Slightly Scandalous

The marquess raised his head, still holding her hand, and smiled into her eyes. Behind the charming, radiant smile, far back inside his eyes, he laughed.

"Now we have got ourselves into a famous scrape, sweetheart," he murmured.

It was the last private word they were to have for some time to come. Numerous people-almost everyone in attendance, in fact-wished to shake them by the hand or bow and curtsy to them and wish them well. A few even claimed to have predicted such an outcome immediately after the fracas in the Pump Room. Lady Holt-Barron was weeping delicately into her handkerchief and smiling at the same time. Charlotte hugged Freyja tightly and whispered that she had never been happier in her life-except when her own betrothal had been announced. The Earl of Willett looked sadly stricken. Lady Potford kissed Freyja on the cheek, turned to her grandson, and tapped him sharply on the sleeve with her fan before accusing him of being a rogue for keeping such a delightful secret from her. Mrs. Lumbard fawned all over them, reminding them and everyone else within earshot that they would be neighbors when the marquess and his new marchioness came home to Penhallow to live.

Mr. King clapped his hands for silence again after a good ten minutes of noise and congratulations, and announced that the program for the evening would be modified slightly in order to include another short waltz, to be danced by the newly betrothed couple. Everyone stayed to watch before the cardplayers drifted back to their room and the tea drinkers to theirs.

It was all remarkably ridiculous-and shamefully exhilarating.

"There is going to be an even greater stir tomorrow," Freyja remarked as their own private waltz was drawing to an end, "when we break off the engagement."

"Ah, not tomorrow, sweetheart," he said. "If it is all the same to you, we will remain betrothed until my aunt has returned home. I daresay she will not remain above a day or two now that her will has been thwarted. She will return home in high dudgeon."

"The moment she leaves, then," Freyja said, "we will have the announcement made." Actually, she did not mind prolonging this amusing farce for a day or two.

"There is no we in it," the marquess said. "You will break the betrothal. It is something a gentleman never does."

"Wonderful!" she said tartly. "It would serve you right if I neglected to do so and you were forced to marry me."

"Better you than Constance, my charmer," he said.

"I shall lull myself to sleep tonight with the memory of those ardent words of devotion from my betrothed," she said.

He grinned and then acknowledged the smattering of applause from the spectators with a more appropriate smile.

"Shall we go and discover what my aunt has to say?" he suggested.

"Absolutely," she told him, setting her hand along the sleeve of his offered arm. It had not escaped her notice that the marchioness was one of the few guests who had not come to congratulate them before their waltz.

The lady had recovered from what must have been a very nasty shock indeed. She was looking frail and sweet and about half her usual size-it was an impressive performance. She extended both hands to Freyja as they approached, clasped them unnecessarily tightly-Freyja countered by clasping hers more tightly still-kissed the air first at Freyja's left cheek and then at her right, and smiled warmly and graciously.

"What a delightful surprise, Lady Freyja," she said rather loudly, for the benefit of those around them. "I can think of no one I would more gladly welcome into the bosom of my family. I have always thought of dear Joshua as a son, you know." Her eyes were doing that needlepoint glare into Freyja's again.

"Thank you, ma'am," Freyja said. "I knew you would be happy for us."

"And my dear Joshua." The marchioness transferred her attention and her hands to her nephew. "What a naughty surprise, indeed. You would not confide in either your grandmother or your aunt?"

"I plucked up the courage to make Lady Freyja an offer during the waltz, Aunt," he said, "and she said yes. We were both so bubbling over with joy that we wanted everyone to share our happiness without any further delay. I thought you and Grandmama would appreciate the happy surprise."

The marchioness's smile did not falter. "Of course, dear," she said.

Mr. Darwin was bowing to Freyja then and requesting the next set of country dances with her. They were, after all, she realized, only two sets into the ball. There was much of the evening remaining. She smiled as she set her hand on his sleeve, remembering her resolve to cheer herself up by flirting with the Marquess of Hallmere tonight.

Well, she had done a great deal better than flirting. She had entered into a mock betrothal with him. Just for the sheer fun of it.

She was, she discovered, looking forward to the next few days with more exhilaration than she had looked forward to any day since she did not know when. At least they would take her mind off Alvesley and Kit's new son and the dreary state of her own life.

Joshua walked up to Lady Holt-Barron's house on the Circus late the following morning. He had avoided the Pump Room, especially as his grandmother had expressed her intention of remaining at home after the late night. But he had not succeeded in avoiding the issue that had kept him awake much of the night, alternately chuckling and breaking into a cold sweat.

His aunt had invited herself and Constance to breakfast, and she had joined enthusiastically in his grandmother's plan to host a large betrothal party at Great Pulteney Street one week hence.

"I cannot tell you how delighted I am, Joshua," his aunt had said, "that you have decided to settle down at last. Though I daresay you will wish to take your bride traveling on the Continent for a year or two after the nuptials, now that the wars are over."

"I sensed Lady Freyja was the right woman for you from the first moment," his grandmother had agreed before laughing. "Well, from almost the first moment. You will never find life dull with her, Joshua."

Constance had found a moment to have a private word with him.

"Thank you, Joshua," she had said. "How quickly you thought and acted! But I do hope you did not offer for Lady Freyja Bedwyn only to thwart Mama. It would be unfair, would it not? I do not think she is ugly. I think she is distinguished and handsome. But, even so, she must have feelings to be hurt."

"Lady Freyja and I understand each other perfectly well," he had assured her. "We share the same enjoyment of a good lark."

"Ah," she had said. "It is not a real betrothal, then. I suspected as much. But I am rather sorry. I cannot help thinking, as your grandmother does, that she is perfect for you."

His aunt was planning to stay for at least another week, then, he thought ruefully as he strode up the steep incline of Gay Street. He had not expected her to stay so long. Neither had he expected his grandmother to insist upon a grand party. This betrothal business might yet prove a deuced embarrassment-and perhaps fun too, he admitted. That was the word she had used, was it not?

He knocked on the door of the house on the Circus, was admitted by a smirking housekeeper who had clearly heard the news-had anyone in Bath not?-and was taken up immediately to a sitting room where the ladies were gathered, mother and daughter looking as if they had just recently returned from an outing.

Lady Holt-Barron beamed at him and her daughter smiled. Lady Freyja looked wary.

"I have come to invite Lady Freyja to walk with me," he said after the first pleasantries had been exchanged.

She got to her feet after folding a letter she must have been writing at the escritoire.

"I need some fresh air," she said.

"And today, Lady Freyja," her hostess said with a broad smile, "you do not need any chaperone while walking with your betrothed."

A few minutes later they were striding back down Gay Street, not touching-she had refused to take his arm.

"You were writing to your family?" he asked her. "Breaking the glad tidings?"

"Doing no such thing," she said. "I was writing to my sister, as I do most days. I was describing the assembly to her-part of the assembly, at least."

"But you were omitting the insignificant detail of your betrothal being announced during it, no doubt," he said, grinning. She was looking out of sorts this morning.

"Exactly," she said. "They need not know. In a day or two's time we will be free to put an end to this foolishness. Your aunt will leave Bath, severely disgruntled, I sincerely hope, and then I can either have an announcement made or else you can leave too and I can go home soon after and no more need ever be said on the matter."

"Do you really believe it is going to be as simple as that, sweetheart?" he asked, chuckling.

They had reached the bottom of the hill and were winding their way toward the Abbey and the river beyond it. The sun was shining, though the breeze was fresh.

"Of course it will," she said with brisk confidence.

"My grandmother is even now planning a grand betrothal party for next week," he said.

She grimaced. "Then we must both leave Bath before then," she said.

"It would be unsporting," he told her, touching the brim of his hat in acknowledgment of a couple they were passing. "All the invitations are being sent out today."

"Dammit," she said.

He laughed out loud. He had never before heard a lady utter such a word. He wondered if she had other such gems in her vocabulary and guessed she probably did.

"And my aunt has decided to stay for the party," he told her.

She stopped walking and looked at him severely as if he were to blame-as to a certain extent, of course, he was.

"Double dammit," she said. "You appear to be enjoying yourself enormously."

"I cannot help remembering," he said as they resumed their walk, "that things were looking grim last evening and that my aunt might just as easily have trapped me into announcing my engagement to Constance. I would far prefer to have you."

"I am overwhelmed," she said haughtily.

"Because you can be shed after a week or so," he said.

"Like a worn coat," she retorted.

"Unless you choose to hold me to the promise, of course," he said, "and make me marry you."

"Heaven forbid," she said.

"Will feigning a betrothal to me and a romantic fondness for me for a whole week be quite anathema to you?" he asked. "Culminating in a grand party and then freedom and sanity again? Last evening you thought it might all be fun."

"Last evening I did not think at all," she said. She looked at him assessingly as they reached the river and turned by unspoken consent in the direction of the Pulteney Bridge. "However, life in Bath is excruciatingly dull under normal circumstances."

"It is," he agreed. "Shall we agree, then, to enjoy the less-than-normal-or more-than-normal-circumstances that the next week promises?"

She smiled slowly at him, the same slightly reckless light in her eyes that had appeared there last evening when he had asked her as a kind of joke if she would care to enter into a fake betrothal with him.

"Since it would appear that the week must be endured anyway," she said, "we might as well enjoy it, I suppose. Where are we going?"

"Sydney Gardens?" he suggested. "It is rather far away, but not too far a walk for you, I seem to remember. I may even be able to find another serving girl there being accosted by a squirrel and impress my betrothed by rescuing her."

"No, not the Gardens," she said. "Beechen Cliff. I have heard that it is a steep climb but that the view from the top is quite spectacular. I wish to go there."

"Good," he said.

At least dancing attendance upon Lady Freyja Bedwyn for the next week was not going to be boring. He had intended being on his way from Bath this morning. He was not on the whole sorry for the excuse to spend more time in her company. He found her amusing-and increasingly attractive.

Freyja did not play fair. She had done the Marquess of Hallmere an enormous favor, and she exacted payment in any way she could devise over the week following their betrothal announcement.

It was true that the Pump Room still had to be endured most mornings and the occasional concert or play or card party during the evenings. But she really did not mind those activities very much. At least the obligatory stroll in the Pump Room got everyone up and moving at a decent hour of the morning, and she enjoyed good music and lively acting and even the occasional game of cards. It was the rest of each day that had always been unbearably tedious.

Now the tedium was gone.

Each day she dragged the marquess off walking or riding. They clamored up Beechen Cliff that first day and up Beacon Hill and across the fields to the village of Charlcombe another day. They walked to the village of Weston one afternoon. They rode up Lansdown Hill and to Claverton Down. Even on the day it rained steadily from morning until evening she insisted upon riding as far as the village of Keynsham halfway to Bristol. Having a betrothed, she quickly discovered, was quite as good as having one of her brothers resident in Bath, since Lady Holt-Barron put up no protest about the propriety of their going off alone together so often.

But if truth were known, she enjoyed the marquess's company better than that of any of her brothers-and he enjoyed himself as much as she, she was sure. She enjoyed looking at him-he was undeniably one of the most handsome men of her acquaintance. And he was witty company. Verbally she could never get the better of him-or he of her. He never suggested to her that as a lady perhaps this walk or that ride might be too much for her. When she demanded the ride in the rain, he did not even so much as look surprised, though Lady Holt-Barron warned of all the dire consequences to their health of not simply taking tea in the Upper Rooms instead.

Freyja was not looking forward to the party at Lady Potford's, which was to be a grand squeeze of an affair since almost everyone with any pretension to gentility in Bath had been invited. She liked Lady Potford and did not relish the thought of such deception as the party would involve. But the more she saw of the Marchioness of Hallmere and Lady Constance Moore during the week, the more she realized that it would have been cruel indeed to have abandoned the marquess to what might well have been his fate-marriage with his cousin, who did not want him any more than he wanted her.

No, for this one week she was betrothed-again!-and she would act her part until the end and then retreat into her normal self and her normal life again when the party was over and the marchioness had left for Cornwall.

Life next week was going to seem very dull, she thought as she arrived back at Lady Holt-Barron's after the ride to Claverton Down. But she would think of that next week. Perhaps she would simply return home to Lindsey Hall. It should be safe to do so by then.

The marquess came into the house with her, since Lady Holt-Barron had invited him for tea. They were somewhat windblown and flushed from the outdoors, but Freyja did not go up to her room to change first. She preceded the marquess into the drawing room.

And stopped so abruptly that he almost collided with her from behind.

Lady Holt-Barron and Charlotte were both in the room.

So was Wulfric.

He was just rising to his feet, looking his usual elegant, immaculate, faintly cold, silver-eyed self. His long fingers were curling about the handle of his quizzing glass and raising it halfway to his eye.

"Ah, Freyja," he said, his voice haughty and distant.

"Wulf!" she exclaimed.

"And . . . ?" His glass went the rest of the way to his eye, magnifying it horribly.

"May I present the Marquess of Hallmere?" she said, standing to one side. "My brother Wulfric, my lord. The Duke of Bewcastle."

What in heaven's name had brought Wulf to Bath at this of all times? But she knew the answer without having to pummel her brain any further. Of course! Wulf, she sometimes thought, shared the quality of omniscience with God. It was this of all times that had brought him.

Someone had told him.

He knew!

His next words dispelled any shadow of doubt she may have felt.

"Ah, yes," he said softly, lowering his glass but still looking at the marquess with cold eyes. "Freyja's betrothed, I believe?"

CHAPTER IX

Bewcastle had a distinct advantage over him, Joshua thought an hour later as the two of them walked down Gay Street, Lady Holt-Barron's housekeeper having made arrangements for the horses to be returned to their stables. There was the advantage of rank, of course-Bewcastle was a duke while he was a marquess. But the difference between them was far vaster than that. Bewcastle had been born to his present role. He was an aristocrat to the marrow of his bones, while Joshua, even after being heir to his title for five years and holder of the title for seven months, still felt like a usurper.

They had conversed on a variety of topics over tea, the five of them, and consequently nothing of any significance had been said. Now Bewcastle spoke of the attractive appearance of Bath and Joshua agreed with his every word, trying not to feel like a whipped boy-or, rather, like one who was about to be whipped. But this really was a devilish coil. It had been too much to hope, he supposed, that word of the betrothal would not somehow come to the ears of Lady Freyja's brother, but who could have predicted that he would come in person like this instead of merely writing to his sister for more information?

"You will step into the Royal York with me?" Bewcastle asked as they reached level ground. It was phrased as a question, but Joshua recognized a command when he heard one.

"It would be my pleasure," he said.

The duke had a private suite of rooms at the hotel. His valet took their hats and gloves and brought a tray of drinks into the sitting room. Bewcastle indicated one empty chair and took another himself. The valet poured two glasses, handed one to each of them, and then left them alone, closing the door silently behind him.

Bewcastle regarded his visitor with pale, keen eyes that had Joshua thinking of wolves-the man was named appropriately, it seemed.

"You will doubtless explain to me," Bewcastle said in a pleasant enough voice, though his eyes were as cold as ice, "why your betrothal has been publicly announced to Bath society and not announced at all to Lady Freyja Bedwyn's family."

Joshua crossed one leg over the other. "It was an impetuous decision," he said. "I proposed marriage to Lady Freyja during a waltz at the Upper Rooms, she said yes, and we decided to invite our fellow guests to share our joy." His explanation sounded remarkably silly even to his own ears.

"Ah, impetuosity," Bewcastle said. "But you did not wish to invite her family also to share your joy, perhaps the next day or the day after-or the day after that?"

There was an unfortunate pause while Joshua tossed about in his mind a few possible answers. There was no convincing answer, of course. This was all devilishly embarrassing.

"Perhaps," the duke suggested, "you intended to wait upon me at Lindsey Hall after the first euphoria of your engagement had passed?"

"Lady Freyja is of age," Joshua said. "Strictly speaking, we do not need your consent. We would have sought your blessing in time, yes. During this past week, as you have suggested, we have been enjoying each other's company rather too much to consider what ought to be done."

"You have, then," the duke said softly, "conceived a passion for each other?"

Oh, Lord. He was wading in deep waters, Joshua realized.

"One might say so," he said.

"One might," Bewcastle agreed. "But do you say so, Hallmere?"

"I rather believe," Joshua said carefully, "that my feelings for Lady Freyja and hers for me are our private concern."

"Quite so." Bewcastle set down his half-empty glass, leaned back in his chair, set his elbows on the arms, and steepled his fingers. Silences, it seemed, did not embarrass him. It was a while before he continued. "It would seem, Hallmere, that you have always been an ambitious man."

Joshua raised his eyebrows.

"It would be strange if you were not," Bewcastle said. "All during your growing years you were one life removed from the heirdom to a marquess's title and property and fortune-a frustration, no doubt, to a penniless boy. And then that one life was extinguished under somewhat mysterious circumstances."

Good God! Joshua turned cold inside. At least it was now clear who had informed Bewcastle of the betrothal and why he had lost no time in coming to Bath.

"Under tragic circumstances," Joshua said. "Are you insinuating that you believe I had a hand in my cousin's death?"

"I insinuate nothing," his grace said, raising haughty eyebrows. "Very probably they were merely fortunate circumstances for you. You celebrated your new expectations by traveling extensively and, ah, sowing some wild oats, I believe?"

"I spent five years in France," Joshua said somewhat testily, "doing undercover spy work for the British government. I resent this interrogation, Bewcastle."

"Do you?" The duke still spoke softly. He was not to be drawn into any angry exchange, it seemed. "But you wish to marry my sister, Hallmere. I will interrogate any man who aspires to her hand, even if he has forced my hand by announcing his betrothal before speaking with me. You refused to marry the lowly gentlewoman you impregnated at Penhallow before you left there?"

Joshua pursed his lips. It would be interesting to read the letter his aunt had written the Duke of Bewcastle. But he would not allow her malice to put him on the defensive before a stranger.

"She never even asked me to marry her," he said, grinning. "But I have supported her and the child for longer than five years."

Bewcastle showed no sign of sharing his amusement. He picked up his glass again and sipped from it. "Lady Freyja Bedwyn is the daughter of a duke," he said. "She is also an extremely wealthy woman, as I daresay you know."

"I suppose I would have guessed it," Joshua said, "if I had given the matter any thought."

"She is, in fact," the duke said, "a quite brilliant match for you."

"And since we are speaking of rank and fortune," Joshua said, grinning again, "I am something of a brilliant match for her too. It is what Bath society has been saying since the announcement was made, anyway."

The duke regarded him with cold hauteur. Too late, it struck Joshua that perhaps he should simply have told Bewcastle the truth. This mock betrothal was going to be over within the next week, after all. Why leave it to Lady Freyja to have to explain to her family?

"You are not at all sure you approve of me," he said. "I can hardly blame you. I proposed marriage to your sister without first consulting you as head of her family, and then I compounded that error by having the betrothal publicly announced during an assembly and by neglecting either to write to you or to call upon you immediately after. My aunt, I perceive, has performed that task for me. I can only say now that I have the deepest regard for your sister and will accept her decision if she should see fit to break off our engagement after listening to your advice."

There-perhaps that would give them a decent way out of their predicament when the time came. This awkward visit of her brother to Bath might turn out for the best after all.

The ducal eyebrows had risen.

"Extraordinary!" Bewcastle said softly. "You would not fight for the woman you love, Hallmere?"

"I certainly would not force any woman into a marriage against her will," Joshua said.

The duke set his empty glass down on the table beside him and Joshua took the gesture as a sign that the interview was at an end. He got to his feet.

