The women of Kallin gathered in the drawing room to confer. After some debate, with arguments on all sides carefully weighed, it was decided that the remote estate of a bachelor staffed entirely by women—especially a bachelor with the Devil’s Duke’s reputation—was simply too ripe for misconstruing.

Zion set off with two fast horses to the Allaways’ farm to fetch Nathaniel.

Molly Cromwell, the chief of Kallin’s distillery, suggested another male addition: the vicar of the tiny hermitage several miles up the glen. Reverend Clacher had thrice come to Kallin at the behest of the women: on the first occasion to do a Christian burial of a babe—whose babe, no one specified—and later to baptize Rebecca’s and Maggie’s newborns. On those occasions the hermit had made it clear he had no judgment on the laird, the house, or its residents.

“He’s a true man of God,” Molly said. An enslaved woman on Barbados where she had labored in a rum distillery her entire life, she had been among the first women to arrive at Kallin. “And he has a discerning palate for fine spirits,” she added with a wink.

It was agreed that the Scotswomen Maggie and Cassandra, and Hannah the Irishwoman, would act as house servants, while Molly would go no farther than the kitchen, with Claire, also West Indian, who had arrived recently and was already cook. Sophie, Rebecca, and Clementine would remain in the village until the guests departed.

With the whirlwind of preparations completed, the women gathered again.

“None o’ you will go anywhere alone while the party is here.”

Everybody’s attention went to the duke, who had remained silent throughout the earlier discussion.

“Won’t that be noticed?” Pike said.

“Perhaps. But I will have your word on it now. All o’ you.”

The women gave it, one after another.

“An’ Miss Finn an’ Miss Poultney will go by aliases,” he added.

The barking of the dogs in the yard, and then hoofbeats, announced the arrival of riders making a swift approach to the house. Cassandra opened the door.

“Good day, miss,” Nathaniel said, removing his hat. “I’m Nathaniel Hay, come to play one-armed butler for a time.”

Amarantha went forward and onto her toes to kiss him on each weathered cheek.

“You’ve found the devil, have you, my lady?”

“I will tell you nothing until you have told me all news of Luke since your last letter reached me in Leith. But first”—she glanced at his mud-speckled trousers and coat—“you cannot greet the guests wearing that.”

Coming beside her, the duke extended his hand to Nathaniel.

“Thank you for arriving so swiftly, Corporal Hay.”

Nathaniel gaped at the duke’s hand. Without taking it, he bowed.

“Your Grace. It’s my honor to have your trust.”

Amarantha laughed. “Nathaniel, you must swiftly become accustomed to the singular ways of this household, and of Kallin’s laird too.”

“After this past year at your service, my lady, I’ve experience tolerating singular ways.”

A gig drew up to the house, with Molly at the reins and a small, elderly man tucked under blankets beside her.

“No funerals? ’Tis a holiday! An’ I dinna mind a wee bit o’ subterfuge for a righteous cause,” Reverend Clacher said with a hearty chuckle as Cassandra fit him in one of Pike’s waistcoats, which would not button over his belly.

“I see you’ve been eating the stores of brandied cherries I brought you in the fall, Reverend,” Molly said.

“Aye, Miss Cromwell.” He patted his belly. “What else is an old man to do when the winter blows through the cracks o’ his house?”

“I’m off to fetch our guests,” the duke said, casting a glance about the foyer where the household had gathered again. “Extraordinary women. Each o’ you.”

“We know,” Maggie said with a brilliant grin.

Smiling, his gaze came to Amarantha. She had the most ridiculous urge to go to him, take his hand, and carry it to her lips, as she had once wanted to do when she was a naïve girl whose heart controlled her.

Dinner was a fine affair, with rustic country meats and cheeses and sweets, including a tart that Thomas and Miss Alice both declared as fine as anything they had tasted in Edinburgh or London. Tabitha had remained in her room, pleading a headache, and every word that Jonah Brock spoke made Amarantha marvel at his pretense.

Now, replete and comfortable in the drawing room, the travelers lingered in conversation.

