Chapter One Summer 1814 Corporal Thorne could make a woman quiver, from all the way across the room. An inconvenient talent, so far as Kate Taylor was concerned. The man didn’t even have to try, she noted with a rueful twinge. All he had to do was stride into the Bull and Blossom, claim a bar stool, glower into a pewter tankard and keep his broad, hulking back to the room. And without a word . . . without so much as a glance . . . he had poor Miss Elliott’s fingers trembling as she laid them to the pianoforte keys. “Oh, I can’t,” the girl whispered. “I can’t sing now. Not with him here.” Yet another music lesson ruined. Kate never had this problem until a year ago. Before then, Spindle Cove had been chiefly inhabited by ladies, and the Bull and Blossom was a quaint tea shop serving iced cakes and jam tarts. But ever since a local militia had been organized, the establishment had become both the ladies’ tea shop and the gentlemen’s tavern. She wasn’t opposed to sharing—but there could be no “sharing” with Corporal Thorne. His stern, brooding presence took up the whole room. “Let’s try again,” she urged her pupil, striving to ignore the intimidating silhouette looming in her peripheral vision. “We almost had