"I will be escorting Lady Freyja to a concert at the Upper Rooms tonight," he said. "I will see you there?"

The duke inclined his head.

"I will bid you a good afternoon, then," Joshua said, and left the room.

He blew out air from his puffed cheeks as he stepped out of the Royal York Hotel. The Duke of Bewcastle was not going to grow any fonder of him when he disappeared from Lady Freyja's life in a few days' time. That would not matter one iota to him, of course, but it might matter a great deal to her, whether she then divulged the full truth or not.

Devil take it! Life was getting just too complicated for comfort.

But he grinned suddenly. It would be interesting indeed to be an invisible witness to the interview between Bewcastle and Lady Freyja that must be pending.

It was one thing, Freyja thought, to have become involved in a betrothal in the eyes of Bath society; it was quite another suddenly to have one pair of those eyes belonging to Wulfric. Such inscrutable eyes too. They always had been. They had always been his single greatest asset when dealing with underlings, including his brothers and sisters.

His other great asset was his patience-if that was the right word. Wulfric was never in a rush. He could bide his time forever while his quarry fidgeted and dithered and waited for him to pounce.

All through tea at Lady Holt-Barron's he had made no further mention of the betrothal but had conversed politely about his journey and the state of the roads and about Bath and the weather and a dozen other topics. Then he had gone off walking back down into the city with the marquess, elegant and urbane, his eyes like two chips off a glacier.

He sat beside Freyja during the orchestral concert in the Upper Rooms that evening, Lady Holt-Barron on his other side, the marquess on Freyja's other side. They did nothing but listen to the music and talk about the music, though Wulfric was mobbed during the interval by people eager to make their curtsy or their bow to the Duke of Bewcastle. There was hardly a moment during which to snatch a private word with the marquess.

"What did he say?" she asked during one of those moments. "Did you tell him the truth?"

"Good Lord, no," he said, confining his answer to the second question. "Ought I to have done? I thought you might have been in more trouble over the masquerade than over a broken engagement next week."

"Wulf is not my keeper," she said haughtily. "There is no question of there being trouble either way."

"Then why are you so very out of sorts, sweetheart?" he asked, grinning at her.

Someone was in the process of informing Wulf that he must be gratified indeed at the betrothal of his sister to the Marquess of Hallmere, and Freyja caught the marquess's eye and chuckled mournfully.

There was going to be a pile of trouble.

Wulfric went back to his hotel after the concert. He appeared in the Pump Room the next morning, immaculately dressed in black and gray with white linen. He acknowledged Freyja and Charlotte and Lady Holt-Barron and proceeded to speak with other people, most notably Lady Potford, with whom he strolled twice all about the room.

Freyja walked arm in arm with Charlotte, who confessed herself mortally terrified of his grace, though she giggled at her own foolishness.

"Does he ever smile, Freyja?" she asked.

"Never," Freyja said. "It is beneath the ducal dignity."

They laughed together and she felt horribly disloyal. She adored all her siblings, Wulf included.

The crowds were beginning to disperse for breakfast when Wulfric sought her out and informed her that she would be taking the meal at the Royal York Hotel with him.

Should she confess the full truth to him and be done with it? she wondered a few minutes later as she took his arm and they set off at a brisk walking pace. But, oh, dear, he already knew-Lady Holt-Barron had told him, enraptured by the romance of it all-that for the past week she and the marquess had been going off walking and riding together, not a maid or chaperone in sight. How would that appear if it were suddenly revealed that they were not really betrothed after all?

And since when, she asked herself, had she been afraid to tell the truth or admit to a little indiscretion? She had never pretended to live by the code that hemmed other ladies in from all quarters until they had less freedom than servants or pets.

She drew breath to tell Wulfric exactly what had happened.

"Lady Potford has gone to great pains to arrange this large betrothal party for you tonight," he said.

Ah, yes, the party. Tonight. Well, this deception must continue until tomorrow, she thought. Surely tomorrow or the next day the marchioness would return home. She must be weary of smiling sweetly at Freyja whenever their paths crossed-at least two or three times each day-while darting private venom at her with her eyes. She had been looking rather pleased with herself this morning, but perhaps that was because she anticipated trouble for her nephew and Freyja with Wulfric's unexpected arrival in Bath.

In fact, Freyja thought with a sudden rush of insight, it was probably Lady Potford who had informed Wulf.

"She has been most kind," Freyja replied, winning for herself a rather sharp glance from her brother, who must have wondered at the docility of her answer.

They did not talk any more as they walked.

If the marchioness left tomorrow, Freyja thought, then the marquess would probably leave the day after. She would then confess all to Wulfric and go back to Lindsey Hall with him. It would all be very easy. No one here need know. No announcement of the ended betrothal need ever be made. After a while people would forget and stop wondering when the wedding was to be. She had never much cared what gossip was circulating about her anyway.

They ate breakfast in Wulfric's private suite of rooms. His valet was dismissed as soon as he had carried in the food and poured their coffee.

"We have seen two of our brothers married in the past few months," Wulfric said conversationally as Freyja buttered a slice of toast. "Both quite suddenly and ineligibly."

She would have agreed with him on both counts when she first met each of her sisters-in-law.

"Eve's father might have been a coal miner," she said, "but she was brought up as a lady, and she has spirit and a tender heart. Besides which, Aidan dotes on her. Judith is a gentlewoman even if her father is just an obscure country parson. Grandmama adores her and so, of course, does Rannulf. Eligibility is not everything, Wulf."

"Quite so," he said, taking his time about chewing a mouthful of sausage. "You, on the other hand, have made a perfectly eligible choice, Freyja."

She had been quite prepared to argue and fight. She had nothing to say to these words of approval. She looked at him suspiciously.

"Though an equally sudden one," he added.

"It was an impetuous thing," she said. "He proposed marriage to me during a waltz at the Upper Rooms, I said yes, and we wished to invite our fellow guests to share our joy."

"Ah," he said softly in that way Wulf had of making one's flesh crawl with apprehension, "almost word for word the explanation I had from Hallmere himself."

"Because that is the way it was," she said. "Look here, Wulf, if you have come to Bath to play elder brother and head of the family and scold me for betrothing myself to the marquess without first weeping all over you and begging you to give your consent, you may jolly well go home again. I have been of age these past four years. I would think you would be delighted to see me marry eligibly."

"I would rather a marquess than a footman, certainly," he said. "But I do feel constrained to ask if Aidan's marriage and Rannulf's provoked you into this, Freyja."

"Eh?" she asked inelegantly, a forkful of egg halfway to her mouth.

"You are, as you have just observed," he said, "four years past your majority. Five and twenty is an uncomfortable age for a single lady. Have you been made suddenly aware of that this year?"

"No!" she exclaimed hotly. Though there might be a grain of truth in what he had said, she supposed. She had not attended Aidan's wedding-no one in the family had even known about it until weeks after the event. But she had been at Rannulf and Judith's just before coming to Bath, and she had felt some envy. She had even considered putting an end to her single state by grabbing some eligible gentleman in Bath-the Earl of Willett, for example.

Wulfric appeared to hesitate before speaking again. He stopped to take a drink from his coffee cup.

"It did not escape my notice," he said, "that the announcement of your betrothal was made two days after Viscountess Ravensberg was delivered of her son. One day, I believe, after Morgan wrote and informed you of the event. Probably the very day you received her letter."

"If you have a point to make, Wulf," she said when he paused, "there is no need to take all day about it. You think that because Kit has a child I am prostrate with grief and self-pity? You think I hurled myself into the arms of the first available man after I heard the news? You think it was I who proposed marriage to the marquess during that waltz and begged him to have our betrothal announced? All to cover for a broken heart? I do not care that much for Kit Butler." She snapped her finger and thumb over the table between them with a satisfying click. "Or for his viscountess. Or for their son." She tore off a piece of toast and popped it vengefully into her mouth.

"This is, then," Wulfric asked after a brief silence, "a love match, Freyja?"

How could she deny it now after that impassioned outburst, from which she was still breathless?

"I adore him," she said. "And he adores me."

"Ah," he said, gazing at her with his inscrutable eyes. "Quite so."

The tension was almost too much to bear. What a bouncer she had just told. And if he believed it, she was going to look that much more pathetic in a few days' time after she had been abandoned. She leaned across the table, her eyes sparkling with merriment.

"Have you heard about our first encounter in Bath?" she asked him. "Or rather about our first two encounters. They are inextricably linked. If you have not heard yet, someone is bound to bring up the matter this evening. I had best tell you myself now."

He looked slightly pained. "I have a feeling," he said, "that it might be something I would rather not know about."

She laughed and told him about the misunderstanding in Sydney Gardens, about her punching the Marquess of Hallmere in the nose and his neglecting to insist upon telling her what had really happened.

"Of course," she added, "I did not know his identity at that time or he mine. He refused to believe that I was a duke's sister because I had no chaperone with me."

"It is very clear," Wulfric observed dryly, "that you were behaving perfectly normally."

She proceeded to describe the scene in the Pump Room the following morning, complete with all the gruesome details.

"You are to be commended," Wulfric said when she had finished. He sounded rather weary. "You must have provided Bath society with enough conversation to last a week, Freyja. And then, just when it was dying down, you refreshed it with that unexpected announcement at the assembly. Now that you have described the commencement of your acquaintance with Hallmere, of course, it makes perfect sense to me that the two of you would have fallen head over ears for each other and you would have decided upon a life's commitment to each other in the course of a single waltz." He sighed and set down his knife and fork.

Freyja wondered what he would have to say if she were to describe her first encounter with the marquess outside of Bath.

"Are you going to be happy in this marriage, then?" he asked.

Sometimes-just occasionally-one had a sudden glimpse into the humanity of Wulfric. Not often. If he had feelings, he almost never displayed them. If he had dreams or secrets or personal concerns, he never shared them. She often wondered about his relationship with his mistress-if it was strictly business, serving only the obvious function. But sometimes, for the merest moment, there came the shocking realization that perhaps he cared for them all, not just as brothers and sisters who were his responsibility, but as persons whom he might love.

She had one of those stabbing glimpses when he asked his question. And she did something horribly ignominious. Her eyes filled with tears.

"Yes, I am," she said fervently, leaning a little toward him across the table. "Yes, we are."

And then she swallowed and heard a nasty gurgling sound in her throat as she remembered that what she had just said with such uncharacteristic emotion was all a lie.

She almost wished that she really were betrothed to the Marquess of Hallmere and that she really were in love with him and looking forward to a lifetime of happiness with him. She wanted to be able to give her happiness as a gift to Wulf, who, she suddenly thought, was quite probably a lonely man.

"I suppose, then," Wulfric said, setting his napkin on the table and leaning back in his chair, "I had better give my blessing to this match, Freyja, for what my blessing is worth. It is rather akin, I daresay, to shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted."

There was still food left on Freyja's plate, but she had lost interest in it. She pushed the plate away. She felt wretched. She was impulsive and headstrong and frequently indiscreet, but she was unaccustomed to lying to Wulf or anyone else in her family. She was so far into this deception business, however, that there was nothing else to do now but go forward with it until it ended. Fortunately that would be soon.

"Hallmere had better come back to Lindsey Hall with us unless he has some pressing obligation elsewhere," Wulfric said. "We will need to present him in the neighborhood and celebrate your betrothal properly. And we will need to make plans for your wedding."

Freyja suddenly wished she had not eaten at all.

CHAPTER X

Lady Potford's home on Great Pulteney Street was filled with guests on the evening of the betrothal party. She had opened the drawing room, her private sitting room, a salon, and the dining room in order to accommodate all her guests. Each room blazed with the lights of many candles. The long table in the dining room with its crisp white linen cloth was covered with dishes laden with a wide variety of appetizing foods. Two footmen hovered to help guests make their selection and fill their plates. Others carried large trays of filled glasses from room to room.

Lady Potford was, as she had told Joshua and Freyja numerous times and the Duke of Bewcastle once during her morning stroll with him in the Pump Room, more than delighted by the happy turn of events.

"I was dreadfully afraid," she had told Joshua, "that you would drift on as you have drifted for the past several years, tasting the ephemeral pleasures of life without realizing that there is an even greater pleasure to be had from fulfilling one's appointed role in life and from forming one's own family. You will go back to Penhallow after marrying Lady Freyja and set up your nursery there and see to the administration of your estate and the well-being of your people. She is just the bride for you, Joshua. I am very happy."

"I have an able steward, Grandmama," he had pointed out to her, "and I keep in constant communication with him." Jim Saunders was, in fact, the one person who always knew where he was. "Lady Freyja may prefer to live in London-or she may not," he conceded.

All the guests appeared happy too. It was not often that there was an event of such a dazzling nature to celebrate in Bath-and involving two such illustrious persons as a marquess and a duke's daughter. There was a great deal of merry conversation and laughter in every room.

The Marchioness of Hallmere, clad regally in a black satin gown with tall black hair plumes, appeared as happy as anyone. She smiled with sentimental joy at anyone who greeted her and occasionally dabbed at a happy tear with her black-bordered handkerchief. She kissed the air close to Freyja's cheek and took Joshua's face between her two hands before kissing him tenderly and assuring him and everyone else within earshot that his dear departed uncle would be proud of him tonight.

And then she sought out the Duke of Bewcastle in the drawing room.

"I am gratified and relieved that you saw fit to come to Bath at such short notice, your grace," she said, presenting him with her hand.

He took it and bowed over it, though he did not carry it to his lips.

"Ma'am," he said.

"Lady Freyja has taken Bath society by storm," she said. "She is such a sweet young lady."

His grace inclined his head in acknowledgment of the strange compliment, his silver eyes flat and quite unreadable.

"One can only hope," she said, "that she will be as happy as she deserves to be."

"Indeed, ma'am," he agreed with chilling hauteur.

"And one can only hope," she said, dabbing delicately at one eye with her handkerchief, "that Joshua did not rush into this betrothal simply for a lark."

The ducal eyebrows arched slightly, but he did not ask the question she clearly expected him to ask in the pause that succeeded her words.

"He is the dearest boy," she said with a deep sigh. "It was always impossible not to love him despite all his mischief. He was devoted to his cousins, especially Constance, my eldest girl, to whom you were presented in the Pump Room this morning."

The duke inclined his head again.

"But he acquired what the late Hallmere referred to as cold feet when he was on the verge of offering for her five years ago," she said, "and ran away to amuse himself on the Continent, though why he would go there when there was a war on I cannot imagine. It became clear to me after my dear husband's passing that he was still too embarrassed and ashamed to come home, and so I came here. It was soon obvious that the attachment between Joshua and Constance was still very much alive, but foolishly-parents can be very foolish, your grace, when they wish for nothing more than the happiness of their children-foolishly I pressed the match on them instead of allowing the courtship to take its natural course. It was my dearest wish that their betrothal be announced during last week's ball in the Upper Rooms, and I was under the distinct impression that it was Joshua's dearest wish too. But then he dashed off to waltz with Lady Freyja, that mischievous, reckless look in his eye that I recognize so well, and at the end of the set he had Mr. King announce his betrothal to her."

The Duke of Bewcastle had grasped the handle of his quizzing glass and raised it halfway to his eye.

The marchioness tittered and then let the happy expression fade. She looked fragile and wan.

"I fear," she said, "that my nephew has taken advantage of a fine lady who has perhaps reached the age at which-I am sure you will pardon me for such plain speaking, your grace-she is so eager for a marriage proposal that she is unable to distinguish between a serious offer and one that was made merely for his own convenience until he can disappear on one of his wild escapades again."

For a moment the marchioness found herself undergoing the disconcerting experience of being regarded through the lens of the duke's quizzing glass. But he soon let the glass fall on its ribbon.

"I must congratulate you, ma'am," he said coldly, "on your narrow escape."

"My . . . ?" Clearly she did not know what he was talking about. She took refuge behind her handkerchief and then smiled bravely and sweetly at a guest who greeted her as he passed.

"It would have been painful to you, ma'am," he said, "to see Hallmere married to your daughter when you suspect that he was somehow responsible for your son's death."

She stared at him. "Oh, I do beg your pardon," she said, her eyes widening in shock. "Is that the impression I gave in the letter I felt bound to write you, your grace? It was an accident. Joshua was with Albert before it happened. He was the last person to see him alive. There was never any question, though, that he caused the accident or even witnessed it."

"Ah," his grace said. "But there would still be the painful knowledge that the man who married your daughter had also fathered a child on her governess."

"Oh, not Constance's governess," she said. "Constance was already out of the schoolroom. Miss Jewell was governess to my other daughters, your grace. It was an unfortunate incident." She simpered and looked archly at him. "But young men will be young men, as I am sure I need not tell you, your grace. You have several younger brothers, I believe?"

The cold silver eyes regarded her in silence.

"Well." She dabbed at her eyes once more. "I considered it my duty to warn you, your grace, that your sister may be in danger of having her heart broken. Joshua is such a handsome boy and such a heartless rogue. I do not know why I love him, but I do. Lady Freyja is such a sweet lady. I would hate to see her hurt."

His grace was fingering the handle of his quizzing glass again and regarding her with haughtily raised eyebrows and arctic eyes.

"Oh." She smiled brightly and waved to someone across the room. "If you will excuse me, your grace. I see that I am wanted."

The duke bowed slightly to her, and she hurried away.

What is it, sweetheart?" Joshua asked. "Can't keep your hands off me, can you?"

He was lighting a single branch of candles on the mantelpiece in the small downstairs room his grandmother used as her office and writing room. There were a desk and chair in there, as well as a few bookcases and two matching armchairs with gilded arms and legs.

"Ha!" she said with haughty disdain.

He turned his head to grin at her. She had told him that she needed to have a private word with him, and he had brought her in here. She was wearing a transparent silver tunic over a low-cut pale blue gown with a great deal of silver thread and embroidery and was looking quite dazzlingly handsome. Her hair was threaded with silver too.

"I may well not be able to keep my hands off you," he told her, perching on the edge of the desk with one foot braced on the floor and the other leg swinging free. "I believe your modiste must have run short of fabric when she reached your bodice. With magnificent results, I might add."

"Such lascivious talk does you no credit," she said severely. "I would wager you would not dare talk thus to any other lady."

"Good Lord, no," he agreed. "I never enjoy having my face slapped. You will note that I set half a room between us before talking thus to you. I like my nose the shape it is."

"We have got ourselves into a dreadful coil," she said.

"We have," he agreed. "Somehow I suppose I imagined that Mr. King would announce our betrothal, everyone would smile and nod and assure us and one another that that was very pleasant news, and then we would all go about our business more or less as usual until you and I could decently go our separate ways again. I did not envisage this party-or the extravagance of my grandmother's delight."

"And I did not foresee Wulf's coming to Bath," she said, frowning. "It has made the whole thing horribly and embarrassingly complicated."

"Has he tried to persuade you to end the betrothal?" he asked. "I have been under the distinct impression that he is less than delighted with me." He wondered if her brother had shown her his aunt's letter or told her any of the damning things she appeared to have included in that letter.

She shook her head. "Wulf would not do that," she said. "He does not give orders. Not to his brothers and sisters anyway. Though I have often thought that he is quite expert at maneuvering us into doing what he wants us to do, apparently of our own free will."

"Perhaps, then," he said, smiling at her, "you can allow him to maneuver you into giving me my marching orders. It would be the perfect answer to our dilemma, would it not? Just give me enough warning, though, if it happens before my aunt leaves Bath so that I can flee before I find myself betrothed to someone else instead."

"I assured him," she said, "that I adore you and that you adore me. I have promised him that we will be happy."