“Interesting what you’ve done with the place, Gabe,” Mr. Brock said, glancing about as he accepted a cup of tea from a little old potbellied footman with rosy cheeks. The room had been prepared with windows cracked open at strategic locations and the chimney partially blocked so the chamber was both drafty and a bit smoky. “But I haven’t been here since we were children, of course, when the duchess still presided. Your father did not like Kallin much, as I recall. Imagine that, a recluse who preferred living close to town rather than in this remote place. But I understand that my uncle bequeathed that preference to his second son, didn’t he?”

The duke lifted a glass of port to his mouth and said nothing.

“Ha ha! Dinna listen to those rumors, Mr. Brock,” Mr. Tate chortled. “The Devil’s Duke ’tis no’ but a story invented by upstarts to frighten ignorant folk. Aye, Janie?”

Jane cast her gaze down to her cup of tea.

“I think it would be capital if you were a devil, Duke,” Iris said. “For then you could do away with my sisters.”

Cynthia sat by a window, an odd, agitated brightness in her face.

“Miss Iris,” Mr. Brock said, “I find your sisters’ company entirely pleasing.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jane replied with sweet fervency. They were the first words she had spoken since emerging from the carriage.

Finally, as the guests bid their host good-night, Amarantha went to Jonah Brock.

“Mr. Brock, do remain and indulge me in a brief tête-à-tête.”

“How refreshingly direct you are, ma’am,” he said, watching the others depart. “I wondered how long it would be before you—”

“I have no interest in rebuking you for the unsavory influence you had on my husband during the months before his death. If a man can be so easily swayed from his convictions, his friends should not be blamed for his sin. Rather, his own weak character should.”

“Yet still I deserve your rebuke.” He tapped his fingers against the back of the chair beside which he stood.

“How did you know that Mrs. Aiken was among my party at Haiknayes?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“How did you discover that she had come to Scotland?”

“Mrs. Garland, I am not acquainted with this—this Mrs. Aiken.”

“I know you are. But you must know that here in Scotland you have no power to harm her. When the letter of proof of her freedom arrives from her former master, Dr. Shaw will petition the courts to establish this incontrovertibly while she resides in Scotland, and England and Wales as well.”

“Madam, I am happy that she has such loyal friends in you and the doctor. I assure you, I wish her well too, whoever she is.”

“Will you claim that you have not threatened her?”

“I could hardly threaten a woman I don’t know, could I?”

“Yet you have before,” Tabitha said behind Amarantha. She stood in the doorway, the duke behind her.

“I cannot allow you to fight my fights, Amarantha,” she said. “And I don’t wish to run for the rest of my life. Mr. Brock, eighteen months ago in Kingston my husband’s murderers claimed that they killed him in his mill at your behest. They said that if I did not do as you wished, you would seek to end my freedom.”

“Madam,” he said tightly, “I have never seen you before. Why would I wish you harm?”

“Are you claiming that those men lied?”

“They most certainly must have, for I have never sent any man to do such a deed, for any reason, no matter what the rumors of me claim. Cousin, will you stand as character witness for me against this accusation?”

The duke remained silent.

“Mr. Brock,” Amarantha said, “will you swear now that you did not know Mr. Aiken?”

“I cannot, for I did know a miller by the name of Jonathan Aiken. He was a hardworking man, and fair. Mrs. Aiken, I am sorry for your loss. To lose one’s beloved—” He seemed to flinch. “You have my sympathy. And I wish you success in your freedom. I have no doubt it was well earned.”

“I did not earn my freedom,” Tabitha said. “I claimed it as my human right.”

“Ah.” His gaze slewed to the duke. “You’ve revolutionaries under your roof, Gabe. Hold tightly on to your title and estates.” Bowing, he departed.

Amarantha went to her friend. “Tabitha, do you believe him?”

“How am I not to? He does not know me and I know of him only by sight and reputation.”

“Mrs. Aiken,” the duke said, “could my cousin have served as a convenient excuse for those men to threaten you into leaving your mill?”

“Given his reputation, his past . . . yes.” She nodded but her eyes were empty. “I believed them. I fled. I have lost my husband’s mill—my mill—through my own fear.”

“It is rightfully yours and will be in your possession again,” Amarantha said. “Come now. We will celebrate this news with well-deserved sleep.”

Amarantha made herself leave the room and go to her bedchamber and undress and climb beneath the cozy covers, and tell herself not to dream of him, of his touch—both innocent and scandalous—and of how well he seemed to understand her.

