Little Beauty

Cherbourg, Normandy - 1159 Shy Jehanne always lived at the mercy of her sisters' spite and bitterness, preferring a life with the saints in her father's library. Cherbourg was home and for her, it was the smaller pleasures of watching the ships in the harbor, searching for her father's vessels.

She might have continued on that path, were it not for the storm that sank his beloved Maud and left her family ruined. Her sisters resented leaving Cherbourg's society for a small home on the edges of a nearby wood. While her sisters griped over selling their baubles and her brothers struggled with simple woodcutting, she was teaching herself the basics of hunting to feed them through the long winter.

She never counted upon finding a huntsman and his party in the woods, nor accompanying him back to his country estate. No more that than the curse on his heart.