Despite himself he threw back his head and laughed.

"You might try frowning less ferociously," he said. "I might almost believe that you do not mean a word of it."

"Is everything a joke to you?" she asked, coming closer to him. "I have never lied to Wulf before. I have always scorned lies."

He reached out and took one of her hands in his and shifted his weight so that he was sitting fully on the desk.

"At the moment," he said, "I am feeling something akin to adoration."

"He expects you to accompany us back to Lindsey Hall within the next few days," she said, "so that you can be presented to the rest of my family and our neighbors. So that our betrothal can be celebrated there. So that our wedding can be planned."

"Ah," he said, possessing himself of her other hand too. "We find ourselves in a coil indeed."

"You are not to agree to it," she said, glaring at him haughtily along the length of her nose. "You are not to come. You are to make some excuse about another commitment, and then after you have gone I will break the truth to Wulf."

"Ah, sweetheart," he said, "I have made life difficult for you."

"You have indeed," she said. "But I agreed to your mad scheme and on the whole I am not sorry. This past week has been far less tedious than it would have been if we had not been betrothed. Indeed, it has been downright enjoyable."

"For me too." He grinned at her.

She opened her mouth and drew breath to say something else, did not say it, but locked glances with him instead. It was an awkward, unexpectedly silent moment in which it seemed they both simultaneously realized that they were alone together in a small, private room lit only by the flickering light of three candles.

He was very aware of the enticingly bare expanse of her bosom, of the cleavage between her generously rounded breasts, of her gracefully arched neck, of her bold, strangely attractive face, of the shining mass of her fair hair. He felt his temperature rise a notch, his breath quicken, his groin tighten.

He drew her forward until she stood between his spread legs, and drew her arms about his waist until she locked them behind him. He cupped her face with his hands, smoothed his thumbs over her dark eyebrows and then down her cheeks to rub over her lips.

He ran his tongue over his own lips as he lowered his head and then over hers-they were soft and warm and unresisting. He drew down her bottom lip with his thumb, ran his tongue back and forth over the soft flesh inside, and then, when she opened her mouth with a low sound of acquiescence, he kissed her fully, sliding his tongue deep inside.

Desire exploded in him with furnace heat. He wrapped one arm about her shoulders and the other about her waist to draw her closer, and lost himself in sheer carnal lust.

"What are we doing?" she asked suddenly a short while later, jerking back her head and glaring at him with bright eyes and flushed cheeks.

"Kissing?" he suggested, rubbing his nose across hers and grinning at her. "We did both just agree, did we not, that it has been an enjoyable week? Why not make it more so?"

"Perhaps," she said, her hands on his shoulders as if to push away from him, "you need to be reminded that we are not really betrothed."

"Yet this is our betrothal party," he said, "and you have assured your brother that we adore each other and are going to live happily ever after together. You never lie to your brother."

He had better be careful, he thought, or he was going to talk himself into something he could not talk himself out of.

"I do not kiss every handsome stranger I encounter," she retorted.

"Only the ones you temporarily betroth yourself to?" He grinned and wrapped both arms about her waist. It was very small, a delicious contrast to her bosom and hips.

She stared at him. "Promise me you will not be persuaded to come to Lindsey Hall," she said. "This needs to be ended now-as soon as possible after tonight."

"You are afraid," he asked softly, rubbing his nose over hers again and teasing her lips with his own, "that you will not be able to resist my body much longer?"

She tutted. "I have never in my life met such a conceited man," she said.

"I am mortally afraid," he said, "that I will not be able to resist yours."

He meant it too. Having Lady Freyja Bedwyn in bed, he suspected, would be the sensual experience of a lifetime. Unfortunately, he would never know for sure. She was a lady-an aristocrat. She was out of bounds. But a betrothal, he was finding, even a fake one, was setting severe temptation in his way. In hers too, it appeared-despite her words she was making no concerted effort to get away from him.

"I could begin the feast here," he said, nibbling at her lips with his teeth, "and work my way down to your toes. Toes are a marvelously erotic part of the anatomy. Did you know that?"

"I did not," she said firmly, drawing her head back a few inches to glare at him. "And this is quite improper talk. You are laughing at me. Your eyes give you away every time."

"Do they, sweetheart?" He dipped his head to nuzzle her neck where it joined her shoulder. She hunched the shoulder and tipped back her head. Her fingers twined in his hair and clutched it. "And do they also tell you that I might never reach your toes? I might be distracted by something altogether more erotic halfway down."

He heard breath hiss into her. This might be the moment to protect his nose from acquiring a bend of its own, he thought, but when he lifted his head he could see that her lips were parted and her eyes heavy-lidded. She did not have fisticuffs on her mind, then.

"We ought not to be here," she said. "We ought to be with your grandmother's guests. They will wonder where we are."

"They will think that we are stealing a few moments for ourselves," he told her. "They will be charmed."

She moved her head forward then, closing her eyes as she came, and kissed him fiercely on the lips, opening her mouth, opening his, and invading him with her tongue.

She had both arms coiled about his neck and he had both hands splayed over her buttocks when the door opened.

"Ah," the cold, rather languid voice of the Duke of Bewcastle said as Joshua opened his eyes, lifted his head, and slid his hands up to a more decorous position on either side of her waist, "here you both are."

He stepped into the room and closed the door quietly behind him as Lady Freyja spun around, flushed and slightly disheveled.

"Do you ever think of knocking, Wulf?" she demanded haughtily.

He raised his eyebrows and looked faintly surprised. "No," he said after pausing to give her question some consideration. "A servant directed me here."

Freyja was horribly embarrassed-partly because she had launched herself with such lascivious intent at the marquess, partly because Wulf had walked in and caught her at it. It was only after the marquess had moved his hands that she had realized where they had been. And of course they would have been in full view to Wulf-she had had her back to the door.

She glanced down hastily but was reassured to find that the low bodice of her gown still covered everything it had been designed to cover. Now, she thought crossly, she was going to look doubly pathetic in a few days' time when this farce was all over.

Wulfric had not come to drag her back to the party by the hair, it seemed. He settled into one of the gilded chairs, rested his elbows on the arms, and steepled his fingers-a characteristic pose when he had something of some import to say.

"Sit down, Freyja," he said, indicating the other chair before joining his fingertips again. "I understand that there was a great deal more at play during the infamous ball at the Upper Rooms one week ago than presented itself to general observation."

Freyja, seating herself and feeling the marquess come to stand behind and slightly to one side of her chair and set a hand on the back of it, suddenly felt no doubt at all that Wulfric knew everything.

"It would appear," he continued, "that quite unknown to most of the guests present, there was an unseemly rush to win the race over which of two betrothals, both involving the same gentleman, was to be announced first. Am I correct in this assumption, Hallmere?"

There was a predictable thread of laughter in the marquess's voice when he answered.

"Not exactly," he said, "though according to my cousin Constance, the marchioness was hoping to advance our apparent courtship to such a degree that an announcement would have seemed superfluous. I preferred to defend myself with offense."

Wulfric leveled upon him the sort of keen, icy look that had most ordinary mortals withering up in the vain hope of disappearing altogether. Freyja did not look to see if the marquess was one of them. She should, she supposed, be feeling enormous relief. The worst part of ending the masquerade-telling Wulf-was to be avoided. She might have guessed that he would discover the truth for himself.

"This betrothal is to end as soon as the Marchioness of Hallmere and her daughter have left for home, I assume?" Wulfric asked.

"With heartfelt thanks to Lady Freyja for saving me from a life sentence and apologies for any inconvenience to her, yes," the marquess agreed.

"It has not been inconvenient, Wulf," Freyja added firmly. "Indeed I agreed gladly to the scheme. And the tedium of life in Bath has been considerably alleviated during the past week."

"During which time you have been enjoying excursions into the hills and surrounding countryside at all hours of the day, alone with a gentleman who is not your betrothed," Wulfric said. "And embracing him."

"That was just tonight," she said. "And on one other occasion," she added for honesty's sake now that the lies had been dispensed with. "You are not going to be gothic about this whole thing, are you, Wulf? I am five and twenty years old. I do not need to be hedged about with chaperones and guardians as poor Morgan does."

He transferred his inscrutable gaze to the marquess.

"Your aunt's prediction, made to me not one hour ago, will prove perfectly correct when you abandon my sister within the coming week," he said. "She will be delighted. Lady Freyja Bedwyn will be humiliated."

"Nonsense, Wulf," she said crossly.

But he did not even deign to look at her. His silver gaze was fixed on the marquess, who chuckled softly.

"Neither of which outcomes is to my liking," he said. "What are you suggesting, Bewcastle? That I marry Lady Freyja after all? I doubt she will have me."

"That-publicly, at least-should be her decision," Wulfric said. "Would you not agree?"

Freyja shot to her feet. "Nonsense," she said again. "I agreed to this scheme because it amused me to do so. I did not do it in order to trap the Marquess of Hallmere into marrying me. I do not want him-or any other husband for that matter."

His eyes were laughing, she saw when she strode past him on the way to the desk. She sat down on the chair behind it, as far from the two men as she could get. How very stupid all this was.

"Perhaps," the marquess said, "we can stage another scene in the Pump Room in a few days' time. Have you heard of the first one, Bewcastle? I am afraid Lady Freyja showed to less than advantage on that occasion. On the next, I can assure you, everyone's sympathy will be with her as she punches me in the nose and invites me to go to hell. Everyone will congratulate her for so publicly freeing herself from her betrothal to a rogue."

Wulfric, Freyja could see as she stared broodingly at him, was not amused.

"The day after tomorrow, Hallmere," he said, "you will accompany Lady Freyja and me to Lindsey Hall, where you will formally make the acquaintance of our family and neighbors. We will have your betrothal properly announced and celebrated. If by Christmas or the spring she has decided that after all she does not wish to join herself in matrimony to you, then the necessary announcement will be made-by me. She will be frowned upon, of course-that cannot be avoided now-but she will not be pitied."

"I believe," the marquess said, turning to glance at her, "Lady Freyja does not wish me to come to Lindsey Hall."

She compressed her lips. How many minutes had passed since she had assured the marquess that Wulf never gave orders to his brothers and sisters? This all sounded very like a firm ducal command to her.

"Lady Freyja will be glad of an escort for the next week or two," Wulfric said. "Her brothers and their wives will be coming to Lindsey Hall, having been invited to attend the christening celebrations for the new grandson of our neighbor, the Duke of Redfield."

Freyja sat bolt upright in her chair. Celebrations for the christening of Kit's son? And she was now trapped into going home, with or without the Marquess of Hallmere? She was going to have to attend? To smile and grin at everyone and pretend to be happy for Kit and the viscountess and the earl and countess?

The marquess had turned to face her fully, his hands clasped behind his back. He was looking far more serious than usual-almost grim, in fact.

"If it is Lady Freyja who is to decide if and when our betrothal is to end," he said, "then it is she who must decide whether I come to Lindsey Hall or not."

She should set him free here and now. Indeed, she should march out into the party right at this moment and make a public announcement of the end of their betrothal. It had been a ridiculous farce from the start. At the same time the marquess could make a public announcement that he was not going to marry his cousin Constance. There would be an end of the whole stupid mess.

With the pathetic humiliation of a broken engagement behind her-news of it was bound to drift homeward sooner or later, probably sooner-she was going to have to attend the christening party for Kit's baby and smile and smile until her face felt permanently stretched.

"You had better come for a week or two, then," she said ungraciously. "We will contrive to quarrel at the end of it-it should not be difficult."

Wulfric got to his feet. "I believe," he said with distant hauteur, "you have neglected Lady Potford's guests for long enough."

He strolled to the door and let himself out without a backward glance.

The marquess looked at Freyja.

"Good Lord," he said.

"Triple damnation," she said.

He grinned and then-quite predictably-laughed.

"So we live to kiss again," he said, waggling his eyebrows and offering her his arm.

"Over my dead body," she assured him, lofting her nose into the air and passing him on her way to the door.

"A cliché unworthy of you, sweetheart," he said. "But I sincerely hope you do not mean it. I would be incapable of enjoying such a kiss-as would you too, of course-and I would hate that for both of us."

CHAPTER XI

Two days later Joshua found himself riding along the king's highway in the midst of the impressively large entourage of liveried coachmen, footmen, and outriders escorting his grace's crested traveling carriage and baggage coach to Lindsey Hall in Hampshire. Who could have predicted the bizarre sequence of events that had brought him to this moment? He could not decide whether he should be quaking with terror or doubled over with helpless laughter.

But he was not a man much given to terror. And watching people in every village through which they passed gawking in awe and bobbing curtsies or pulling at forelocks and the drivers of every vehicle they passed respectfully pulling over to one side of the road until the procession had gone by was endlessly amusing. He could probably behave this way if he wished, he supposed-he was the Marquess of Hallmere, after all. The thought tickled his fancy.

He wished he could share the joke with Lady Freyja. But she, much against the grain, he suspected, was riding inside the leading carriage with the duke. Besides, it was possible that she was so accustomed to this form of travel that she would not see anything humorous about it. He wondered what they were talking about. Probably nothing at all, or else the weather or the passing scenery. Bewcastle had made no further mention of the betrothal since the evening before last.

Joshua was feeling perfectly cheerful as he looked forward to arriving at Lindsey Hall. It was true that he was fairly caught in parson's mousetrap until Lady Freyja in due course decided to set him free. He was entirely at her mercy. But she was a woman who would always play fair even if she also played rough, he believed. Besides, she had no more wish to marry him than he had to marry her. In the meantime he liked her. He had not yet tired of her company. Quite the contrary-he found her conversation and wit and spirit quite as stimulating as those of any of his male friends. And he found her dashed attractive. Maybe too attractive-he was going to have to tread carefully in the coming days or weeks or however long he was expected to stay in Hampshire.

They reached Lindsey Hall during the middle of the afternoon. Joshua followed the carriage through the gates and along a straight, wide avenue lined with elm trees. The house soon came into view at the end of it. It was neither medieval nor Jacobean nor Georgian nor any other single architectural style. It was a mix of many styles and clearly a mansion that had been in the family for generations and "improved" upon and added to many times. The result was surprisingly imposing and pleasing.

The wide avenue divided into two not far from the house in order to skirt about a large circular garden with a marble fountain at its center. There were not as many flowers blooming at this time of the year as there probably were in July, but the water had not yet been turned off for the winter. It spouted at least thirty feet into the air before spilling over into the wide basin like the sparkling spokes of an umbrella.

There was a young boy standing precariously on the edge of the basin, probably getting wet. A tall, solid-looking man with dark, forbidding countenance and large, hooked nose-the Bedwyn nose?-stood on the grassy verge of the avenue not far from the boy, a young girl perched on one of his shoulders and clinging to his hair. A slender, pretty, brown-haired young lady and a voluptuously endowed redhead were with them. All had turned to watch the approach of the carriage. The ladies smiled as it passed. The little girl waved. They all looked curiously at Joshua.

Three other people dressed for riding were walking out of the stable yard as the carriage made its final turn onto the cobbled terrace before the great double doors of the house. One was a slender, willowy, dark-haired young beauty. The other two were men, one tall, broad, fair, and dark-browed, the other dark, slim, and good-looking. Both had the family nose.

He was about to meet the Bedwyns, Joshua realized. He wondered how he would be introduced. He had not discussed with Bewcastle whether or not the family was to be party to the farce that must be acted out for decency's sake until the betrothal could be properly ended-if there was a proper way to end a betrothal.

There was a great deal of noise as everyone converged upon the terrace while the carriage door was opened wide and the steps set down. The big, fair-haired brother reached inside and swung Lady Freyja out without benefit of the steps. She proceeded to hug the ladies and the little girl. She shook hands like a man with the boy and her brothers. The duke meanwhile descended, nodded to them all, and looked faintly taken aback when the brown-haired lady hugged him.

Joshua dismounted and turned his horse over to the care of a groom who had come running from the stables.

Freyja came striding over to him when she had completed her flurry of greetings. Her chin was lifted proudly. There was a martial gleam in her eyes. It was not, perhaps, a moment she had anticipated with any great joy. She took him firmly by one hand.

"I want you all to meet the Marquess of Hallmere-Joshua," she said, her voice raised haughtily. "My betrothed. There is no marriage date set. I daresay it will be next year sometime. Perhaps next summer."

There was a chorus of sound, but she held up one hand and it subsided.

"Let me complete the introductions first," she said and proceeded to name all the strangers about him. Lady Morgan Bedwyn, the dark young beauty, curtsied to him and looked him over with frank, dark eyes. Lord Alleyne, the dark-haired young man, looked amused. The fair-haired giant was Lord Rannulf, the gorgeous redhead, his wife, Judith. The pretty, brown-haired lady was Eve, Lady Aidan Bedwyn. Her husband was the dark, dour man, who looked as if he might have spent a year or ten in the military. The children, Davy and Becky, belonged to the latter couple.

"So that is why you dashed away to Bath without a word to anyone just when we were expecting Aidan and Eve and Ralf and Judith to arrive," Lady Morgan said to her eldest brother. "You heard about the betrothal and went to see for yourself. Why is it that Wulf hears all the interesting stories and we do not?"

Lord Rannulf was shaking Joshua's hand with a warm, firm grip.

"This is sudden," he said, grinning. "But we Bedwyns have a recent history of sudden betrothals and marriages. Why would Free be different?"

"Hallmere?" The dark, granite-faced Lord Aidan Bedwyn shook his hand with a nod but no smile.

His wife was hugging Lady Freyja again, tears in her eyes.

"I am so happy for you, Freyja," she said. "I knew it must happen soon."

The little boy had wormed his way between Joshua and Freyja and was pulling on the skirt of her carriage dress.

"Aunt Freyja," he said, and tugged again. "Aunt Freyja, I brought my cricket set with me."

"Hey, rascal." Lord Aidan suddenly looked almost human as he reached down to scoop the child up and deposit him astride his shoulders. "Let your aunt get her foot inside the house before pestering her to play with you. Besides, this is not the season for cricket. We will find something else energetic to do tomorrow."

"But cricket it will be first, in season or out," Lady Freyja said, smiling up at the boy and even winking at him. "I want you on my team, Davy. I'll hit a six in my very first over at bat."

Joshua looked at her with some interest. She played cricket? He might have known it.

"May I play too?" he asked. "I am a famous bowler and have been known to prevent a single six being hit for a whole inning-or even a four."

"Ha!" she said.

The boy was laughing with delight and Lord Aidan made himself look entirely human by smiling.

"I suppose," he said, "any season is good for cricket if the Bedwyns say it is."

"Perhaps," the Duke of Bewcastle said without at all raising his voice, though all of the boisterous Bedwyns fell silent to listen, "we should step into the house and gather for tea in the drawing room in half an hour's time?"

"The master has spoken," Lord Alleyne said with a low chuckle after Bewcastle had preceded them all into the house. He set one arm about Lady Freyja's shoulders and hugged her to his side. "I am happy for you, Free, if you are happy. And you, Hallmere. We had better file inside like docile lambs." He strode off ahead of them.

"Whew!" Joshua said, grinning down at Lady Freyja and offering her his arm.

"I have decided," she said, looking at him haughtily as she took it, "that I will call you Josh. I refuse to 'my lord' you, I do not wish to call you Hallmere, and Joshua is too biblical. You may call me Freyja."

"Or Free, as your brothers do?" he suggested.

"Or Free," she agreed. "But only as long as we are betrothed. Until Christmas at the latest."

"I will make free with Free until then," he said.