Again, it seemed, she did not wish to be found. But he did find her eventually in the little greenhouse which, years ago, his mother had built onto Kallin’s southernmost flank. Late-morning sunshine filtered through the glass and made a crisp, bright halo about her.

“What are you doing?” he said, stepping up behind her and looking over her shoulder.

“Good morning, Urisk. I am beginning to think that immediate interrogation is the way of devils and dukes.” She did not lift her head, but continued with the pot and dirt on the table before her. “But I admit myself ignorant of such things, having circulated mostly in humble circles since my debut, you see.”

“You are in fine spirits, it seems. Good.”

She turned her face up to him and a smile danced in her eyes. “I am relieved at the outcome of last night’s conversation with your cousin. You are staring at my lips.”

“Give me permission to do more than stare.”

Swiftly she returned her attention to the pot. “I am all dirt, you see.”

“If dirt suits you, it suits me,” he said, and inhaled her fragrance of winter fir. “You were well acquainted with my cousin on Jamaica, it seems.”

“Does it?” Her fingers tucked around the base of a plant, scooped it tenderly from its pot, and placed it into a larger pot.

“Last night I overheard you speaking with him o’ personal matters.”

“Oh? Were you lurking outside the parlor?”

“Lurking is one thing a man o’ my height canna do.”

“I was not well acquainted with your cousin. My husband and he spent considerable time together in the months before Paul’s death.”

“Did they?” He didn’t care. “You’d no joy in that?”

“They were an unlikely pair. People remarked on it. But Paul enjoyed the friendship.”

He leaned back against a table and gripped the sides of it with his hands, lest he leave them free and available to take hold of her. Only when she invited it. And she would.

“Will you make me court you for nine weeks again, lass, or can we snip a few weeks off that total. Perhaps seven or eight?”

“Your teasing fails to rouse me, Urisk.” Her fingers were moving more swiftly now, patting the soil in place and brushing bits of it from the leaves.

“Then what can I do to rouse you—again?”

“My husband always wondered why, when we would pass your cousin in town, Mr. Brock would offer me such elaborate bows.”

Gabriel rubbed a palm over his face. “I said rouse. Not douse.”

“He became obsessed with it.” She set the pot on a tray and reached for another plant. “He spoke to me of nothing else for weeks. When his obsession became wearisome, I told him that you and I had been well acquainted.”

He paused in the act of crossing his arms.

She glanced at him.

“You needn’t be astonished,” she said. “I omitted the part at the end, those last two conversations we had. I daresay you don’t remember those conversations anyway.”

Abruptly, Gabriel’s heart was beating very swiftly. “I do.”

Her fingers stilled. “Do you?”

“O’ course I do.”

She began arranging dirt again.

“In any event, the details did not matter to Paul. He was not interested in Mr. Brock’s deep bows for my sake, it turned out, but for the sake of your cousin’s soul. He decided that his ministry had neglected planters in favor of enslaved people, but that it needn’t any longer, for both were needy of salvation. He chose to make your cousin his first project.”

“Project?”

“For reform. He believed that given your cousin’s many sins, he was ripe for a thorough conversion.”

“He wasna?”

“Within a month my husband was playing cards with him twice a week. For money. I think Paul even drank spirits with Mr. Brock, which he never did otherwise, not even wine.”

“What o’ the conversion?”

“Oh, it went in the opposite direction. Your cousin has always been persuasive, of course. There, I have finished. I have no idea what these plants are but Claire seems to believe that someday their fruit will be delicious.” Wiping her hands on a towel, she reached behind her to untie her apron.

Gabriel caught her hands. He bent his head. Wisps of her fiery tresses escaping her kerchief tickled his cheek.

“Those deep bows he gave to you on the street,” he said close to her ear. “I never introduced you to him. If you tell me that scoundrel was having sport with a lady—with you—I will find him an’ give him a taste o’ my displeasure.”

She swiveled, breaking his loose hold on her hands and bringing her body within inches of his.

“He and I were never formally introduced. But he had brought me the news, of course, so, yes, I was acquainted with him.” The sunlight made merry with her eyes, but the green was sober.

“The news?”

“The news of your death. The false news, that is.” She shifted to take up a pot on the table and the brush of her hip and arm were like the caress of a specter to his fogged thoughts.

