huge lichen-green eyes lined with lashes so dark and thick that they looked like smudged soot. The woman—girl? She wasn’t that tall, but a swift glance at her bodice assured him she was quite mature, thank you—was only a slim bit of a thing, dressed foolishly in a green velvet gown, richly over-embroidered in red and gold. She hadn’t even a bonnet on. Her dark hair slipped from a messy knot at the back of her neck, waving strands blowing against her pinkened cheeks. Actually, she was rather pretty in a gamine sort of way.

But that was beside the point.

Where in hell had she come from? As far as he knew, the only other people in the ruined pleasure garden were the brace of so-called gardeners presently working on the hedges behind the pond. He’d been taking out his frustration alone on the dead tree stump, trying to uproot the thing by hand since their only dray horse was at work with the other men, when he’d heard a feminine voice calling and she’d suddenly appeared.