She cast him a sidelong look, which assured him that she had not missed either the pun or the double entendre.

They ascended the steps and entered the house. Joshua found himself in an impressive medieval great hall complete with an oak-beamed ceiling, a gigantic fireplace large enough to roast an ox in, whitewashed walls bedecked with coats of arms, banners, and weapons, a minstrel gallery above an intricately carved wooden screen, and a massive oak table filling up much of the floor space.

It looked like the perfect setting for a feast and an orgy.

The christening was to take place two days after her return home, Freyja discovered, and it was to be a grand affair indeed. After the church service late in the morning, all the guests were to proceed to Alvesley Park, home of the Earl of Redfield-and of Kit, Viscount Ravensberg, too-for dinner and a party that would probably last into the evening.

Rannulf and Judith had come all the way from Grandmaison in Leicestershire, where they lived with the Bedwyns' ailing maternal grandmother, whose heir Ralf was-he and Kit had always been best friends. And Aidan and Eve and the children had come because they were not far away in Oxfordshire and because, according to Aidan, he had been away at the wars for so many years that he had missed a decade and more of family and neighborhood events.

It was all going to be a severe trial, Freyja decided. She dreaded the day even with the added security of a betrothed to take along with her. It was stupid to have allowed herself to be so discomposed by an ancient passion-it was four years since she had fallen desperately in love with Kit Butler, and it had lasted for precisely one month. But, of course, there had been the added bother of last year and all its hideous embarrassment. She had behaved badly. She had made an idiot of herself. She had ended up practically begging Kit to give up Lauren in order to marry her and then slamming her fist into poor Ralf's jaw, perhaps because Kit's had not been available at that precise moment.

She would think of tomorrow when tomorrow came, she decided the morning after she arrived home. And she would think of the problem of Josh after tomorrow was over. He was in her debt, she had decided, despite all the walks and rides in Bath. After all, he had enjoyed those walks and rides too. So he owed her his escort for tomorrow. After that she would find some way of drawing him into a ghastly, very public brawl, and she would break off the engagement. She had no intention of waiting until Christmas or later, as Wulfric had suggested. It would be unfair. And she might find it harder to do if she allowed more time to elapse. He was quite alarmingly attractive. That was in addition to his good looks, of course, which had not escaped notice among her family.

"You have been in Bath for a couple of weeks, Freyja," Morgan had said the night before when all the women had gathered briefly in Freyja's bedchamber, "and you have come home with a Greek god. All I will discover when I go to town in the spring for my come-out and exposure to the marriage mart is a whole gaggle of awkward-mannered, pimply youths. It is most provoking."

Both Judith and Eve had laughed.

"But you will wait for your prince to arrive, Morgan," Eve had said. "And he will, you know, just as Freyja's has."

"Freyja's prince just happens to be absolutely gorgeous," Judith had added, her right hand placed theatrically over her heart, her eyelids batting. "All that shining blond hair. Arghhh!"

"And those laughing blue eyes," Morgan had added mournfully. "How will I ever find any man to match him for myself?"

"But one's own particular prince always appears more splendid than any ordinary mortal, Morgan-or even any other extraordinary one," Eve had said kindly. "Aidan does to me, and I am certain Rannulf does to Judith."

Freyja had looked at them both, slightly envious.

She would feel no negative emotion today, though, she decided after getting out of bed early and looking out the window to note that the clouds were high and might even move off by midmorning to offer a sunny day. The air coming through her open window was cool but not cold. It was a fine morning for cricket. It was a fine day for all sorts of strenuous outdoor activities.

How wonderful it was to be away from the confining atmosphere of Bath.

They all joined in the game of cricket after breakfast-all except Wulfric, of course, who disappeared into his study. Even Eve and Judith decided to play, though Rannulf tried to talk Judith out of it, directing all sorts of significant glances across the table at her, all of which she ignored.

Gracious heavens! Freyja thought. Was Judith with child? How very interesting that would be if it were true. She and Ralf had been married no longer than a month. Was it possible . . . But that was absolutely none of her business.

Freyja and Joshua were on different teams-deliberately so. He was determined to bowl her out; she was equally determined to hit a six off him. She had Eve, Morgan, Rannulf, and Davy on her team. Joshua had Judith, Aidan, Alleyne, and Becky on his.

Fortunately, Rannulf was a decent bowler. Although he went easy on Judith and very easy indeed on Becky, making sure that she hit a number of balls and scored a total of eight runs while all the fielders became remarkably clumsy and simply could not throw her out, Aidan hit one six and a couple of fours off him before Freyja caught him out close to the boundary, and Joshua hung in for a total of twenty runs. Alleyne went out ignominiously to the very first ball bowled at him-it shattered the wickets behind him while Davy went wild with glee.

Freyja's team needed fifty-two runs to win when they came up to bat. Rannulf scored fifteen before being caught out. Eve scored sixteen and Morgan eleven, both with very lenient bowling from Josh, who looked distractingly virile and handsome without his coat or waistcoat and with his shirtsleeves rolled halfway to his elbows. Davy, also the recipient of friendly bowling, was at nine runs when Morgan finally went out and Freyja came in.

Joshua's first ball came hurtling down between the wickets, a wicked spin making its course almost impossible to judge. Freyja could do nothing better with it than fiercely protect her wickets and then glare at a grinning bowler.

"Can't you do any better than that?" she yelled, and flexed her wrists and made a few showy air shots with the bat.

He could.

The next ball hopped awkwardly just in front of her, sending up a shower of grass and dust and almost taking her front teeth out as it whizzed past her face.

"Can't you do any better than that?" he yelled, while his team catcalled and Freyja's clapped their hands and called out encouraging words to her.

She watched the next ball every inch of the way, saw it as if it were coming at half speed, judged the spin with clear, unhurried mind, adjusted the bat, gripped it tightly, and hit the ball with a satisfying crack. She watched it as it soared over the lawn in a beautiful arc and cleared Aidan's head at the boundary by a good three feet. Then she ran between the wickets, her bat in one hand, her skirts caught up in the other, laughing as she went, passing a wildly whooping Davy halfway down.

The game had been won by Freyja's team.

"I believe," she said, when she had finished running, stopping not far from Joshua, panting, her hands on her hips, her hair in wild disarray about her shoulders-she had pulled out the last of the pins long ago, "I have proved a point."

"You have," he said, with a look of abject dejection belied by his laughing eyes. "You have won our wager, Free. I had better pay the penalty."

And there, before her brothers and sister and sisters-in-law and the two children, he took two long strides forward, tangled his hand in her hair so that he was cupping the back of her head, tipped back her head, and kissed her with lingering thoroughness on the lips.

She was glad she had been running, she thought, when he finally lifted his head and she found herself the interested object of her relatives' grinning attention. It would account for her hot cheeks. It would be just too lowering to be seen to blush.

"I must be suffering from memory loss," she said. "I do not recall any wager."

"I will never again be able to hold up my head among my cricket-playing peers," Joshua said. "I must confess that game was quite fairly won. I had no intention of allowing you to get a hit off me."

"I know." She smiled dazzlingly at him.

"What are we going to do next?" Davy was jumping up and down in his excitement and addressing them all in a piping yell. "You said we would find something else strenuous to do, Uncle Aidan. Can we go riding or play hide-and-seek or climb trees or-"

Aidan caught him up and suspended him by his ankles.

"What we will do next," he said, while Davy squealed and giggled and demanded to be put down, "is have luncheon. And then we will see." He set the boy gently down on the grass and tickled him with the toe of his boot.

"Uncle Aidan?" Joshua asked, as they walked back to the house, taking Freyja's hand in his and lacing his fingers with hers.

"Becky and Davy were Eve's foster children when Aidan met her earlier this year," she explained. "Their parents were dead and none of their relatives were willing to take them in. More recently Eve and Aidan have been given legal custody of them. Becky calls them Mama and Papa. Davy calls them Uncle and Aunt. Eve has told me that they are careful not to try to take their parents' place or to encourage the children to forget their parents. I could never have imagined Aidan with children. But, as you can see, he is as fond of those two as any father."

"He has been a military man?" Joshua asked.

"For twelve years," she said. "From the age of eighteen to a few months ago, after he married Eve." She glanced down at their hands. "Did I give you permission to hold my hand, Josh-and in quite so intimate a manner?"

He looked down too and then up into her face before laughing at her.

"No," he said. "But we have a masquerade to maintain. Apparently you and Bewcastle agreed between you that our betrothal is to appear real to your family. I am merely doing my part."

"If you imagine," she said severely, "that I am going to stand idly by while you maul me about in the name of realism, I am here to tell you that you are mistaken."

"Stand idly by?" He laughed again. "Oh, I hope not. It is no fun mauling about a marble statue or a limp fish. I suppose you were quite a hoyden when you were growing up?"

"Of course," she said.

"Good." He lowered his head closer to hers, and for one moment she thought he was going to kiss her again. "I have a definite weakness for hoydens."

This masquerade, she realized, had given him all the license in the world to flirt outrageously with her-and even to slip beyond flirtation at times.

Why was it such an exhilarating thought?

The Bedwyns were a boisterous, fun-loving family, Joshua had decided before the day was out. The children were not hidden away in the nursery while the adults found something decorously dull with which to occupy themselves. After luncheon they all decided to walk down to the lake, which was hidden from sight among the trees to the east of the house. There were plenty of hiding places there, Rannulf said-all of them had invited Joshua to an informal use of their names-for a game of hide-and-seek. He would take the swing with him, Alleyne added, and set it up in one of the trees. The trees were there to be climbed too, Freyja said.

"And there is always the water," Aidan said.

"In September?" his wife asked.

"A warm September," Aidan said, looking toward the window.

The sun indeed was shining.

"If anyone is going swimming," she said firmly, "I shall sit on the bank watching and attempt to look as decorative as I possibly can."

"Me too, Eve," Judith said. "We can take turns on the swing for exercise."

It was as active and strenuous an afternoon as it had promised to be. The children, Joshua suspected, were merely an excuse for the adults to kick up their heels and have a rollicking good time.

Alleyne and Joshua both climbed a tall, stout tree not far from the picturesque, man-made lake and secured the ropes of the swing to a high branch. The children swung there for a while, but inevitably a game of hide-and-seek began and continued for an hour or more until it was Joshua's turn to hunt and he had unearthed everyone but Freyja. He found her eventually perched high in an old oak tree, her back against the trunk, her feet drawn up against her, her arms clasped around her knees. He had already searched around and past that tree half a dozen times.

"Hey!" he called. "That is cheating. One rule was that we must keep in contact with the ground."

"The tree trunk is in contact with the ground," she said, looking down without giving any sign that she might be afraid of heights. "And my back is in contact with the tree trunk."

"Hmm," he said. "There is a flaw in that logic somewhere. But you are fairly caught now."

"You have to touch me first," she said.

"Are you going to make me come up there?" he asked, narrowing his eyes on her.

"Yes." She tipped back her head to admire the sky.

They admired it together after he had climbed up and touched her arm to make her officially out. A few little puffs of white were rolling slowly in a wide expanse of blue.

"Summer is almost over," she said. "Well, it is over, but it is lingering on into autumn. I wish winter were not ahead."

"But there are invigorating walks and rides to take in winter," he said. "And if it snows, there are sled rides and snowball fights and skating and snowmen to build."

"It never snows," she said with a sigh.

He stood on the branch slightly below the level of hers and looked at her. She had left her hair down since the morning. She looked like a wild fairy creature of the woods-but in a pensive mood.

"We will have to stay betrothed, sweetheart," he said. "And I will show you so many interesting ways of using winter that you will want summer never to come."

She turned her head and half smiled at him.

"Don't worry," she said. "I will have decided long before winter arrives in earnest that you have repaid the debt you owe me. Tomorrow will be tedious."

"Tomorrow?" he said, and then remembered that they were to go to a christening party for the neighbor's new baby. "Redfield and his family are a dull lot?"

"I was engaged to the eldest son once," she said. "I was supposed to be the Viscountess Ravensberg. The first son-the first heir of the next generation-was to have been mine. But Jerome died."

"Ah, yes," he said. "Pardon me, I knew that. You loved him?" She had said not when she had told him about the betrothal at the white rock above Bath.

She looked slightly disdainful. "We grew up to expect the marriage," she said. "We did not dislike each other. We were even fond of each other. But love is not a requisite for such matches."

Nevertheless, today she was feeling understandably low-spirited about the whole thing. Tomorrow might be somewhat difficult for her, he supposed. She would see another woman in the place that should have been hers with a child that should also have been hers-though with a different father.

"Do you swim, Josh?" she asked.

"Of course I swim," he said. "You are not about to propose a race, are you, Free? If so, I give you fair warning-I grew up by the ocean. I would race to win. You have severely dented my self-esteem, first by winning our horse race in Bath, and then by hitting one of my best balls this morning during your first over-for a six, no less."

"To the far bank and back," she said.

He turned his head to look down and could see that the men and children were already in the water. Now that he was paying attention, he could hear their shouts and the children's laughter. Eve and Judith were sitting decorously on the bank. Morgan was on the swing, propelling herself almost dangerously high and looking very pretty indeed. That young lady, he thought, was going to be mobbed by prospective suitors when she made her come-out next spring, regardless of the fact that she was a duke's daughter.

"What do you intend to wear?" he asked.

"My shift," she said. "If you believe you will be just too embarrassed, you may make your way back to the house and find a good book."

"Embarrassed?" He started down the tree without offering her a hand-that might be provocation enough for one of her famous punches in the nose. "I can hardly wait. I'll give you a head start for our race, shall I? I'll count slowly to ten before coming after you."

He chuckled as she sputtered and fumed and came down after him.

CHAPTER XII

The christening of the Honorable Andrew Jerome Christopher Butler was indeed a grand occasion, as Freyja realized as soon as the Bedwyns arrived at the church and were shown to their pews. The church was filled with neighbors and with both Kit's relatives and the viscountess's. Her cousin, the young Viscount Whitleaf, was there and her grandfather, Baron Galton. Then there were all her illustrious relatives by her mother's second marriage-the Duke and Duchess of Portfrey, the Duke and Duchess of Anburey, the Marquess of Attingsborough, the Earl and Countess of Kilbourne, the dowager countess, and her widowed daughter, Lady Muir.

Such a fuss, Freyja thought, for a baby who was supremely indifferent to all that was going on around him in his honor. He was dressed gorgeously in a long lace christening robe, a family heirloom, but he slept through the whole service, waking only once to squawk with indignation when the baptismal water was poured over his head. He soon fell asleep again, rocked in Kit's arms.

Freyja tried not to pay too much attention to the central group, but how could she avoid seeing Kit, fairly bursting with pride and happiness, and his viscountess-Freyja had never been able to think of her as Lauren-glowing with her new motherhood.

The viscountess had a certain beauty, Freyja conceded. She had dark, lustrous hair and a flawless complexion and eyes that were startlingly violet. But she was always dignified, always the proper lady, with never a word or a hair out of place. It seemed to Freyja that she lacked all spirit and charisma. She hated the woman-if only because everyone else admired and loved her.

Freyja was looking at her gloved hands in her lap when Joshua took one of them, squeezed it tightly, and drew it through his arm. She looked up at him with her is-this-not-a-dead-bore look. He smiled at her, his eyes softer, less merry, less mocking than usual, and covered her hand with his free one.

She could cheerfully have gone at him with both fists then. She knew very well what this was all about. He pitied her. Just before he had handed her into one of the carriages this morning, when she had been feeling out of sorts and irritated with everyone, he had bent his head to hers and spoken for her ears only.

"Courage," he had said. "Your Jerome is gone. But there will be someone else for you one day." He had grinned then. "And in the meanwhile, maybe I can be of some service, sweetheart."

He thought she was depressed because of Jerome. And so she was-or so she ought to be. He had died so young and so foolishly-of a fever contracted when he rescued several of his neighbors' laboring families from a flood. And she had been fond of him. He had been one of her playmates all through her growing years. But she had dragged her heels about marrying him, and he had not seemed overeager for the event either. Whenever she had made some excuse not to make the betrothal formal just yet or-after their betrothal-not to set a wedding date just yet, he had offered no objection.

The interminable service was over at last, and Kit and the viscountess left in the first carriage, it being close to the time when the baby would need to be fed. It would appear that the viscountess was nursing her child herself. She certainly was not perfect in that, Freyja thought with a moment's satisfaction. Many ladies of good ton would frown and even call her vulgar for not hiring a wet nurse.

It was an enormous blessing having Joshua with her after they arrived at Alvesley. Introducing him to everyone as her betrothed occupied both her time and her attention and deflected any embarrassment or pity any of those people who knew about last year might have been feeling. And there was an appallingly large number who did know that last summer's celebrations for the birthday of Kit's grandmother-she had died suddenly earlier this year-were to have included the announcement of his betrothal to Lady Freyja Bedwyn.

Just before dinner Kit and his viscountess came down from the nursery, and there was the painful moment of coming face-to-face with them. Kit was wearing the somewhat wary smile he always wore in Freyja's presence. The viscountess was wearing her corresponding bright, warm smile. Freyja smiled dazzlingly. What varying thoughts and emotions must be turning over behind those three smiles, she thought.

"I must congratulate you both on the birth of your son," she said.

"Thank you, Freyja," Kit said. "And thank you for coming."

"We are so very delighted that you came home from Bath in time to join us today," the viscountess said-surely lying through her teeth.

"May I present the Marquess of Hallmere, my betrothed?" Freyja said. "Viscount and Viscountess Ravensberg, Josh."

"Lady Freyja's betrothed." The viscountess smiled with warm pleasure at Joshua. "How pleased I am to make your acquaintance, Lord Hallmere. And how happy I am for you, Lady Freyja."

She took one step forward and for a horrified moment Freyja thought she was about to be hugged. She raised her eyebrows and lifted her chin, and the viscountess hesitated and contented herself with another warm smile.

"Hallmere?" Kit shook hands with him. "You are a fortunate man. I hope you realize that you have won a treasure."

Freyja's knuckles itched as she curled her fingers into her palms.

"And Freyja." Kit set both hands on her shoulders. "I knew you would find happiness one day soon. My sincerest best wishes." He did not hesitate as his wife had done. He kissed her warmly on the cheek.

Fortunately dinner was announced at that moment and so there was no need to make further conversation. Freyja took Joshua's arm and smiled dazzlingly at him.

"What fun we are having," she murmured.

Joshua did not stay at Freyja's side all through the afternoon. It would have been bad form, and it seemed to him that once dinner was over the terrible tension he had sensed in her body earlier despite her smiles and seemingly perfect composure had dissipated. She was circulating among the guests, bright-eyed, poised, and sociable and looking remarkably fetching in a muslin dress with loose, floating skirts in varying shades of turquoise and sea green.

He was not at all sure she had not loved Jerome Butler very much indeed. Certainly today seemed very hard for her.

He mingled with the guests too for most of the afternoon. But eventually he sat down on the window seat in the drawing room beside the Earl of Redfield's youngest son, Sydnam Butler, who had been sitting there for a while. The man's right arm and eye were missing, and the right side of his face and neck were disfigured with the purple marks of old burns.

"War wounds?" Joshua asked.

"Right," Sydnam Butler said. "I was captured by a French scouting party when I was on a reconnaissance mission in Portugal. I was out of uniform."

Joshua grimaced. "It was my greatest fear for five years," he said. "I was in France doing some spying for the government, but in an entirely unofficial capacity. No commission, no uniform, no rescue had I been caught. You were not given the honorable treatment your uniform would have ensured, then?"