“My death?” He hardly heard himself.

“You needn’t deny it. Though it was more than five years ago, it seems like a lifetime really. I was gullible then, as we have already established, so I cannot fault two young men of your habits for having a bit of fun at my ex—”

He grasped her arm and turned her to face him. “He told you I was dead?”

She tugged to free herself. “Of course.”

He released her. “I knew nothing o’ the lie.”

“Please.” Stepping to the side, she moved around the table. “I told you, it is ancient history.”

“Amarantha, I will willingly admit that I was every kind o’ fool then—more than a fool. But I had no idea he told you that lie.”

“Your Grace?” Maggie said behind him.

“I am occupied, Miss Poultney.”

“Reverend Clacher has been nipping at the rum. He’s fallen asleep on the foyer chair an’ is fixing to slide off it.”

He looked over his shoulder. “Then prop him up, lass.”

“Miss Iris an’ Miss Alice are placing bets on which direction he’ll tumble.”

“Well, place your bet too, then grab him before he lands on the floor,” he said impatiently.

“But there be the dog—”

“I am occupied, la—”

Amarantha swished past him, went around Maggie, and out the door.

Maggie dimpled. “No’ now, Your Grace.”

He scraped his hand over his jaw.

“Now that I’ve your attention,” Maggie said, “after propping up the reverend, would you be telling Cassie where she’s to do the ledgers an’ receipts in privacy, so no one discovers her about it?”

He frowned, but it only made her grin.

“An’ do you know when they’ll all be leaving, by chance?” she said.

Amarantha found Jonah Brock alone in the drawing room.

“Eschewing the grand tour of the distillery today in favor of mucking about in the dirt, Mrs. Garland?” His gaze slid over her stained apron. “I’d no idea you had a green thumb. But you are variously talented, I have learned.” His eyes were cold. He might have been drinking already; a wine bottle sat open nearby.

It made no difference to Amarantha.

“Yes, I am,” she said, whipping off the apron and balling it up. “You are upset with me that I believed the villainy those men claimed about you—regarding Mrs. Aiken. Aren’t you?”

“I am,” he purred like a sleek golden lion. “Although, admittedly, upset seems such a mild term for what I am feeling at present.”

“You have no right.”

“Yesterday I knew you could not be speaking the truth. You do blame me for your husband’s inability to hold his liquor, don’t you? Off of a ladder, our elevated man of God—of all ironies. Wretched way to go, though. Oh, I know you told everyone that he went from fever. But I—” His voice stumbled. “I heard the truth. And you have come now to demand that I find a ladder to climb, so that I might also fall to my oblivion.”

“You are horrible.”

His gaze slid away. “You will no doubt disbelieve me when I vow now that his death was an unpleasant shock to me. I had come to actually enjoy his friendship, you know.”

“I am not here now to speak with you about him.”

He floated a hand languidly in the air. “Enlighten me, madam.”

“After the Theia sailed—”

His gaze came to her abruptly and very clear.

“You told me he was dead,” she said. “It was a lie. You knew he was well. You lied to me intentionally. Cruelly. Without his knowledge.”

“I did.”

Chill crawled through her. But it mattered nothing now, really. The world had changed. She had. There was nothing left in her of the girl who had twice thrown her heart into love—first in passion with a man who made her world spin off-kilter, and then in hope with another man she had misunderstood until it was too late.

“Have you discovered only now that my cousin was unaware of that little mistruth?” he said. “How timely.”

“Timely?”

“Tate means for Gabriel to wed his daughter.”

“The one has nothing to do with the other.” She went to the door.

“If it is any consolation,” he said, “I am being punished for it now.”

“Unless you anticipate a bolt of lightning to shortly strike you down, I really don’t see how you imagine I could be consoled by that.”

“I had imagined a preacher’s wife would be forgiving,” he murmured.

“If in your intimate friendship with my husband you did not learn that I was a thorough failure as a preacher’s wife, then you knew him very little after all.”

A smile slowly curved his lips. “You hid it so well. For years, I imagine. But you truly are all the spark and fire my cousin said you were. Until my ears bled. It was nauseating. It still is.”

She frowned.

“My cousin is as smitten with you now, Mrs. Garland, as he was then. If you cannot see that then you deserve your fate.”

