Raven's Vow. Gayle Wilson

patiently waiting for the next blow to fall. In several places where the stick had cut, blood oozed.

      The girl’s lips tightened and she took a deep breath. For the first time an emotion besides anger tinged her voice. “Damned bastard,” she whispered. Realizing that she’d spoken the epithet aloud, she glanced quickly at the American. The russet eyes swam with tears, but before they could overflow, she blinked, a fall of impossibly long, dark lashes concealing feelings Raven read quite clearly.

      “Thank you,” she said again, looking down into that strong-featured face. Something in the crystalline eyes had changed. And he made no response to her gratitude.

      “For my gift,” she explained softly, her lips lifting into the smile that had set masculine pulses hammering since she’d turned fourteen. Catherine Montfort thought of all the presents she had received from suitors in the last three years, not one of whom had, of course, thought to give her an abused donkey.

      There was no response in the still, dark face. Not handsome, Catherine thought; it was too strongly constructed to be called handsome. But there was something, some indefinable something in the hawklike nose and high cheekbones that was very appealing. And in his eyes, she thought again. She had never seen eyes that shade of blue.

      Raven became aware suddenly that she was talking to him, but he didn’t have any idea what she had said. Something about a gift. Something… He took a deep breath, realizing that air was a necessity he had neglected in the last minute. The perfection of the heart-shaped face floated before him against the background of clouds and sky.

      “Angel,” he said softly in his grandmother’s tongue, although the word’s connotation there was not exactly the same. Oliver Reynolds had told him he’d need a guardian angel. The stern line of John Raven’s lips tilted upward at the corners.

      Catherine Montfort found that her hand was still resting in his and her throat had gone dry. The small movement of his mouth fascinated her until she recognized the expression for what it was—he was smiling at her.

      Sensing her inattention, Storm sidestepped suddenly, and the pull against their joined hands broke the spell. Reluctantly, Catherine disentangled her fingers. She had thanked the man twice, and there was really nothing else she could say. She didn’t even know his name. She might never know it. She’d never seen him before and would, in all probability, never see him again. He was certainly not a member of the select group, the London ton, with whom she associated, the only people with whom she had associated since her birth. What had happened today was simply a chance meeting with a stranger on a crowded London street.

      Raven stepped back, clearing the way for her departure. Her boot heel touched Storm in command, and, her back flawlessly straight, Catherine Montfort directed her mount around the donkey and back on the course of her normal activities.

      John Raven watched the slight figure until it was lost in the throng of riders and carriages. Realizing that he had been staring far too long for politeness, he turned back to find the groom carefully inspecting the animal’s injuries.

      “Shall I find him a home?” Raven asked, wondering what her ladyship would do with a donkey in Mayfair.

      “You think she’ll forget him?” the groom asked, not bothering to look up from his examination. “You think she bought him on impulse and will forget him before she gets home?” The rude sound that followed was indicative of his opinion of what Raven had suggested about the girl.

      “Then she won’t?” Raven asked, the slight smile again marking the hard mouth.

      “If I don’t have him back in the stables and these injuries tended to by the time she returns, she’ll serve my head to the old man with his supper.”

      “The old man?” Fear stirred suddenly in Raven’s gut.

      “Montfort,” the groom informed him, as if, that said, there was no other explanation needed. He moved to the other side of the donkey to run skilled hands over the protruding ribs and to pick up a trembling foreleg to examine an untreated cut.

      “Montfort,” Raven repeated, feeling like Echo.

      “The Duke of Montfort,” the groom said, glancing up at last to assess a man who was so ignorant as not to recognize that particular name. “The Devil Duke, they call him. Not out loud, of course,” he said, remembering his employer’s temper. The sobriquet was well earned and well deserved.

      “Who is she?” the American asked, his gaze moving back to the street down which the girl had disappeared.

      “The Devil’s Daughter,” Jem said, noticing for the first time the style of the foreign gentleman’s hair. The groom’s eyebrows climbed slightly, but it was not his place to question his betters. “Lady Catherine Montfort. The Duke of Montfort’s only heir.”

      “Thank you,” Raven said, and reaching into his waistcoat pocket, he flicked a coin to the groom. The man smiled his thanks and then turned back to his careful survey of the donkey.

      John Raven crossed the street and, taking the narrow stairs two at a time, retraced his path to Reynolds’s office. The old man looked up from his notations in a leatherbound ledger.

      “Lady Catherine Montfort,” John Raven said, his wide shoulders filling the doorway.

      “Montfort?” the banker repeated, wondering again, as he had when he’d first met the American, if he were more than merely eccentric.

      “Is Lady Catherine Montfort angelic enough for our purposes?” Raven asked calmly.

      The old man stared blankly for a moment, wondering how his client had come up with that name.

      “Is she?” Raven prompted, knowing that the banker’s reply really didn’t matter. The die had been cast in the middle of a crowded London street, but at least Reynolds’s approval would provide an acceptable excuse.

      “Catherine Montfort is bloody well the entire seraphic choir,” the old man acknowledged truthfully. He watched the smile that touched the American’s mouth again deepen the indentions at the corners. “But I’m afraid that the Montforts—”

      “You said one only had to offer enough money.”

      “Montfort’s one of the few men in London evenyou couldn’t buy. And I must tell you…” The banker’s voice trailed off. He really hated to offend the man, but he knew that the duke would never accept John Raven as a suitor for his daughter’s hand. His only daughter. His only surviving child and heir. Reynolds’s mind having dealt too long with the prospects of profit, he briefly allowed himself to consider those combined fortunes being handled by his bank. And why not? Was his not the oldest financial establishment in the city? The bank had financed the East India Company’s venture into the Russian market in the sixteenth century. He cleared the tempting visions from his mind and shook his head regretfully.

      “He’ll never allow you to even present your suit. Forget Catherine Montfort, John. You’ll never convince her father, and I must warn you that it would be dangerous even to try. Montfort’s as proud, cold-blooded and arrogant as any of the old aristocrats. His was a generation that made its own rules—whatever they wanted, whether legal or moral, they took, consequences be damned. There’s nothing you can do to win Montfort’s daughter. You have nothing to offer the girl that she doesn’t already have.”

      The blue eyes rested on the seamed face of the old man a moment, their farseeing gaze untroubled by the obstacles Reynolds had just thrown in his path.

      John Raven had believed he had come to London to make money. The call had been so strong that he had left India in the middle of an incredibly successful mining venture. His intuition had directed his journey to this city as surely as it had previously drawn him to Delhi, leaving the profitable exporting business he’d founded in New York to be run by his assistants. Wherever there was money to be made, John Raven could sense it. He could feel it moving in his hands as clearly as he had felt the reality of the rubies and sapphires he’d mined in India. He thought he had been drawn to England by the growth