"No," Butler said.

They chatted for a while about the wars and about Wales, where the man was now living on one of Bewcastle's estates in the capacity of steward. Then Butler nodded in Freyja's direction-she was in a group with Rannulf and Judith, Lady Muir, and a Butler cousin whose name had escaped Joshua's memory.

"I am very glad indeed to see Freyja happy again," he said. "You are obviously good for her."

"Thank you," Joshua said. "Today has been something of a strain for her, though. I believe she must have been deeply attached to your brother when she was betrothed to him."

"Oh, they were never actually betrothed," Butler said. "When Kit came home last summer he brought Lauren with him as his fiancée, and there was an end of the match Bewcastle and my father had arranged." He paused briefly and Joshua was aware that he grimaced slightly. "I do beg your pardon. You were speaking of Jerome. Yes, of course. They were always fond of each other. But I would not worry if I were you. That was a long time ago, and she looks happy today. Very happy."

Ravensberg and his wife, who had been absent from the room for a while, came back into it at that moment. The viscountess was carrying the baby, no longer in his christening robe but wrapped cozily in a white blanket. Two little hands were waving above its folds. They proceeded to move from group to group, showing off their treasure while the ladies cooed and smiled over him and several of the gentlemen looked faintly sheepish.

They were a remarkably good-looking couple. And they were still in the throes of a deep romantic attachment to each other, if Joshua was not mistaken.

He also had not mistaken what Sydnam Butler had just said before he had realized his mistake. A marriage had been arranged for Freyja and the present Ravensberg. It made sense. If the two families had planned the alliance with the eldest son from the children's infancy, would it not be natural a suitable time after his demise to revive the plan with the second son as the projected husband? But the second son had brought home a bride of his own choosing and so had spoiled the plan.

Had it been deliberate? Had he known of the marriage his father and Freyja's brother were arranging for him? Had he-rather like Joshua himself in Bath-rushed into a betrothal with someone else in order to avoid a marriage he did not want? Or had he not known?

Either way Freyja would have felt spurned.

She would not have liked that!

What part of her being had been most hurt by the rejection? he wondered. Her pride? Or her heart?

Watching from his position on the window seat-Sydnam Butler had been drawn away by his father and a cousin-Joshua could see Freyja's smile become brighter as the couple and the baby approached her group. He could see her fingers flexing at her sides and one foot tapping a rapid tattoo on the carpet. The smile looked somewhat feline to him. She darted a look at the viscountess, who was not far from her now and who had just laughed with warm delight as she gazed down into the face of her baby. Freyja's look, brief as it was and quickly veiled as it was, was pure venom.

In a few moments more, the couple and their baby were going to be moving on to Freyja's group, and she was going to be called upon to admire the child. Judith was already beaming in happy anticipation of the moment and glancing a tender look at Rannulf.

Joshua got to his feet.

"Freyja." He touched her elbow, and she jumped as if he were holding a branding iron. "I see that a few brave souls are strolling out on the terrace. Would you care for a breath of fresh air?"

"I would love it," she said rather loudly. "I am going mad from inaction."

The weather had changed overnight. Yesterday had been almost like summer. Today was cold and gray and blustery, more like November than September. They wore their cloaks outside. Joshua pulled his hat down over his brow so that it would not blow away.

"I hope," Freyja said, "you are not expecting me to stroll with mincing steps along the terrace, Josh. I need to draw air into my lungs. Are not such gatherings unbearably insipid?"

She turned right to walk in the direction of the stables, and as soon as they were past the formal gardens before and below the house, she struck off across the lawn to walk parallel to the driveway. She moved along with her usual manly stride. Joshua fell into step beside her.

"Ah." She tilted back her face. "This is better."

He did not attempt to make any conversation, and she was clearly not in the mood. They walked until they reached the stone bridge that crossed a river and formed the boundary between the inner cultivated part of the park and the woods beyond. It must be later than he had realized, Joshua thought. Already early dusk was falling.

"What now?" he asked. "Back to the house?"

"Not yet," she said. "That party will go on for hours yet. No one knows when to end events like this."

"Where next, then?" he asked.

She looked about her. "There is the lake," she said, pointing to it over to their right. "But I do not fancy a swim today." She shivered as a cold blast of wind buffeted them.

"What?" he asked, waggling his eyebrows. "I do not get to see you in your shift again today?" More accurately, he had seen her in her wet shift yesterday, and it had been very akin to no shift at all. His temperature threatened to rise a notch at the mere memory.

"Let's go to the gamekeeper's hut," she said. "It is through there." She pointed into the woods to the left of the driveway. "It was actually more like a family retreat, since I can never remember any gamekeeper living there. But it was always kept in good repair. Perhaps we can light a fire there and be cozy for a while before going back."

It sounded good to him, Joshua thought, leading the way across the bridge.

They wandered about in the darkening woods for a while since it seemed she did not remember quite where the hut was. But she cheered up considerably even while she was searching for it.

"I spent several hours of a hot afternoon there once," she told him. "I was locked in and Jerome and Kit stood guard outside. They had kidnapped me. But the adventure got dismal for them when Aidan and Ralf refused to ransom me. When Kit finally went up to the house to try to steal some food from the kitchen, I yelled and swore so foully that Jerome let me out for fear that I would attract the attention of some wandering gardener. I dealt him a bloody nose, and then I went home and left a few bruises on Ralf and Aidan too."

"And you were never kidnapped again?" Joshua said, grinning at her. "Sweetheart, kidnapped maidens are supposed to weep and wilt and make their captors fall in love with them."

"Ha!" she said. "Oh, there it is. I knew it must be just here."

It was locked, but he felt above the lintel and she lifted a few mossy stones beside the door until she found the key. It opened the door so easily that he knew even before stepping inside that the hut must still be used. The interior was dark, but he could see in the faint light from the doorway that there was a small table against the far wall, and on it were a lamp and a tinder box. He fumbled around for a few moments until he had the lamp lit.

There was a fireplace with a fresh fire laid in the hearth and a box of logs standing beside it. There was an old wooden rocking chair with a faded blanket thrown over the back and seat. There was a narrow bed against one wall, neatly made up with blankets and a pillow. Everything was clean, including the dirt floor.

This, Joshua thought, was definitely someone's retreat.

Freyja stepped inside and closed the door. She stood with her back against it while Joshua knelt and lit the fire.

"Yes, this is it," she said. "My prison house."

"But a prison no longer, sweetheart," he said, straightening up and brushing off his hands before turning and stepping against her. He dipped his head and touched his lips to hers. "A haven instead. Soon to be a warm haven, I hope."

It was also a very private, secluded haven. A dangerous haven for a man and a woman who were trying to avoid having their betrothal extended into the life sentence of a marriage. He stepped back and indicated the rocking chair.

She unfastened her cloak, tossed it over the back of the chair, and sat down. He set his hat and cloak on the table and took a seat on the edge of the bed.

"The big ordeal is almost over," he said.

She laughed softly, her eyes on the fire. "It would serve you right if I refused to release you after all," she said. "Am I really such a big ordeal? How lowering. You are, of course, but am I?"

"I was not referring to us," he said. "Tell me about Ravensberg."

"Jerome?" she said.

"Kit."

She turned her head to look at him. "What do you want to know about Kit?"

"Were you in love with him?" he asked.

"With Kit?" She frowned ferociously at him.

"Jerome was not the only brother you were betrothed to," he said, "or almost betrothed to. You were fond of Jerome. Were you fonder of Kit?"

She continued to glare at him. "It is none of your business," she said.

"I am your betrothed," he reminded her.

"You are not," she said scornfully. "And you are not going to play the part of jealous lover now, Josh. The very idea! It is none of your business whom I have loved or whom I do love, if anyone. Kit is none of your business."

"Did he know," he asked, "that you loved him?"

"Of course he knew," she said, turning her head back toward the fire again and then setting it back against the chair and closing her eyes. "He desperately wanted me to marry him. He wanted me to give up everything-all the expectations of his family and mine-and go follow the drum with him. I was everything in the world to him and he to me. But Wulf would not give his consent. I was one and twenty and did not need his consent. It was not that he forbade me exactly-Wulf rarely does that, and of course he knew that I would have fought to the death against any such attempt at tyranny. But there was a speech on family duty and I allowed myself to be talked into announcing my engagement to Jerome. Kit fought Ralf bloody when he came storming over to Lindsey Hall and was refused admittance. Then he went off back to his regiment in the Peninsula. Last year, with Jerome dead before our nuptials had been solemnized and Kit on his way home, his father and Wulf arranged for our marriage at last. But Kit had not forgiven me. He had his revenge on me by bringing home that perfect, insipid woman, Lauren Edgeworth."

Joshua wondered if she had yet realized that even if it had started out as revenge-or simply escape-the marriage was now a love match. And he wondered how much real love Freyja still felt for Ravensberg, mingled with the very real hatred and bitterness.

"Poor Freyja," he said softly.

She surged to her feet then and closed the gap between them in three strides. He clamped one hand about her right wrist when her fist was two inches from his nose, and about her left wrist as her fist brushed the underside of his chin. He came to his feet and bent her arms behind her back. He held them there by the wrists-her hands were still fisted.

Her eyes flashed at him. Her teeth were bared.

"Don't you dare pity me," she told him in her coldest, haughtiest voice. "My story and my feelings are my concern and no one else's. Certainly not yours. We are not even really betrothed. We are nothing but strangers who happen to have been thrown together by circumstances. We are nothing to each other. You are nothing to me. Do you understand me? Nothing."

He lowered his head and kissed her. He was taking a mortal risk, he knew-she might well take a chunk out of his lip with her teeth. But she needed comforting. Not that his motive was entirely selfless. Freyja Bedwyn in a raging temper was an infinitely exciting woman.

"Nothing at all, sweetheart?" he murmured. "You wound me."

"What I will do is knock your head off your shoulders if you will just stop playing the coward and release my wrists," she said, her eyes still flashing fury. "Are you afraid of facing the anger of a woman unless you have pinioned her arms?"

He grinned and released her. And chuckled aloud as he parried blows without grabbing hold of her again.

"Ouch!" he said as one of her fists connected with his ear.

But she was not finished with him and would not be, he suspected, until she had milled him to the ground and stamped him into the dirt with her heel. It was a good thing for him that she was not wearing her riding boots. To give her her due, though, he noticed that she did not attempt to use either her fingernails or her teeth. She fought fair.

There was only one course of defense open to him short of planting his own fist in her face. He caught her up in his arms, one about her waist, the other about her shoulders, hauled her tightly against him so that her fists flailed helplessly out to the sides, and kissed her again-open-mouthed.

"I dislike you intensely," she said coldly when he lifted his head a good while later. The rage had gone from her eyes and the fury from her voice. "And you are absolutely nothing to me. Less than nothing."

"I know, sweetheart," he said, and kissed her again.

Her anger might have subsided, he realized during the next few moments, but her passion certainly had not. She opened her mouth beneath his, somehow got her arms about him, and pressed as close to him as their clothes and their anatomy would allow.

"Don't stop," she told him fiercely when he lifted his head, desperately trying to hold on to his sanity. "Don't stop!"

"Freyja-"

"Don't stop!"

Who tumbled whom to the bed he did not know, but there they were moments later, wrestling and panting together in the narrow space, their hands all over each other in a desperate effort to find bare flesh. She pulled off his coat and waistcoat with a little cooperation from him, and she was tugging his shirt outside his pantaloons and sliding her hands underneath to press against his naked back while with his thumbs he hooked the low neckline of her muslin dress beneath her breasts and took them in his hands, rolling her nipples between his thumbs and forefingers. With his mouth he found the racing pulse at the base of her throat.

Somewhere sanity was trying to attract his attention. And another thought occurred to him too.

"Sweetheart." He lifted his head and looked down into her face. "Are you a virgin?"

Perhaps she was not if there had been that passionate interlude with Kit Butler. If she was not . . .

"Lift your arms."

He lifted them, and his shirt was off over his head and sailing over the edge of the bed to land in a heap with his coat and waistcoat.

"Are you a virgin?"

"Don't you dare stop." With one hand she pulled his face back down to hers. With the other she fumbled at the flap of his pantaloons.

He took it that the answer was yes. If it had been no, she would have said so and dispensed with his scruples. His bare chest came down onto her bosom and he pressed his tongue into her mouth. She sucked it deep.

"Let me do this," he whispered a few moments later, moving off her and undoing his buttons himself.

But she helped him remove the pantaloons after he had pulled off his Hessian boots and stockings. He drew her dress down her body, taking undergarments with it. Sanity, he half realized after he had pulled off her silk stockings too, had been stripped away with their clothes.

They came together again with fierce passion. If she was a virgin-and he would wager she was-there was no shrinking self-consciousness in her for either her own nakedness or his. But then he had known that being in bed with Freyja would be akin to lying with a pile of explosives with the fuses lit.

When he touched her between her legs, she opened to him, feverish and urgent. She was hot and wet and ready. He was hard and throbbing with need. He rolled fully on top of her, pushed her legs wide with his own, slid his hands beneath her to lift and tilt her, and mounted her.

She was a virgin. She was small and tight, and there was a barrier to impede his progress. She was also hot and wet, and her inner muscles were contracting about him and her hands were pressing down on his buttocks while her feet pushed her up from the bed. He pressed inward, heard her involuntary cry as he broke through, and embedded himself fully in her.

He might have taken her slowly and carefully after that, but she would have none of it. She was hot and fierce with passion, and he, God help him, felt an answering hunger that needed no further encouragement.

What followed was more like a wrestling match than lovemaking. He had no idea how long it lasted. He only knew that somehow he held on to some measure of control until she cried out and shuddered into a powerful release. Then he plunged toward his own pleasure and allowed his seed to spill into her.

They were both slick with perspiration, he discovered moments or minutes later-he had become strangely unaware of time-though the fire in the hearth had died down. They were also panting as if they had run ten miles apiece into a stiff wind. He lifted his head and looked down at her in the dim lamplight.

Her hair was in wild, wavy disarray about her head and shoulders. She was flushed. Her lips were parted, her eyes heavy-lidded.

"Well, sweetheart," he said, "if we were not in a scrape before, we certainly are now."

CHAPTER XIII

Freyja's legs were trembling as she dressed. So were her hands as she fumbled with her hairpins, dragging them all out and trying to tame and rearrange her hair without benefit of either a mirror or a comb. She was very thankful that Joshua had dressed faster than she and was at the moment kneeling at the hearth, cleaning out the remains of their fire and building a new one.

Glancing at him, she had a stomach-churning feeling of knowledge.

Gracious heavens, that splendid male body had just been naked and . . .

Well, never mind.

"This," she said in a firmly practical voice, "was all my fault."

He came to his feet and turned toward her, his eyes laughing, though there was a certain grimness about his mouth.

"Will you put a further dent in my self-esteem, then?" he asked her. "Have I just been seduced, Free?"

"You would not have done it," she said, "if I had not insisted. I will never blame you. It was all my fault."

Don't stop. Don't you dare stop.

How excruciatingly humiliating.

"If that were a bird's nest," he said, nodding toward her hair, which she was holding on top of her head while she jabbed in hairpins to keep it in place, "it would be impressive indeed. But I would guess it is meant to be an elegant coiffure?"

He came closer, batted her hands away, and then, when the hair came cascading down about her shoulders again, he sat her down on the end of the bed and played lady's maid with surprisingly deft fingers.

"It was a mutual outpouring of lust, Freyja," he said. "It was mutually satisfying too, though I cannot see that I did not hurt you rather badly. I daresay you would rather be stretched on the rack than admit to that, though, and so I will not ask. You do agree, I suppose, that we are now in a very serious scrape indeed."

"If you mean," she said, holding still as he anchored her hair in place with the pins, "that we are now obliged to marry, then of course you are speaking nonsense. Don't you dare propose marriage to me. I am five and twenty years old, and I imagine you are older. Why should we not go to bed with each other if we wish? I thought it was remarkably pleasant."

"Pleasant." He chuckled softly and stood back to admire his handiwork. "Remarkably chic, even if I do say so myself. Pleasant, sweetheart? You certainly know how to wound a man where it hurts. But I can answer your question in one word. Why should we not bed each other if we wish? Babies! They have an annoying and sometimes embarrassing habit of resulting from such activity as we just indulged in."

How utterly foolish of her not to have thought of that-especially on the day of a christening.

"It will not happen," she said briskly, getting to her feet and setting the bed to rights again.

"If it has happened," he told her, "we have both of us acquired a leg shackle, sweetheart. For now we had better get back to the house and hope that no one has noticed quite how long we have been absent."

They bundled up in their cloaks, and she waited outside, getting her bearings in the dark woods, while he extinguished the lamp, locked the door, and put the key back where they had found it. They walked back to the driveway and across the bridge without talking.

It was strange that she should feel so strongly opposed to marrying Joshua, she thought. It was not that she did not want to marry at all. She did. And she was five and twenty already. Joshua was handsome, charming, witty, and attractive, and he liked the same sort of vigorous outdoor activities as she. They had been to bed together and it had been a glorious experience.

Why did she not wish to marry him, then?

Because he did not wish to marry her? Because she might be in danger of falling in love with him? Why would that be undesirable?

Because she would feel disloyal to Kit? Or because she would destroy her foolishly romantic dream of love by proving that it was possible to love two different men in the course of a lifetime?

Because she was afraid that her heart might be broken-again?

But Lady Freyja Bedwyn did not fear anything or anyone. Ever.

"If I were an enemy army watching you march into battle against me," Joshua said, "I would not wait and stand my ground but turn and flee in panic and terror."

"What nonsense you speak," she said.

"Why the grim look and the long, purposeful stride, my charmer?" he asked her.

"It is cold, if you had not noticed," she said. "I am eager to get back to the house."

"Our outing has served its purpose, then, has it?" he asked.

She turned her head and looked at him in the darkness.

"You must understand," she said, "that everyone in my family and Kit's, everyone in the whole neighborhood, I daresay, knew that he was coming home to marry me. And then he came with Lauren Edgeworth and presented her as his betrothed. I have never been accustomed to humiliation. I thought it a ploy to anger me, to punish me. I thought it a fake betrothal because they seemed so very unsuited to each other. In fact, the circumstances seemed very similar to yours and mine now. Except that I thought he really meant to have me in the end. But he married her instead. I am not abject, Josh. I am not an object of pity. I am just . . . angry."

"It is a love match," he said. "Take it from someone who has met them for the first time today. It is very much a love match, Free."

She laughed softly as they approached the house across the lawn. "Are those meant to be words of comfort?" she asked.

"I would not so insult you," he said. "You like straight talk, sweetheart. You like the truth more than falsehood and directness more than evasion. Your Kit is very deeply in love with his wife."

"My Kit." She laughed again. "He was raw with pain that summer four years ago. He had just brought Sydnam back from the Peninsula, broken and maimed and closer to death than life. He blamed himself. He was Sydnam's only companion on that reconnaissance mission and his superior officer. When they were trapped by a French scouting party and one of them had to court capture so that the other could go free to complete the mission, Kit was the one who went free. He was mad with guilt that summer-and he turned to me. My Kit-he was never mine."

She had never faced up to the truth of all this before now. While he had been as desperately in love with her as she with him that summer, for him it had been a transitory thing, a way of coping with his guilt and anxiety. She wondered if Wulfric had realized that and so had taken the unusual step of interfering in her life, of actually lecturing her about duty. She wondered if the Earl of Redfield had realized it. And Jerome.

Everyone but her.

There was no one strolling on the terrace now. Everyone was indoors.