“Fate does not rule me, Mr. Brock. No one rules me any longer.”

She left him. Bypassing Reverend Clacher, who napped contentedly on his footman’s chair in the foyer, she took up her cloak and went out.

The day was cold, the sky brilliant blue quilted in snowy white and every shade and shape of gray. The hills beckoned.

Wind greeted her on the slope. She strained as she climbed, her skirts tangling about her legs and her chest tight with the effort. Reaching the crown of the hill, she stared out across the valley speckled with sheep and thick woodlands and the wide ribbon of the Irvine.

The heavy beats of a horse’s hooves came to her. She pivoted to face him, hating that he understood her so well that he had known to find her here.

She tore the hair from before her mouth. “I believed you dead!”

He slowed his mount.

“No’ lately, lass.”

“The Theia had barely been gone a fortnight. He told me it was ambushed and you and your crew were killed. I believed him. I don’t know why I believed him. But perhaps I did so—so willingly, without question—because I had believed what you said to me before you left. I was naïve and impetuous. But you knew that. Indeed, you depended on that.”

Astride his great fearsome warhorse he said nothing.

“After he told me of your death, he claimed that it was secret information, that I was not meant to know it, that he could be jailed if I revealed it to anyone. Jailed! Of course I believed him. I had no reason not to—not then. I was acquainted with few men, and all of them men of honor. But I could not bear knowing so little about what had happened to you. I went to the naval bureau and asked for news of your ship, but they had none. So I returned the following day, and the day after that. Every day for a month they said they had no news of your ship.”

Gabriel could not doubt this. By then the Theia had been hundreds of leagues away, on his first glorious assignment as its commander. They would not have shared that information with a curious girl. And no one on the island except Jonah and an obliging vicar had known what that girl meant to him.

“Weeks later I finally learned that you were alive,” she said, “that the Theia had not been ambushed. Then I understood.”

“What did you understand?”

“About the letter.”

The letter.

She took his silence as lack of understanding.

“The letter that your cousin wrote, in which you supposedly declared your intention of marrying me immediately, and told me to wait for you.”

He remembered every word of it: three lines it had taken him days to compose, days without drink, without sleep, without enough time to prepare his green crew and patched-together ship for an assignment he had never anticipated—the assignment that would establish his career, the orders directly from London. Among all its vessels in every sea, the Admiralty had chosen Theia. Yet even in the heady cloud of pride and the press of preparations, he could not cease thinking of a girl in whose presence he had never felt more right in his own skin and right with the entire world. A girl who drove him mad with need.

“I wrote it,” he said.

“Make as many claims of honesty as you wish. Despite knowing better by now, I do find them alluring. But they will not convince me that a man who has lied to everyone in Scotland for years cannot still lie to me.”

“I wrote the letter.”

“You did not. You had promised that you would not write to me.”

“I never promised that.”

“I had asked you not to write to me. I insisted.”

“I wasna your lapdog to order about, lass.” He’d been a daft cub with a heart full of arrogance and a head fixed on having everything he wished, and damn the consequences.

Her brow was troubled, the cloverleaves clouded. “It hardly matters who wrote it.”

“It matters to me.”

“Eventually I understood it all, clearly,” she said as though he had not spoken. “Gossip, however wicked, can be enlightening. They said you had taken up with a woman in Montego Bay. Who was she?”

“Annabelle Lesson.”

Her eyes widened a bit. “You admit to it?”

“No’ to taking up with her.” She had been Torquil’s lover, the couple with whom he had spent his single day ashore before sailing east, the day he had thought would be his wedding day. “But she was a friend.”

“So, I had imagined, were we friends,” she said, subdued.

“An’ I.”

“I wanted to disbelieve the rumor. I wrote to you. I needed to know the truth. I never sent that letter, of course. By then I was married. In my thoughts I had betrayed my vows to my husband but I could not do so in deed. In any case, soon I came to believe the gossip. I had no reason to disbelieve it.”

“Except my word.”

“And your cousin’s, your dearest companion’s. Do you know what I wanted most then?”

“To forget we had met?” As he had that first night, the night that changed the course of his life.

“For you to be dead.”

“Given what you believed, I suppose your wish to hold a pistol to my head wasna unreasonable.”