"This is the moment," Joshua said, "at which we must hope that our absence has not been too particularly remarked upon and that every pin in your hair does not decide to clatter to the carpet as soon as we step into the drawing room."

Their long absence had not, of course, escaped the notice of Freyja's family. Aidan raised his eyebrows when they entered the drawing room, Alleyne waggled his, Morgan smiled knowingly as she caught Freyja's eye, and Wulfric fingered the handle of his quizzing glass. Only Rannulf did not react-he was deep in conversation with Kit and the viscountess and Judith.

Kit was sitting next to the viscountess, his arm draped along the back of her chair, his fingertips just touching her shoulder on the far side. It was an almost shockingly informal pose, but it was late in the day and everyone seemed more relaxed than they had been earlier. They were both engrossed in listening to something Judith was saying.

Yes, it was true, Freyja thought. She had known it for a long time, of course-perhaps even from the beginning. It was a love match. And perhaps they were even suited, the two of them. Certainly they were a handsome couple.

She did not wait to consider whether or not the admission brought pain with it. She glanced at Joshua, who was looking down at her quizzically, linked her arm through his, and strode across the room with him.

"I hope," he murmured, "I am not about to be embroiled in a scene, sweetheart. I do find scenes embarrassing."

Freyja smiled, first at Kit, who looked suddenly wary, and then at the viscountess, whose gracious smile hid any sign of trepidation she might have been feeling.

"I do apologize," Freyja said, "for missing seeing the baby when you brought him down a while ago. Josh suggested a walk, and I was longing for some fresh air and dashed off without a thought. I should, of course, have waited a few minutes."

Although she was eating a great deal of humble pie-or perhaps because of it-she was also speaking in what she recognized as the haughty voice she always used when on the defensive. Nevertheless, all four of them looked at her in some astonishment. Joshua, she noticed, was hugging her arm tightly to his side.

"Oh, but he is still awake," the viscountess said, her smile bright and warm as she got to her feet. "It just did not seem kind to leave him down here when he is used to the peace and quiet of his nursery. Will you come up and see him now?"

Freyja grimaced inwardly but maintained her smile.

"If you are not afraid I will disturb him," she said.

"Oh, no." The viscountess looked at Joshua and a certain merriment danced in her violet eyes. "But we will not drag you up there, Lord Hallmere. Do take my chair."

For a moment Freyja thought that the viscountess was going to link an arm through hers, but if she had had such an intention she thought better of it and led the way out of the room and up the stairs to the nursery floor.

"I am afraid," she said, turning her head to smile at Freyja as they approached the nursery, "new parents can be very tedious, Lady Freyja. We dote upon our children and make the assumption that everyone else must be as charmed as we are."

"Perhaps it is time," Freyja said, "that you dropped the 'Lady' every time you address me."

The viscountess looked quickly at her. "And you must start calling me Lauren," she said. "Will you?"

The baby was lying on a blanket in the middle of the nursery floor, his arms punching the air and his legs kicking while his nurse sat in a chair close to him, knitting. But it was not exactly a place of peace and quiet. There were several other children present, some of them babies, a few older, including Becky and Davy, who waved cheerfully at Freyja before returning their attention to their paints. There were three other nurses in attendance.

Freyja would have been quite contented to stand looking down at the baby and to make a few appropriately admiring comments. But Lauren bent down, scooped him up into her arms, and deposited him in Freyja's before leading the way into an inner room, which was obviously the baby's bedchamber, and closing the door.

Freyja held him gingerly, terrified of dropping him. He had Kit's brown hair, lighter than Lauren's. But he was going to have her eyes. He was soft and warm and weighed almost nothing at all. He smelled sweet and powdery. He made little gurgling noises and gazed at her with eyes that were not yet quite fully focused. She was alarmed by the rush of tender emotion she felt.

For Kit's baby-and Lauren's.

"He is beautiful," she said-lame words indeed. She handed him back to his mother.

"Freyja," Lauren said, "I cannot tell you how happy I am that you have met Lord Hallmere and are betrothed to him. I will not pretend to know him on such short acquaintance, of course, but in addition to his extraordinary good looks he has smiling eyes. I always trust eyes like his. He looks happy, and you look happy. How becomingly flushed your cheeks are! I knew this must happen for you one day, but until it did I have been anxious for you. I know how you felt, you see-I was abandoned at the altar by the man I had loved all my life. I thought my life had ended. I certainly never expected that I would love again. But I did-and the second love has been many times more powerful and satisfying than the first. I believe you must be discovering that too. It will only get better as time goes on. Believe me."

She really was extremely lovely, Freyja admitted grudgingly to herself. And she glowed with her new motherhood-and perhaps with more than just that.

That man-the one Lauren had grown up with and almost married-was the Earl of Kilbourne. He was downstairs with his wife. Their daughter was one of the babies in the nursery. It was clear that Lauren felt not one twinge of lingering bitterness regarding him and what might have been.

"I never really loved Jerome," Freyja said. "I was fond of him. I mourned him far more deeply than I could ever have predicted. But I did not love him."

Lauren smiled her acknowledgment of Freyja's deliberate misunderstanding and looked down at the baby, who was being lulled to sleep in her arms.

"I wish I had known Jerome," she said. "Kit adored him."

Yes. But their last encounter had been a bitter, violent one. Kit had broken Jerome's nose before riding over to Lindsey Hall and fighting Ralf and then returning to the Peninsula.

"I should tell you," Freyja said, "about the time the two of them kidnapped me and locked me in that gamekeeper's hut in the woods."

Lauren looked up and laughed. "Kit has told me," he said. "How delighted I was to hear that you came out the victor. Did you really swear the air blue? And did you really punch Jerome in the face? Childhood memories are wonderful, are they not? We use that hut quite often, you know, Kit and I. It is our own quiet, cozy retreat."

Freyja was suddenly reminded of what had happened there just an hour or so ago-she had been trying not to think about it. Perhaps even now she was with child herself. Perhaps even now she was fated to marry Josh-against both their wishes. But if it were not so, then she was fated to end their betrothal soon and never see him again.

It was a strangely dreary thought.

The baby was sleeping. Lauren kissed him softly on the forehead and set him down gently in his crib before covering him with his blankets. Then she turned back to Freyja, and this time she did link arms with her before they went back downstairs.

"I am so glad we can be friends at last," she said. "I have always liked and admired you. Sometimes I wish I had your bold spirit. But I must confess that I have also been a little afraid of you."

Freyja let out a short bark of laughter. "One would never have known it," she said. "Do you remember that first time you came to Lindsey Hall with Kit?"

"And you all tried to make me as uncomfortable as you possibly could?" Lauren said, laughing too. "How could I possibly forget? I could cheerfully have curled up and died."

"But instead you dealt me a magnificent, oh-so-ladylike set-down," Freyja said. "My brothers were crowing with delight after you left."

The party was breaking up, Freyja saw when they entered the drawing room. Some of the neighbors had already left. Wulfric was on his feet. So were the other members of her family. The carriages must have been sent for.

"Gracious, Free," Alleyne said, appearing at her side as Lauren made her way toward Wulf, "has there been a grand reconciliation between you and Lauren? Life is threatening to grow very dull indeed."

"It is time you got a life for yourself," she said severely.

He winced. "A hit, Free!" he said. "A palpable hit, to quote some authority I cannot quite identify at the moment. I shall have to go out into the world to seek my own happy ending. Aidan, Ralf, you . . . Happy endings are becoming an epidemic among us."

Joshua was standing talking with Lady Kilbourne and the Duchess of Portfrey. He was using all his considerable charm on them and looking devastatingly handsome in the process. The light from the chandelier overhead made his hair gleam very blond. Again Freyja felt that rush of knee-weakening knowledge. Just an hour or so ago . . .

He had tried to stop it from happening.

She had dared him to stop.

How complicated life had become.

And how undeniably exhilarating!

He turned his head and smiled at her, and she raised her eyebrows. And then he slowly depressed one eyelid and she bristled with indignation.

Joshua was normally an early riser. He was not late up the following morning, but he was later than usual. He had scarcely slept all night, only to fall into a deep sleep when it was already light. All the Bedwyns except Freyja and Judith were at breakfast.

"She is feeling indisposed this morning," Rannulf said, looking rather sheepish, when Joshua asked about Judith, "just as she was yesterday morning until it was almost time to leave for church. I have just been admitting to the family that she is in a delicate way. We were going to keep it to ourselves for a while, but morning sickness is a great spoiler of secrets."

"Poor Judith," Eve said. "I'll go up and keep her company for a while after breakfast-unless I discover that she would rather be alone."

"And Freyja?" Joshua asked. Surely she was not still in bed, unless she had had as sleepless a night as he. It was altogether possible.

"Did you two quarrel yesterday?" Alleyne asked, grinning. "She would not come back inside after riding with us before breakfast. She said she needed more air and went striding off on foot."

"Quarrel?" Joshua said. "With your sister? How could one ever provoke a quarrel with a sweet-natured lady like Freyja?"

Everyone at the table laughed. Even Bewcastle looked faintly amused.

"I winked at her across the drawing room just before we left Alvesley last evening," Joshua said, "and sent her into a towering rage. People, she told me when we had a moment alone together before getting into the carriage with Morgan and Alleyne, might have noticed and thought us remarkably vulgar. Where might she have gone?"

"You might be wise," Aidan said, "to wait for her to walk off any lingering indignation and return to the house in her own good time."

"Ah," Joshua said, "but no one has ever been able to accuse me of excessive wisdom."

"There is a wilderness walk out behind the house," Morgan said. "She usually goes there when she wishes to be alone. And if I had quarreled with my betrothed, Aidan, I would want him to come after me even if I had told everyone that I wished to be left alone and even if I had warned him not to follow me."

"Eve is still in the process of teaching me how to understand women," Aidan said. "I spent too many years in the military, it seems."

It was not that they had quarreled exactly, of course, Joshua thought as he strode off beyond the stables half an hour later to where the wilderness walk began. And she had not been in a towering rage over the wink-only hotly indignant. He had made a kissing gesture with his lips and called her sweetheart when she had scolded him, and had watched her nostrils flare, and then they had been in the carriage with her brother and sister and he had deliberately drawn her hand through his arm.

No, they had not quarreled. But last evening they had had conjugal relations and everything had changed between them. What had begun as a light flirtation to alleviate the boredom of being stuck in Bath for a week had escalated into an impulsive and very temporary betrothal to stave off his aunt's dastardly entrapment scheme and then into something rather more lengthy with his grandmother's decision to give them a betrothal party. And then Bewcastle had arrived in Bath and quickly discerned the truth, and that had led to this prolonging of the connection. He had known the danger. He had prepared himself for it, steeled himself against it, for both her sake and his own. But now look what had happened. They were in dire peril of having their temporary lark transformed into a lifelong commitment. If it so happened that she was with child, they would have no choice at all. And even if she was not . . .

Good Lord, she was Lady Freyja Bedwyn.

Last night she had seemed not to realize the seriousness of what had happened. Or perhaps she had, but had simply refused to admit it. This morning, if his guess was correct, she had faced reality and found it disturbing indeed.

The wilderness walk began with a series of wide, earthen steps with wooden borders leading up between rhododendron bushes to larger trees farther up the hill. Then a well-worn, shaded path turned sharply to the right to weave among the trees and give the walker an impression of total seclusion, of being miles from any habitation. It was fragrant with vegetation even though the height of summer was past, and loud with birdsong.

So had he-faced reality this morning, that was-or last night, to be more accurate. He was Hallmere now, whether he wanted to be or not. The wars were over with Napoléon Bonaparte imprisoned on the island of Elba. His job was done. He was twenty-eight years old. It was true that he had no intention of returning to Penhallow-ever. But he was a peer of the realm. He was going to have to take his seat in the House of Lords one of these days. He was going to have to acquire a permanent home somewhere-probably in London. He was going to have to settle down-those dreaded words.

Though why he should think them with dread he did not know. He had settled down once before, years ago, when he had learned and practiced the trade of carpenter. He had expected to live his life out there in the village of Lydmere. He had even been starting to look about him at some of the village girls.

Perhaps it was time he married. And if he must marry, why not Freyja? Socially he could not do better. He would never be bored with her. He found her attractive. He had discovered last evening that she was quite as explosively passionate in bed as he had expected. He would certainly enjoy the opportunity of bedding her under less frantic circumstances in order to discover if her nature was as sensual as it was passionate-he would wager it was.

Why not Freyja?

Perhaps because he had never set out to woo her. Perhaps because she had never shown any inclination to be wooed. Perhaps because his nature was still too restless or because her feelings were still too tied up with a thwarted passion for Ravensberg.

But perhaps now they had no more choice in the matter, he thought, striding along the path and peering into the occasional grove or folly set aside for rests along the way. There was no sign of Freyja. It was possible, of course, that she had not come this way at all. Or, if she had, she might have returned to the house another way by now.

The path had been climbing steadily upward from the beginning, though not with any steep gradient. He was about to move over the crest of the hill, Joshua realized, and begin the gradual, curving descent to the end of the walk. A stone tower, artfully built to look romantically ruined, had been built on the crest. If there was a winding stairway inside the narrow doorway with its Gothic arch-and he rather believed there must be-the energetic walker could get up to the crenellated battlements and have a magnificent view out over the treetops to the surrounding countryside.

He looked up-and grinned.

Her hands were resting on the battlements. Her face was raised to the sun and more than half turned from the path on which he stood. If she had been wearing a hat for her ride earlier, there was no sign of it now. Or of any hairpins. Her hair was billowing out loose behind her in the breeze.

Once more he was reminded of Viking maidens or Saxon warrior women. Or perhaps this morning she looked more like the medieval lady of the castle, holding it against all assailants while her lord was away in battle.

She had told him once that she sometimes felt she had been born in the wrong era.

"If I come closer," he called, cupping his hands on either side of his mouth, "will I be greeted with boiling oil and poisoned arrows raining down on my head?"

She turned and looked down at him, raising her hands to hold her hair back from her face.

"No," she called back. "I thought I would give myself the more personal pleasure of pitching you over the battlements. Come on up."

She favored him with one of her feline smiles.

CHAPTER XIV

Look," she said after he had come up the spiral stairs inside the tower and joined her at the top. She gestured about her with a wide sweep of her arm. "Is there a view more lovely anywhere, do you suppose?"

There was a view for miles in all directions. The house was back behind her, but she preferred to look into the wind the other way, over the trees, over the back part of the park, and on out over farmland and farm buildings and hedgerows and winding lanes. The tower was one of her favorite places in the world-wild and secluded, dwarfing her little problems and heartaches, blowing them away in the wind.

She did not like sharing it with anyone, but it would have been petty to send Josh away. She wished she could have done so, though. Hearing his voice calling unexpectedly from below and then looking down and seeing him had turned her knees to jelly and sent her stomach somersaulting and taken her breath away for an unguarded moment. She was terribly aware of him physically, more so now that he had come up beside her, tall and virile in his riding clothes-and hatless.

She did not like the feeling one little bit. Passion had been all very well four years ago when she had also fancied herself in love and headed toward a happily-ever-after-how young she had been in those days. But now it suggested only a loss of control, a fear that she could somehow lose her hard-won sense of strong independence. She was not in love with Josh, but she was certainly and ignominiously in lust with him. She did not like it. She did not choose to be either in love or in lust-especially not with a man who found everything in life amusing and rarely seemed to entertain a serious thought.

Joshua Moore, Marquess of Hallmere, was not worthy of her love, even if she was prepared to offer it. She was not.

"Not that I have seen in any of my travels," he said in answer to her question, looking about appreciatively at the view. "The fields have all been harvested and some of the trees are beginning to turn color. In another few weeks they are going to look more glorious yet. Ah, pardon me." He turned his head to look down at her. "You do not like autumn, do you?"

"Only because winter comes so close behind it," she said. "Winter always reminds me of-" She shivered.

"Your mortality?" he suggested. "Have you read Gulliver's Travels?"

"Of course I have," she said.

"Do you remember those characters who were doomed to live forever?" he asked her. "I cannot remember which part of the book they were in, but they were born with a mark on their foreheads that meant they could never ever die. Instead of being envied, they were the most pitied members of their race. It was a terrible fate to be born with such a mark. Jonathan Swift was wiser than most of us, it seems, and understood how undesirable it would be to live forever. And if we live always in constant dread, Free, how can we enjoy the time that is allotted to us?"

"I do not live in constant dread," she told him.

"Only in winter?" he said, smiling at her. "And in autumn because winter comes next? Half of every year?"

She shook her head. "This is foolish talk," she said. "Who told you that you would find me here?"

"Were you hiding from me?" he asked her.

"I never hide from anyone," she said crossly-she had, of course, been doing just that, or at least postponing seeing him as long as she could this morning. "I think it is time we quarreled, Josh. It is time I set you free and sent you on your way. It is time to end this farce."

"It cannot be done, sweetheart," he said, leaning one elbow on the battlements and turning to look fully at her. "Not yet. Not until we know if you are with child or not."

She had lain awake most of the night worrying about just that. About having to marry Josh. About his having to marry her. About being forever trapped in a marriage that neither of them had freely chosen and both of them would forever resent. About having a soft, warm, living baby of her own.

"I am not," she said firmly. "And there is always something or another. When we started this, we were going to end it the next day. Every day since then we seem to have dug ourselves a deeper hole."

"Am I to understand, my charmer," he asked her, "that you do not want to marry me?"

"You know I do not," she said irritably, "any more than you want to marry me. Do be serious for once in your life, Josh. I begin to think that your laughter and your carefree manner are masks that you wear. What I have not yet decided is whether they mask nothing at all or whether there is a person behind them that I would not recognize if I were to meet him without the disguise."

He gazed at her with squinted eyes, the smile still playing about his lips. "It would be nothing at all, sweetheart," he said. "Are you sorry last night happened?"

"Of course I am sorry it happened," she said. "And it was all my fault. I ought not to have suggested the gamekeeper's hut in the first place. With a little imagination I might have guessed the danger I was leading us both into. But I did not. I had not armed myself for resisting what proved irresistible. You had. You would have stopped me. But I would not be stopped. It is all quite, quite lowering."

"You did not enjoy it, then?" he asked her.

"Of course-" She turned her head and glared at him. "Of course I enjoyed it. I am a woman and you are a man-a handsome, attractive man."

"No!" He grinned at her. "Am I?"

"Of course I enjoyed it," she said again. "But that has nothing to do with anything. Do you not see that? I wish it had not happened. Not only are we not betrothed, but we are not even thinking of becoming betrothed. We have never cultivated any deeper relationship than a light flirtation, and we engaged in that only because we were both stuck in Bath and were horridly bored. We have never taken our feigned betrothal seriously, though we have both enjoyed it, I believe, as a sort of lark that will soon be over and will leave us quite unscarred. Last night spoiled all that. Of course I wish it had not happened. If we are forced to marry, that one mistake on my part will have ruined both our lives."

"We had better hope that we are not forced to marry, then," he said, the laughter gone from his eyes. "But did last evening have at least one positive result? Have you now abandoned your hatred of Viscountess Ravensberg?"

"It was high time," she said with a sigh, turning away to look back toward the house, which, with its long mullioned windows looked very Elizabethan from this angle. "My feelings had become an embarrassment to me-and to her and Kit. She is a perfect lady and kind and warm-hearted too-all qualities I have hated in her because I do not possess them myself. But, yes, we came to an understanding last evening. Perhaps we will even become friends. Who knows? Stranger things have happened."

"And Ravensberg?" he asked her. "Have you forgiven him?"

She sighed again and held her hair back from her face with one arm. "I could not help thinking all last night," she said, "that if he had come home last summer without Lauren, he would perhaps not have been able to resist the pressure of expectation from his family and mine. He might have married me simply because he could find no way not to marry me. And I would have known, if not immediately, then long before now. I would have been trapped in a living hell. There is nothing to forgive. He would have married me four years ago, but I would not marry him. He owed me nothing last year. And perhaps I have been clinging to something that never really existed. I was in love-desperately so, but I am not sure being in love is any closer to real loving than being in lust is."

"Are you in lust with me?" he asked.

She turned to look at him again and laughed when she saw the laughter back in his eyes.

"Oh, now that," she said, "I will not deny. You must know it anyway as I know it of you. It certainly would not be enough to carry us into any future, though. And so it is dangerous and must be resisted at all costs."

She was standing too close to him. His hands reached out to catch her on either side of her waist and draw her against him. He lowered his head and kissed her softly, almost lazily, with slightly parted lips. She rested her hands on his shoulders and realized with a terrible sinking of the heart that there was going to be a yawning emptiness in her life where he had been after this farce had finally come to its end.

"Though why you lust after me," she said when he lifted his head, "I will never know. I am so ugly."

"What?" His eyes were alight with merriment. "In any other woman that would be a far from subtle fishing expedition for a compliment. But you mean it. Let me see. Let me have a good look at you."

His eyes proceeded to roam her face while she wondered what on earth could have possessed her to utter such stupid words aloud. She had long ago given up lamenting her looks and envying Morgan hers. She was as she was. Anyone who did not like looking at her might simply look elsewhere.

"You are not pretty, Free, or beautiful," he said-at least he was not going to resort to lying flattery. "You are something else, though, over and above both. You, my sweetheart, are plain gorgeous. I think I may forever afterward find all the pretty girls somewhat insipid."

"How foolish!" She laughed. "Any more of such blatant flattery and I may toss you over the battlements in dead earnest."

"I am in fear and trembling," he said, and bent down to scoop her up into his arms.

"Put me down," she demanded indignantly.

But he stepped against the battlements with her and lifted her higher. She shrieked, wrapped her arms tightly about his neck, and then found herself laughing helplessly.

"Don't struggle," he said, laughing too, "or I may d-d-drop you, Free. Oops!"

She shrieked again as he pretended to do just that.

He set her down at last and she stood close to him, her face against his cravat, recovering from leftover laughter.

"You wretch," she said. "I will get my revenge. See if I don't."

"Free," he said softly, his chin against the top of her head, "this needs to be said. If we have made a child, I was as much a part of the making as you. We will marry, and we will make the best of the marriage both for the child's sake and for our own. We will not waste energy resenting each other and blaming ourselves and making ourselves unhappy by imagining that the other must be unhappy. We will do our best to rub along together. Agreed?"

She was considerably shaken. She felt warm and safe standing against him, and uncharacteristically she welcomed the solid safety of his body. His words had changed nothing-and everything.

. . . if we have made a child . . .

"Agreed," she said.

They stood against each other, neither seeming to know how to proceed.

"We had better go back to the house," she said briskly, stepping back. I am hungry."

"I'll go down those stairs ahead of you," he said. "They are remarkably steep. You may take my hand if you wish."

Freyja lifted her chin to a sharp angle and glared at him along the length of her nose.

"Uh-oh!" he said, raising his hands theatrically as if to defend himself from attack. "Now what the devil have I said?"

"Don't you dare try to protect me!" she told him, her voice cold and haughty. "I came up the stairs without the helping hand of any insufferably hovering male. I will go down the stairs the same way."

"Deuce take it," he said, shaking his head and returning his arms to his sides, "one cannot even be a gentleman with you, Free, without arousing your ire. Go ahead. Break your neck on the way down and I'll stand behind you, thankful you are not taking me down with you. Better yet, you can break my fall when I trip all over my boots."

Freyja smiled to herself as she started down the steep spiral stairs.

Joshua liked the Bedwyns and regretted the deception that was being perpetrated against them-though of course it might not prove to be a deception if he and Freyja were forced to marry after all.

Rannulf and Judith were to return to Leicestershire the next day. They lived at Grandmaison Park with Lady Beamish, the Bedwyns' maternal grandmother, but she was in poor health and they did not want to be absent any longer.

"We will see you again soon, Joshua," Judith said when she was taking her leave of everyone, "so this is not good-bye. I just hope you do not set your wedding date for a time when I am unable to travel. But that is extremely selfish of me. I will be very happy for you and Freyja wherever I am on that day."

"You must be made of stern stuff to have taken on Free," Rannulf said, winking at him as they shook hands. "It will doubtless not be a tranquil marriage. She is not easily controlled. But my guess is that she has met her match. It is sure to be an interesting marriage."

"I do not believe," Joshua said, "she can be controlled, easily or otherwise. It is perhaps a blessing that I like her as she is."

Rannulf laughed appreciatively and punched him in the shoulder.

Aidan seemed dour and humorless until one got to know him. He was certainly reticent and slow to laugh, or even to smile, but it was soon evident that he adored Eve and was devoted to their children. He spent much of the day before the christening and the days after with the children-playing with them, taking them walking and riding, demanding courtesy and obedience of them, but otherwise keeping them on a very loose rein.

"They experienced all the terrors of rejection and insecurity after their parents died," he explained after Joshua had supervised the boy on his pony while Aidan gave the little girl a riding lesson one morning. "Even when they had been with Eve for a while and after I married her, someone tried to snatch them away as revenge against Eve for marrying me. It took a court case and the ruling of a magistrate to establish the fact that we are their legal guardians. If I have to spend the next twenty years of my life helping them believe that they belong somewhere, that they are loved unconditionally, that their world is a predominantly benign place, that they can dare to be happy, productive adults when they grow up, then I will consider those years well spent."

"They are fortunate children," Joshua said, remembering the bleakness of his own childhood.

"They have every right to be," Aidan told him. "Of course, we face the possibility of their insecurities surfacing again when Eve bears a child of our own, but that time is not yet, and we will deal with it when it does happen."

Alleyne reminded Joshua of himself. Cheerful and always active, he nevertheless exuded a certain air of restlessness and aimlessness.

"I envy you," he said when the two of them were alone together at breakfast after seeing Rannulf and Judith on their way. "You have your home and your estate to go to now that you have the title and your services in France are no longer required. And a marriage with someone you love to help you send down roots. I think you must love Free." He grinned. "I cannot imagine any other reason a man would want to marry her unless it was her fortune, and you obviously don't need her money."

"I do not," Joshua agreed. "You probably are not lacking in funds yourself, though, or any of the other attributes necessary to attract a prospective bride, if that is what you want."

"The trouble is," Alleyne said, "that I do not know what I want. If I were poor, I would have no choice but to take employment, would I? I suppose I would have found my niche long ago and been reasonably happy in it. And if I were poor, there would not be so many females setting their caps at me. Perhaps I would have pursued and won someone who loved me for myself, someone for whom I would happily give up my freedom. Rank and fortune are not without their problems."

"Once upon a time," Joshua said, "I had neither, and on the whole I would have to admit you have a point."

"Having said which," Alleyne said ruefully, rising from his place to help himself to more food from the sideboard, "I am not sure I would give up either even if I could. I have been thinking-with a little prodding from Wulf-of running for a seat in Parliament or taking some government appointment. As for marriage, I am in no hurry. Bedwyns are expected to be monogamous once they do marry. More than that, they are expected to love their spouses. I am not sure I am ready for that sort of commitment yet, if I ever will be. I hope you are. Freyja will demand it of you-with her fists if necessary."

"Now that is a threat to put the fear of God into me," Joshua said. "I have been at the receiving end of one of those fists-at least my nose has-on two separate occasions."

Alleyne threw back his head and laughed.

"Good old Free," he said.

Morgan was young and beautiful and on the verge of making her come-out in society. She would be presented to the queen next spring and remain in London to participate in all the frenzied social activities of the Season. With all her advantages of birth and fortune and looks, she could not fail to take the ton by storm and to be courted by every gentleman in search of a wife and a good number who would think of matrimony only after setting eyes on her.

But she was not living for that day. She was not a giddy young girl with nothing in her head but beaux and parties.

"It is all remarkably foolish," she said at dinner one evening, "all this faradiddle of a come-out and a Season. And the whole idea of a marriage mart is distasteful and remarkably lowering."

"You are not afraid no one will bid for you, are you, Morg?" Alleyne asked.

"I am afraid of no such thing," she said disdainfully, "so you may wipe that grin off your face, Alleyne. I am afraid of just the opposite. I expect to be mobbed by silly fops and ancient roués and earnest, dull men of all ages. All because of who I am. Not a one of them will know me or even wish to know me. All they will want is marriage with the wealthy younger sister of the Duke of Bewcastle."

"Fortunately, Morgan," Aidan said, "you have the power to say no to any or all of them. Wulf is no tyrant and could not force you into a marriage against your will even if he were."

"You will meet someone next spring," Eve said, "or the year after or the year after that, and there will be something about him that is different, Morgan. Something that stirs you here." She touched her heart. "And before you know it, even if you never intended to love or even to like him, you will know that there is no one else in the world for you but him."

"Eve met Aidan," Freyja said, sounding exasperated, though there was a certain fond gleam in her eye as she looked at her sister-in-law, "and has become a hopeless romantic."

"Yes, I have," Eve agreed, and laughed and blushed.

"Well, I certainly do not expect to meet my future husband at the London marriage mart," Morgan said with a contemptuous toss of her head. "I will wait until I am five and twenty if I must, just like Freyja. She waited until she met just the right man." She looked at Joshua, approval in her eyes.

"Even if there were a few hiccups along the way," Alleyne added.

Joshua found that he did not dislike even Bewcastle. The man was cold, austere, distant. He took his meals with his family and joined them in the drawing room during the evenings. But apart from that he kept very much to himself. He did invite Joshua into his library after luncheon the day Rannulf and Judith left. Joshua guessed that such invitations were rare. He sank into the leather chair Bewcastle indicated before taking the one at the other side of the hearth himself.

"You have been presented to most of the members of our family," he said, setting his elbows on the arms of the chair and steepling his fingers, "and to almost all our neighbors while we were at Alvesley for the christening. It was my intention when I came home from Bath to host an evening party or even a ball here in honor of your betrothal. But you may consider such an event undesirable. The betrothal is still of a temporary nature, I assume?"

Joshua hesitated and found himself staring into the pale, inscrutable eyes of the duke. It seemed for a moment that he could almost read in those eyes a knowledge of what had happened during the evening at Alvesley.

"As you pointed out in Bath," Joshua said, "and as I explained to Freyja before that, my betrothal is very real to me. Only she can end it. She has not yet spoken the final word on that."

He had noticed before that Bewcastle did not seem disconcerted by lengthy silences. There was one now.

"If you wish her to speak that final word," Bewcastle said at last, "then I trust you will make it desirable to her to do so. Freyja may be the last woman one would expect to be susceptible to a broken heart, but that fate is not unknown to her."

"I know," Joshua said.

"Ah." The ducal eyebrows went up.

"I will see what Freyja thinks about a party or ball," Joshua said, feeling that he had had a brief glimpse into a side of Bewcastle that he kept very carefully hidden even from his own family. He cared about Freyja-not just about her good name and therefore the good name of the Bedwyns, but about her. He was afraid she was going to be hurt again.

The library door clicked open behind him at that moment, and the ducal eyebrows arched even higher while his fingers curled about the handle of his quizzing glass. Joshua looked over his shoulder and saw that the intruder was young Becky, who peered around the door for a moment before stepping inside and shutting it carefully behind her.

"I just woke up from my nap," she said very precisely in her piping little voice, "and Davy was gone and Nanny Johnson said I could come down. But Mama and Papa and everyone else have gone outside and I do not want to go to join them there because it is cold today."

Bewcastle half raised his glass to his eye. "It would seem, then," he said, "that the only alternative is to remain indoors."

"Yes," she agreed. But she did not respond to the implied suggestion that she was free to make herself at home in any part of the indoors except the library.

"Hello, Uncle Joshua," she said as she passed him on her way to examine the object that had taken her attention-Bewcastle's quizzing glass. She took it from his surprised fingers, examined it closely, turned it over in her hands, and raised it to her eye. She looked up at him. "You look funny, Uncle Wulf."

"I daresay I do," he said. "So does your eye."

She went off into peals of giggles before turning and wriggling her way up onto his lap, leaning against his chest, and resuming her game with his glass.

The thing was, Joshua thought as Bewcastle began a determined conversation about Penhallow, he looked both slightly uncomfortable and slightly pleased. He also sat very still as if he feared frightening the child away. It was Joshua's guess that nothing like this had ever happened to him before.

Freyja was adamantly opposed to any public celebration of their betrothal at Lindsey Hall, as Joshua had expected.

"Gracious heavens," she said when he asked her about it as they played a game of billiards later in the afternoon, "whatever next? A mock wedding? Enough is enough. I am going to quarrel with you very soon, Josh, and very publicly, whether you like it or not. This whole business is becoming tedious and ridiculous."

"Just wait a little while," he said.

"Oh, wait, wait, wait," she said impatiently. "Will you still be saying that on my eightieth birthday? Everything has become so stupid. No, there is to be no soiree, no ball, no tea, no anything. I wish we had never started this. I wish you had not come dashing into my inn room that night. I wish I had not been walking in Sydney Gardens that morning. I wish I had ignored those silly screams. I wish I had not danced with you at the assembly. I wish-"

"If you hit that ball," he warned, "it is going to go sailing over the end of the table and smash right through that window."

She slammed down the billiard cue.

"Josh," she said, "everyone is so happy for me. For us. I cannot stand it any longer."

"There are two courses open to us, then," he said. "You can quarrel with me and break off the engagement and send me away, or I can discover important business that necessitates my immediate return to Penhallow and leave here. I would suggest the second course since it need not involve an immediate ending of our betrothal and will leave you open to recall me if it becomes necessary to do so."

Devil take it, he thought, surprised, he did not want to leave just yet. But he had to admit that the situation had become intolerable and surely unnecessary. In retrospect he was not convinced that Bewcastle had been right to insist upon his coming here and keeping the betrothal alive this long.

"Do that, then," she said, frowning. "But how? What reason will you give?"

"My steward writes to me frequently," he told her. "He knows I am here. There is almost bound to be a letter from him within the next few days."

"It cannot come too soon for me," she said.

"Such warm, romantic words, sweetheart," he said, lifting one hand and flicking his forefinger across her chin.

She picked up the billiard cue, frowning, and bent over the table again.

CHAPTER XV

The letter came the next morning. It was waiting on the silver tray on the great hall table where the family's letters were always displayed, except for Bewcastle's, which were delivered separately to the library. They had all just returned from a ride, slightly damp, since a drizzling rain had started falling. Even the duke had come with them this morning. The children were already running upstairs to the nursery to change.

"Oh, Aidan, here is a letter from Thelma!" Eve exclaimed, sounding delighted. "And there is one for you underneath it, Joshua." She handed it to him with a smile.

His eyes met Freyja's-she had just picked up a letter of her own. It was a bleak moment. Here it was, then, his excuse to leave. He had already thought out what he would say after "reading" the letter, and indeed there would even be some truth in it-that with the harvest in and winter not far off there was an urgent need to begin some repairs and some rebuilding for his farm laborers, and that dreary as such business was, he really ought to be there to oversee the work, at least for a few weeks. During those weeks, of course, Freyja would learn the truth of her condition and either bring him back to arrange a hasty marriage or put an end to their betrothal. It would be up to her to think of a plausible reason for that.

He would leave tomorrow, he thought as he broke the seal of the letter. He would be a free man again-at least he would once he had heard from Freyja. He would be able to do whatever he wanted with the rest of his life. He could get back to enjoying himself in any way that presented itself.

Jim Saunders's letter was shorter than usual. Joshua read it quickly, and then read it again more slowly. Well, hell and damnation, he thought. He had crossed the woman's will, and now she would not be satisfied until she had destroyed him. She was prepared, it seemed, to go to extraordinary lengths to do just that.

"Is something wrong, Josh?" Freyja asked, her voice deliberately loud and concerned, and of course everyone looked at him, as she had intended they would.

"Actually there is," he said. "I am going to have to go to Penhallow without delay I'm afraid."

"Oh, what has happened?" Eve asked, all concern. "Nothing too dreadful, I hope?"

"Actually," he said, "I am about to be charged with murder."

"Murder?" Aidan spoke for all of them in a voice that must once upon a time have had a whole regiment of men jumping to instant attention. "Murder of whom?"

"My cousin," Joshua said, folding his letter into its original folds. "Five years ago. A witness has recently presented himself to my aunt, the Marchioness of Hallmere. He is prepared to swear that he saw me kill Albert."

"And did you?" Aidan asked, his face like granite, every inch the formidable colonel he had been.

"Actually, no," Joshua said, grinning. This was not funny, he knew-not by any means-but it was playing out like a typical melodrama, with all of them standing about the great hall like well-placed actors. "Though I was, apparently, the last to see him alive."

"Might I suggest," Bewcastle said, sounding perfectly cool, even bored, "that we remove this discussion to the breakfast parlor?"

For a few moments no one moved except Bewcastle himself. But then Freyja came hurrying forward to link her arm through Joshua's.

"I am hungry if no one else is," she said.

She marched him off with long strides, leaving everyone else behind.

"I might have known," she said, her voice low and furious, "that you would invent a perfectly ridiculous story like this. Do you seriously expect anyone to believe it?"

"I'll do my best to be convincing, sweetheart," he said, slipping Saunders's letter into the pocket of his riding coat. "At least you will have a reasonable excuse to end our betrothal in a few weeks' time if it turns out that I am a vicious felon, locked up in some damp, gloomy cell awaiting a hanging."

"Everything is a joke to you," she retorted.

There was no chance for further private conversation. Everyone came crowding after them, avid for more information. But Bewcastle talked languidly and determinedly about the weather until they had all filled their plates at the sideboard and the butler had poured their coffee and been dismissed.

"Now, perhaps, Hallmere," his grace said when the family was alone together, "you would care to enlighten us further on the nature of these accusations against you. Or perhaps not. Freyja has some right to know, I believe. The rest of us do not."

"Albert drowned," Joshua explained. "He and I were out in a boat together during a night that became more and more stormy. He jumped overboard to swim back to shore. He was not a strong swimmer, but he refused to get back into the boat. I rowed beside him until he was close enough to the beach to set his feet down on the sand-which he did-and then I took the boat out again for an hour or so longer. It was reckless of me under the circumstances, of course, but I had things on my mind. Besides, in those days I still considered myself invincible. The next morning I heard that he was missing. Later in the day his body was washed ashore with the incoming tide."

Eve had both hands over her mouth.

"He went swimming again after you had disappeared?" Alleyne said. "That was a dashed stupid thing to do on a stormy night, especially if he did not swim well. Or did he think himself invincible too?"

"The two of you had quarreled, I assume," Aidan said.

"Yes," Joshua admitted, "though I can no longer remember over what. We were always quarreling. We grew up together at Penhallow, but there was never any love lost between us."

"And yet," Bewcastle said, sipping his coffee and regarding Joshua with steady silver eyes, "you went out rowing with him at night."

"Yes."