“No, you misunderstand. I had no wish to do violence to you myself. I wanted the story your cousin told me—about the bandits—to be true. I wanted you to have died. I believed at the time that I could endure that grief, even as painful it was. But I did not believe that I could endure the heartbreak I had so impulsively brought upon myself. And”—she stared at the ground before his horse—“I think I did not want to ruin the memory. I knew fully that what I had done, meeting you privately, being with you when I felt as I did, that it was wrong. And I wanted you to be dead so that I would not hate you for playing me for a fool.”

“You’re mad,” he said.

“Probably. Then, at least.”

He dismounted, released the reins, and went to her. Her hair spun about in the wind and moisture sat upon each rosy cheek.

“Did you want me to be a scoundrel who had abandoned you, lass, or at the bottom o’ the ocean? You’ve got to choose one.”

“Why not both?”

With the pad of his thumb he stroked a teardrop from her cheek. But she did not lean into his touch as she had those years ago.

He withdrew his hand.

“Would you have wed him if you hadna believed me dead?”

“Yes.”

It was the final proof he needed. Despite the teardrop, and despite the passion of her kiss on the ramparts, she was cold, immobile, an alabaster statue of a woman who had discarded her heart. His hopes could not make it otherwise.

With thickness in his throat that he could not speak through, and a furious emptiness gathering in his chest, he turned away from her and moved toward his horse.

“Why did you write to my sister last autumn?” she said. “You did, didn’t you?”

He turned to her.

“She told me of the anonymous note claiming that I was here and in danger, bidding her come to Kallin and fetch me to England. You played on everyone’s fear of the Devil’s Duke, hoping she would respond immediately. And she did. You wrote that note.”

“Aye.”

“Why?”

“I wanted you gone.”

“Gone?”

“Off my land. Away from Kallin. Out o’ Scotland, if I could make it so.”

Her lips fell open. “Why didn’t you simply come to the village and tell me that?”

“I didna want to see you.”

“You—? Not even for a brief conversation?”

“No.”

“But—”

“Never.”

She backed away. “You really are the worst sort of beast.”

“I am?” he exclaimed. “You wanted me dead.”

“No. I wanted you.” Her cheeks were two spots of crimson on cinnamon-dusted ivory, the cloverleaves brilliant. “I wanted you with all of the unguarded passion of a girl who did not know how to separate lies from truth. And when I believed that you died I wanted to die too. Do you wish to know the real reason I married four days after I learned of your death? Here it is: to restrain myself from swimming out to sea to die with you. That is what an idealistically naïve and ridiculously histrionic girl I was. That is how susceptible I was to the game that a cavalier young man played with me. I married not because I wanted a husband, but because I wanted a child. Because I needed a reason to want to live.”

Her words fell into the wind and were snatched away.

“Yes,” she said to his stunned silence. “I was that drunk on a fantasy I had invented myself. So you see—”

He took a step forward and pulled her into his arms and covered her mouth with his.

She responded without hesitation, her lips opening to meet his kiss, her fingers clutching his shoulders, her breaths mingling with his until the air was gone and there was only the heat of their mouths and the frigid wind swirling about them. His hand came around her jaw, surrounding her, drawing her into him, and he kissed her beautifully. His lips left hers to trail over her cheek and then her jaw, to her throat. She gripped him hard and struggled to breathe.

“You’re set to break my heart again,” he uttered. “I willna allow it.” He held her with both hands and pressed his lips into her hair, his teeth against her bone. “I willna fall again, witch.”

“Then why are you kissing me?”

“’Tis the only thing I’ve a will to do.” Taking her face between his hands, he captured her lips again. They were soft and sweet and blessedly eager, rising to him, seeking him. He tasted them, tasted her with his tongue, and she let him inside. His fingertips sank into her hair, and the heat of her mouth, the grip of her hands, the caress of her tongue went through his entire body. He shuddered.

“Perhaps more than kiss,” he said against her lips.

Then she was wrapping her arms about his neck, and he was drawing her body to his and feeling her entirely. Her hands were tight around his shoulders and she was having him, taking him, hungrily, pressing her breasts and thighs against him, and then her hips. She was small and strong and willingly, eagerly climbing up him. Finally.