"And now a witness has come forward," Morgan said scornfully. "Someone who was also rowing or swimming around in those stormy seas, I suppose. Yet you did not see him, Joshua? I daresay he is someone hoping to make his fortune with a little blackmail. Is your aunt likely to pay him? You must indeed return home and see to it that she does not."

"My aunt, you must understand," Joshua explained, "lost her only son that night. He was the heir to the title and all that went with it-including the house she still calls home. I was the one who benefited from his death-it made me the heir. Just recently I made it very clear that I would not marry my cousin, her eldest daughter. I was already . . . attached to Freyja."

"So she is willing to believe this witness?" Eve said, her eyes wide with distress. "Oh, poor Joshua. How are you to prove your innocence?"

"I really do not expect it to be difficult," he said. "However, I must go down there to sort the matter out. It would appear that another cousin, my heir presumptive, has been summoned, and there is bound to be a bit of a bother. For, of course, if the accusation could be made to stick, I would not have the protection of my rank. The death occurred long before I was Hallmere."

"Oh, poor Joshua," Eve said again. "What can we do to help?"

"I rather fancy the idea of interviewing this witness," Alleyne said. "It sounds a havey-cavey business to me."

Freyja had been sitting silently across the table all this while, watching Joshua with cold, hostile eyes. Suddenly she got to her feet, scraping back her chair with her knees as she did so, and came stalking around the table toward him. She reached into his pocket without a by-your-leave, pulled out Saunders's letter, unfolded it, and stood there reading it. Her lips were compressed into a hard line by the time she had finished. She folded the letter and set it down beside his plate.

"That woman is behind this," she said. "She needs to be taught a lesson she will never forget. We will leave today. An hour should be long enough in which to get ready. Wulf, have a carriage ready and waiting for us in an hour's time, if you please."

"We?" Joshua said. "Us?"

"You do not think I am going to let you go and face this alone, do you?" she asked haughtily. "I am your betrothed. I am going too."

"Oh, yes, Freyja," Eve said. "I really believe you ought."

"There is, of course," Bewcastle said, "the small matter of propriety. You are not yet married to Hallmere, Freyja."

She clucked her tongue impatiently, but Alleyne spoke up.

"I'll be your chaperone, Free," he said. "I'll come with the two of you. Actually I would not miss this for worlds."

"And I too," Morgan said firmly. "No, there is no point in grasping your quizzing glass, Wulf. It will not deter me. I am eighteen years old, and it is perfectly proper for me to go visiting my future brother-in-law with my sister and brother. Indeed, it is only right that Freyja have female companionship. I do not like the sound of the Marchioness of Hallmere. I want to see her for myself. And I believe she should be given the opportunity to discover that the family into which Joshua is about to marry can be a powerful enemy."

"Oh, bravo, Morgan," Eve said. "Though we do not know yet if the marchioness has had anything to do with producing this sudden witness. However, I do like the notion of her finding herself confronted by all the considerable power of the Bedwyns. Of course, Aidan is the most ferocious-looking one of you all. Aidan?" She looked inquiringly at him.

He returned her look with a blank stare for a few moments before raising his eyebrows and shaking his head slightly.

"We have been planning a sort of belated wedding trip after leaving here," he said, "with the children, of course. Their governess has recently married and we have not yet replaced her. We did think of the Lake District as a possible destination, but I daresay Cornwall would serve just as well-if we are invited, that is. Hallmere?"

A house party of Bedwyns determined to be formidable, even ferocious. An iron-willed aunt bent upon a revenge so ruthless that his very life would be snuffed out if she had her way. Accusations of murder rattling around the neighborhood and a mysterious witness and some sort of official investigation pending. Cousin Calvin Moore, the pious heir, riding with furious haste to claim his inheritance from the man who had got it by committing murder most foul. And a fake betrothal that was to be given yet another extension.

What red-blooded, sporting gentleman could possibly resist?

"Certainly you are all invited," Joshua said, "if you care for a little wild excitement rather than more conventional entertainment, that is."

"We are Bedwyns," Alleyne said with a grin.

Bewcastle merely raised his eyebrows and resumed his breakfast.

"But we are wasting time while we sit here talking," Freyja said impatiently. "We can be many miles on our way by nightfall if we leave this morning."

The prospect of a long, unexpected journey to Cornwall, beginning on a gloomy day complete with drizzle and a light fog and ending with a potentially nasty murder investigation starring their future brother-in-law as chief and sole suspect appeared to have cheered up the Bedwyns no end. They were all talking at once and pushing away their breakfast dishes as Joshua left the room with Freyja.

"Sweetheart," he said as soon as they were out of earshot, "I presented you with the perfect chance to be rid of me today and the perfect excuse for ridding yourself of me permanently as soon as you are sure circumstances will allow it. Yet you insist upon coming with me?"

"That woman has gone too far this time," she said, her chin and her nose in the air, a martial gleam in her eyes. "It will give me the greatest pleasure to demonstrate that fact to her."

He chuckled softly. "You may never be rid of me," he said.

"Nonsense," she said briskly. "It will be for just a short while longer. What man in his normal mind would sit alone out on the ocean in his boat during a stormy night just on the chance that someone might row by, not notice him, and then tip his cousin overboard and leave him to drown? And what normal man would not make a great deal of noise and fuss if it did happen and at least attempt to rescue the drowning man? What man would keep his mouth shut about the whole thing for five years and then open it at just the moment when the victim's mother happened to be in a royal rage because her hopes of wedding the murderer to her daughter had been foiled? I would like to have a word or two with such a man."

"Lord help him," Joshua said. "You and Alleyne both. And Aidan and Morgan too, I daresay. Not to mention Eve. Do you not realize, my charmer, that we are getting into a deeper and deeper scrape with every passing day?"

"Nonsense," she said again. "And you need not fear that there is going to have to be anything permanent about our connection, Josh. I discovered last night that we have both been spared that fate. That was a relief at least."

He stared at her. She was not with child? And yet she had just quite deliberately missed her chance to be rid of him permanently within the next few hours? And then he chuckled.

"It is your move next, sweetheart," he said. "You are going to have to find a way out of this betrothal. I am quite resigned to being an engaged man until my ninetieth year."

"One hour," she said firmly as they arrived outside the door of her room. "I expect everyone to be ready and downstairs in the hall not one minute later than that."

"Yes, ma'am," Joshua said, grinning at her as she whisked herself inside the room and shut the door firmly in his face.

But his grin faded and his stomach performed an uncomfortable flip-flop as soon as he was alone. He was going to have to go back to Penhallow after all, then, was he?

It was a grim prospect.

The journey was a long and tedious one. Conversation in the carriage and at the various inns where they stopped for meals and accommodation centered about neutral topics that were probably of no great interest to any of them. Certainly they were not to Freyja.

She could not believe this was happening. During the silences that a long journey inevitably brought and even during some of the conversations, she tried to trace back every stage of her relationship with Joshua to understand how she had got herself into this deep scrape, as he called it. How had she got from waking up in the middle of one night to find him invading her room to this moment of riding toward his home in Cornwall with him as his betrothed, half her family with them? Her involvement had all started, she supposed, when she had harbored him in her wardrobe without betraying his presence there to that horrid gray-haired old man, who had not even waited for her to answer his knock on the door.

What would have happened if she had betrayed him? Would the whole of her life now be different?

She supposed it would.

So would his.

They arrived at Penhallow late one afternoon, having driven almost all day along the coast road, admiring the views. It was not a brilliantly sunny day. Neither was it entirely cloudy. At one moment the sea below the high cliffs would be steely gray and rather forbidding, and the next it would be a brilliant blue and sparkling in the sunshine. More often its surface was a mixture of the two extremes.

"I would like to paint the sea," Morgan said. "It would be a marvelous challenge, would it not? I suppose most of us usually imagine that it is one color, or at least one color at any particular moment of any particular day. But it is not. One would need a whole palette of colors to paint it well, and even then . . ."

"And yet if you were to wade into the sea and let a handful of the water trickle through your fingers," Joshua said, "you would see that it is colorless."

"The color is projected onto it from something else," Morgan said.

"The sky?" Alleyne suggested.

"But if you climb a high mountain," Morgan said, "you find that the sky-the air-is also colorless. What gives the sky color? What gives the water color? If we could get inside a blade of grass, as we can get inside water and air, would we find that it too is without color?" Her eyes were shining with the intensity of the puzzle.

"And how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" Alleyne said with a chuckle. "Even if I could count them, Morg, I would wonder what was the point."

"Color, interpretation, come from our minds," Freyja said. She held up a staying hand when Morgan drew breath to speak again. "But what gives our minds that capacity, I do not know. Perhaps there is something beyond our minds-something of which we are unaware."

"Awareness itself?" Morgan said.

She was a strange girl, Freyja mused. Beautiful, accomplished, daring, as proud and haughty as any of them, as boldly contemptuous as Freyja herself of some of the starchier rules and conventions of society, she nevertheless had intellectual depths and this almost mystical awareness of the mysteries of existence that most people did not bother to question even if they noticed them.

What would happen to her sister, Freyja wondered, now that she was grown up and about to be launched on society? Would she find a man who would appreciate her, who would allow her enough rein to feel free, who would not clip her wings?

And what would happen to her? Once this foolish business of a murder accusation had been cleared up, she was going to have to end her betrothal to Joshua. There must be no more putting it off again for any flimsy reason that presented itself. But then what would happen to her?

"You may paint at Penhallow," Joshua said to Morgan, "and probe all the mysteries of the universe with your brush. But, speaking of Penhallow, the house is about to come into view around this bend."

The bend was necessitated by the presence of a river valley cutting across the landscape. The cliff turned sharply inland and then fell gradually away to a steep hillside. The road had been built along the top of it. Below was a river, wide and slow-moving at this point on its course, flowing onward to the sea. The slopes on either side were green and rocky and carpeted in many places with pink thrift and yellow gorse and white clover. On the near side of the valley were the church and houses of a village, close to the sea, climbing the hillside for lack of enough flat land beside the river.

On the far, western side of the valley, perhaps half a mile from the sea, and perched on a wide plateau more than halfway up the hillside, was a large, imposing gray stone mansion. It was half turned to face the sea, smooth-looking lawns all about it and continuing down the hill with beds of brown earth that must be flower gardens in the summer. Surrounded as it was on all four sides as well as above and below by the wild beauties of the Cornish seacoast, the house and park were like a perfect, cultivated gem.

There was something about Freyja's first sight of Penhallow that was pure physical sensation, almost as if a fist had collided with a dull thud into her ribs below the heart. It was almost painful.

The road was descending slowly but rather steeply into the valley and the three-arched stone bridge Freyja could see there. On the other side the road followed the line of the river north for a while before climbing out of the valley on the other side. There was also a steep, curving driveway up to the house and a smaller, though not inconsiderable stone house at the bottom of it-a dower house, perhaps.

Morgan and Alleyne were crowded against the window on their side of the carriage, looking out. Joshua was looking over Freyja's shoulder.

"Impressive indeed," Alleyne said.

"Beautiful!" Morgan said softly.

Joshua was silent. And tense. Freyja could sense his tension even though he did not touch her. This was where his aunt and cousins lived. Where he had spent an unhappy childhood as an orphan in his uncle's home. This was where he had wanted never to return. And where he would fight suspicion and innuendo and hostility and hatred and accusations of murder.

It was his. It was his inheritance, his source of wealth and prestige, his responsibility. It was the millstone about his neck.

She knew almost nothing about his life here, about what had driven him away, about why he had been so reluctant to return. But she was about to discover much, she supposed. She was not sure she wanted to. She had always thought of Joshua as a laughing, carefree, charming man with little depth of character. She had thought of him as pleasant to flirt with, pleasant even to lie with, but not in any way desirable as a lifelong partner. She had always expected to be able to say good-bye to him without any real regrets.

She hoped all that was not about to change, but she had a horrible sinking feeling that perhaps it was.

For no reason she could fathom, and without at all intending to, she sought his hand with her own and held it firmly. He laced his fingers with hers and gripped so tightly that she felt pain. Normally she would have reprimanded him sharply or tried to outgrip him. But she sat quietly and made no protest at all.

The wheels of the carriage rumbled over the bridge and Freyja was aware of a wide and beautiful view along the river to the sea. Both were sparkling like a million diamonds in the sunshine, the clouds having just moved off the face of the sun.

It would be difficult to approach Penhallow unseen unless one climbed to the headland above it and sneaked down the hill on foot. The approach of two grand traveling carriages, another, plainer one for the servants, and two baggage coaches would have been well nigh impossible to miss.

Even so, only Jim Saunders was waiting on the gravel terrace before the front doors when the first carriage, in which Joshua rode with Freyja, Alleyne, and Morgan, drew level with them and then pulled ahead to allow room for Eve and Aidan's carriage too. Grooms were approaching from the stables.

Joshua was first out of the carriage. He shook hands warmly with the steward he had hired in London six months ago and not seen since, and turned to hand Freyja and Morgan down before Alleyne alighted. Aidan was already lifting the children out of their carriage, and the two of them were dashing to the edge of the terrace to gaze downward along the valley to the wide golden beach at the end of it.

"I came as fast as I could," Joshua said after he had presented Saunders to the Bedwyns.

"And a good thing too, my lord," Saunders told him. "The Reverend Calvin Moore arrived last night."

The front doors had opened at last, and glancing up, Joshua saw his aunt standing on the top step, looking frail and wan in her black mourning clothes, a black-bordered handkerchief held to her lips. He wondered if she had expected him. He wondered if she had expected that he would bring Freyja with him. He would wager she had not expected him to bring other guests too. And the Bedwyns were a formidable lot. With the exception of Eve, they were all gazing at the marchioness with their haughtiest expressions. No one could do haughtiness quite like the Bedwyns.

Joshua almost grinned but decided against it.

"Aunt?" he said, striding toward her.

She came down the steps and melted into his arms.

"Joshua, my dearest boy," she said. "What a perfectly delightful surprise-and just when I had given up all hope of your ever coming home. I was just now observing to Cousin Calvin . . . But you do not know that he has come for a visit, do you? I was just observing to him that it would be more the thing for you to receive him since Penhallow is yours and he is your heir, but that you had not found the time to come here since your poor uncle passed on. And then Chastity saw the carriages approaching and I knew that my prayers had been answered."

No, Joshua concluded, she had not expected him. Neither did she realize that he knew what was afoot, or else she chose not to speak of it immediately. She might, of course, have greeted him quite differently if he had come alone.

"I am delighted to be here, Aunt," he said. "I have brought houseguests with me, as you can see. You know my betrothed already. May I present Lord and Lady Aidan Bedwyn, Lady Morgan Bedwyn, and Lord Alleyne Bedwyn? My aunt, the Marchioness of Hallmere."

She welcomed them graciously. For a moment it looked as if she were about to hug Freyja, but something in Freyja's stance caused her to change her mind and she contented herself with a warm, watery smile instead. A stranger would have sworn that she had never been happier in her life than she was at this moment in greeting a number of unexpected guests to the house she considered her own.

"And children!" she exclaimed, clasping her hands to her bosom and gazing fondly at Becky and Davy, who were still admiring the view while their nurse looked on from beside the third carriage. "How delightful it will be to hear the happy voices of children echoing about Penhallow's halls again. It has been many years since you and Albert and the girls were children, Joshua. Those were good days. Will you all come up to the drawing room, where everyone is waiting to meet you? You must be ready for your tea."

Joshua turned to offer his arm to Freyja, but before she could take it, someone came hurtling past his aunt in the doorway. She was ungainly in her haste, her arms clamped to her sides down to the elbows, her hands flapping to the sides in a show of excitement. Her round, childish face beamed with happiness. She was laughing convulsively as children do when deeply involved in a game.

"Josh!" she was saying over and over again. "Josh, Josh, Josh."

He opened his arms and she came into them, coming close to bowling him over. Her arms gripped him tightly about the neck, almost throttling him, and her head came down so that she butted him in the chest with her forehead and fairly robbed him of breath. She was still laughing and repeating his name.

She had grown up in five years-she was eighteen now-but she still looked much the same as she had last time he saw her.

"Prue!" he said, closing his arms about her. "Prue, my sweetest love."

"You have come home," she told his chest. "I knew you would come home. Josh, Josh, Josh."

"Prudence!" his aunt said in awful tones. "How dare you leave the nursery without my permission! Where is Miss Palmer?"

"It is all right, Aunt," Joshua said as his cousin began to make grunting noises of distress. "What better welcome home could I possibly be given? I have brought some people for you to meet, my love. If you will leave off hugging me, I will present them to you."

"Lady Prudence Moore, my cousin," he said, looking first at Freyja. "This is Lady Freyja Bedwyn, Prue. I daresay she will allow you to call her Freyja just as she will call you Prue. She is going to be my wife."

Now, why the devil had he added that?

Prue smiled her wide, guileless child's smile at each of the Bedwyns in turn and repeated their names quietly to herself so that she would not forget them. When Joshua had finished introducing them, she looked at him and laughed.

"And this is Josh," she said, having noticed that he had not been introduced to anyone.

"And I am Josh," he said, smiling tenderly at her and setting one arm about her shoulders.

"And you have come home."

"And I have come home."

"And you have brought Freyja," Prue said. "I like Freyja. I like everyone. I like Eve best, though. Except Josh. I love Josh most in the world. Except for Chass and Constance and-"

"Prudence!" her mother said a little more faintly.

Joshua chuckled and caught Freyja's eye. She was not looking cold or haughty or shocked or repelled or any of the things he might have expected. She was gazing fully at him, a light of sharp curiosity in her eyes.

His aunt led the way into the house. Eve hurried forward and took Prue's arm, a kind and very genuine smile lighting her pretty face, while Aidan strode across the terrace to fetch the children. Morgan and Alleyne had already stepped inside. Joshua offered Freyja his arm.

"She has always been a child," he said. "She always will be."

"And you love her," Freyja said.

"She is made up of love," he said. "There is nothing else in her but love. How could one give back to her anything else but love?"

"Josh," she said with a sigh, "this is something I really did not need to know about you."

"Sweetheart," he said, laughing softly, "did you think me incapable of loving? How unsporting of you."

CHAPTER XVI

The pillared hallway was two stories high with marble friezes and marble busts that would be worth examining more closely some time. The stairway with its wide, gleaming oak stairs and intricately carved banister was in a separate chamber. The drawing room to which the Marchioness of Hallmere led them was a large, square, elegantly classical apartment with an ornately sculptured marble fireplace, silk-paneled walls with gilded trim, a high, coved ceiling painted with scenes from Greek mythology, and a deep bay window with a breathtaking prospect down over the valley and out to-ward the sea.

Freyja did not immediately notice the view, but from the moment she stepped inside the house she realized that it was far grander than she had expected. Yet it was a place to which Joshua had never wanted to return.

Lady Constance was waiting in the drawing room. She smiled with genuine warmth at Joshua and at Freyja. The other lady with her, slender almost to the point of thinness, brown-haired with a long, oval face and large, beautiful, sad eyes, was her younger sister, Lady Chastity Moore. The slightly portly, somewhat balding gentleman with shirt points so stiff and high that he had to move the whole of his upper body when he wished to turn his head, was introduced to the newly arrived guests as the Reverend Calvin Moore, Joshua's second cousin.

The heir, who had been sent for, Freyja supposed.

It was Joshua who made the introductions, not his aunt. Indeed, Freyja noticed with interest, his whole manner had changed as soon as they set foot inside the drawing room. The room became almost visibly his. He became lord of the manor. He invited them all to be seated after the introductions had been made or to look out at the view from the bay window. He asked his aunt if she would be so good as to have tea brought up.