Some shred of self-preservation that yet remained in him, some mote of reason learned before he had sold his soul to the devil, made him spread his palms and fingers across her back and pin them there. He wanted his hands on her round behind, pulling her tighter against him. She rocked to him and her sigh of pleasure mingled between their lips with his strangled moan.

He dragged her off him and backed to arm’s length. Her eyes were unfocused, her hair thoroughly tousled from his hands, and her lips ripe red and glistening.

In desperation, he cast his eyes upward.

“Yes,” she said breathlessly. “Yes, good idea.” She pulled away from him entirely and smoothed her palms over her hair. “Best not to do that again. Especially not in full view of the house and sheep farm—and me. Good heavens, you do have a knack for making me forget my scruples.”

“Damn the house, damn the farm, an’ damn your eternally stupid scruples, woman. We will do that again, an’ much more, I assure you, as soon as can be.”

Her eyes flared with surprise. Then with anger.

Gabriel’s chest filled with the most unwisely heady optimism.

“Those”—he pointed to the clouds rolling over the hills—“are carrying a mighty ice storm. I have no intention o’ making love to you for the first time with you fearing for your life.”

“I am not afraid of storms,” she said, turning her face toward the clouds. In profile, her nose was too pert, her chin too pointed, her brow too high. She was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen.

“I have not feared a storm since the hurricane,” she said. “You did that to me. You changed me—obviously in other ways too,” she added with an absent gesture of her hand. “But for quite literally teaching me calm in the midst of storm, I should have thanked you years ago. So I will finally. Thank you, Urisk.”

“I could eat you whole.”

“That was not the response I expected. But I suppose by now I should be accustomed to that—”

“I am mad for you.”

“—and to my body’s betraying reactions to at least half of the things you say to me.” A pink flush had overtaken her cheeks and neck. Her gaze scanned him, jaw to knees, lingering meaningfully about his hips, and finally resting upon his mouth. “What is the actual likelihood of rain or snow falling here soon?” she said with glorious unsteadiness. “And if it did rain or snow, how wet and cold do you think we would become?”

He could hardly breathe. “Very wet.”

“You are not referring to the rain, I think.”

“An’ no’ in the least bit cold.”

“I daresay,” she said upon a thick inhale.

“Go.”

“Go?”

“How is it that you canna understand the word go, woman?”

“I can! It is only that you say it to me at the most inconvenient and frankly unlikely moments. It is really no wonder I don’t always anticipate what you will say. You are contradictory.”

“Get off this hill an’ away from me. Now.”

“Do you see? Contradictory,” she said, backing away. “Am I to go away from you or the storm?”

“’Tis one an’ the same at present.”

“I see,” she said, beginning to turn toward her descent. “But I may not offer you this opportunity again.”

“You will.”

“Contradictory and overly confident. Are you coming?”

Not quite, but he was perilously close.

She took the hillside in long, indecorous steps. Five and a half years ago the girl straining to be free of her restraints had captivated him. This woman, entirely free of shackles, filled every part of him with truly insane euphoria. He watched her body move, her arms swinging, the wind wrapping her skirts about her legs and buttocks, and her hair flying every which way. His cock was as hard as a yardarm. He needed her riding it. He needed her coming while she rode it. Twice. Thrice. Four times, each time deeper, her shouts louder, her hands—

“Are you coming?” she called over her shoulder.

“I’m waiting till you’re far enough away that I’ll no’ be able to catch up with you.”

“I am a quick runner,” she shouted back.

“I will take that under advisement.”

Her laughter caught on the wind and tripped up the hill, wrapping around him. Judas, if he stared any longer at her perfect behind, at her thighs—

Her back was straight, proud, yet she was a little thing—a little thing he had dreamed of taking like this, on a lush hillside in the wind, grasping those shoulders with his hands, urging her knees apart, spreading those thighs—

He scraped his hand over his face. He must wrest control of the damn fool green lad clearly still in command o’ his bollocks. And his brain.

When she was far enough away to assure safety, he called to his horse and followed.

The snow fell wet and thick. Entering the house, he enquired of his false butler where to find her ladyship.

“She’s in Maggie’s bedchamber with the little one,” Hay whispered then cleared his throat. “Your guests have gathered in the drawing room to play a game of charades, Your Grace,” he said at full volume.

Damn his own rule never to enter any of the residents’ bedchambers at Kallin, for any reason. And if she were with the nursing mother she wished to be away from him, clearly. She was wiser than he, most certainly.

He wanted her in his arms again. And then in his bed.

She had given a moment’s consideration to making love to him on a hillside in the freezing rain. He was dying.

Glancing at the falling snow and considering walking out into it to cool off, he went instead to the drawing room.

Bellarmine, Miss Campbell, and Iris Tate were enacting a farce for the elder Miss Tates, their father, and Mrs. Aiken. They all greeted him and returned swiftly to the game. Jonah sat removed from the others, his hooded eyes on Jane Tate. Gabriel took the seat beside him and curled his fists around the chair arm ends.

“Charades, cousin,” Jonah drawled beneath his breath during a burst of laughter from the play actors. “Shoot me now.”

“I’ll gladly level a pistol barrel at you, but no’ for your sake.”

“Aha,” Jonah said. “You and the fair English widow have spoken about my little lie, I see. She inquired about that earlier.”

“You read my letter.”

“Of course I read it, you dolt. You were raving mad about the girl, beyond what I had ever seen. You sent her a secret letter, for God’s sake. What true friend would not have read it?”

“Why did you lie to her?”

“I believed you were being too precipitate. I wanted her to marry the parson so that you could head off to naval glory.”

“You wanted me to die at sea so you could move one place closer to the title.”

“Not true.”

“I would kill you, Jonah, an’ toss you in the river if I thought nobody would find the body.”

“Go ahead,” he said dully. “I’ve nothing to lose now.”

Across the room, Jane Tate cast Jonah a shy glance then dropped her lashes.

“You have something to live for there, it seems,” Gabriel said.

“Ah, yes,” Jonah said, subdued. “The maiden whose father intends her to be the next Duchess of Loch Irvine.”

Gabriel’s hands relaxed about the chair arms. “No’ if I’ve a say in the matter. Which, fortunately, I do.”

“I used to dream of coming into the title,” Jonah said, his eyes still on Jane Tate. “Not of you dying. I never wished that. But of being your brother, instead of that lout enjoying that honor.”

“Why did you come here now, Jonah?”

“There was nothing left for me on Jamaica. Would you like to hear my confession, Gabriel?”

“No. I am having a good day.” Exceptionally good. If Amarantha did not appear in the drawing room soon, he would go looking for her. He could borrow Pike’s shillelagh and knock on Maggie’s door from a distance.

“When Charlotte died,” his cousin said, “I was devastated. For months. I had no will to do anything, not work, not even drink. Sometime in the midst of it I realized that what I was feeling—the unspeakable grief—was what your little English girl must have felt when I gave her that lie.” His fingers played absently with a frayed fringe of the drapery beside his hand. “And so I did an odd thing, cousin.”

“Did you?”

“I courted her husband.”

Gabriel turned his eyes to Jonah. “Beg your pardon?”

“I sought the reverend’s friendship. I made a deal with him. I told him that if he occasionally indulged with me in the pastimes of regular men, a drink, a game of cards, that I would attend his church.”

“You’re daft.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

“Aye,” he said, and felt his teeth grind.

“He was so starched and righteous and tight,” Jonah said. “She was miserable. She wore a fine façade. Nobody knew it.” The animation slipped from his features. “Few knew it,” he amended upon a shaking breath. “I wanted to fix him. Change him. Because of what I had done—the lie. I wanted to make him more like you.”

“Fool.”

“That is the thanks I get?”

“Aye.”

“My plan was not, unfortunately, a success. He was not wise enough to know what he had. But he was not all bad, Gabe. In fact, I came to quite like him. He had good intentions, if little imagination. And he was enormously well-read. We had some fine debates—”

“I dinna care.”

After a moment Jonah said, “She was mystery to him. An alien creature.”

A renewed round of laughter arose from the game players.

“Duke!” Iris Tate called, bouncing in her chair. “You must come play, even if Mr. Brock cannot due to his twisted ankle.”

Gabriel offered Jonah a skeptical brow. “Twisted ankle?”

“Will you come play, Duke?” Iris shouted.

“Aye, Miss Iris,” he said, standing up. “But I’ll no’ be donning ridiculous hats an’ false moustaches. It doesna suit my consequence to playact.”