Augusta stared at the reflection of herself in the gown borrowed from her hostess. She hadn’t worn anything so fine in years. Most of her fine gowns had been sold or had become so worn and moth-eaten over the years that they were little better than rags. The transformative powers of a lovely gown were truly amazing. Perhaps it was a bit too short, and the bodice just a tad too tight from Alice’s hasty alterations, but the fabric felt heavenly and the deep blue color made her eyes sparkle.

“Is it any wonder that vanity is one of the seven deadly sins?” she surmised quietly.

“What was that, miss?” Alice asked as she pinned up the last wayward strand of hair.

“Nothing, Alice. Simply thinking aloud. My hair looks very nice. You’ve a deft touch. Thank you.”

Alice blushed and ducked her head shyly. “Thank you, miss. Your hair is so lovely tis a pleasure to work with, truly.”

Augusta laughed. “Now you’re just being kind… we both know that Mrs. Wilmont’s hair is the envy of every woman she’s ever encountered. Those perfect curls!”

“Her hair is lovely, miss, as is Mrs. Atwell’s, but yours is also. Lovely and thick, black as night, it is. I’ve always been partial to dark hair.”

“And is there some dark haired beau who has you extolling the virtues of raven hair, Alice?” she teased. The girl’s answering blush told the truth of it. “Never mind. Your secret is safe with me. Thank you again, and now I’ll join the other ladies in the drawing room.”

“It’ll be the ladies and the gentlemen, miss. Until the remainder of the guests arrive tomorrow, they’ll be unlikely to separate… I didn’t mean to pry or eavesdrop, miss, but I heard his lordship in here earlier. I won’t tell a soul… but I thought you’d like to be warned that you’ll be seeing him before dinner.”

Augusta pressed a hand to her fluttering stomach. “I see. Thank you for the warning and for your discretion, Alice.”

“You reckon it’s true, Miss? That he thought it was you asked to meet him?”

It probably was. “I think that it doesn’t matter either way… that was too many years ago to let it matter now.”

Alice ducked her head again. “Yes, miss.”

“You’ve something else to say on the matter, Alice… you haven’t held your tongue yet, I can’t imagine you should start now. Out with it.”

“He’s very sad, I think,” she admitted. “He cared for Lady Elwynn. I could see that when they were here, before she became to sick to pay calls. He was kind to her, but it’s not like when you’re in love, miss… like the way he was when he stormed in here earlier to bare his heart. It was quite dashing, don’t you think?”

“I think I don’t need him to be dashing, Alice. I need him to leave me be… I’ve made my peace with what happened and no good can come from dredging it all up.” Except that he was a widower. He was free to wed as he chose now.

That traitorous whisper in her mind needed to be quashed. Try as she might, Augusta couldn’t tamp it down entirely. The simple truth was that she didn’t trust him. She no longer had the ability to trust anyone, truth be told. Friends had turned their backs on her. People who’d once gushed over her had snubbed her completely, and all because she’d been accused of being a fortune hunter. Everyone had assumed that it was that which had resulted in the abrupt end to her unspoken arrangement with Lord Elwynn. Overnight, she’d become a pariah and he’d been a newlywed, the toast of society with his bride on his arm. Whatever his reasons had been and however it came about, it was still a bitter pill to swallow and she was finding little forgiveness in her heart.

After exiting her bedchamber, she made her way down the stairs. There was no need to ask for direction from a footman. She could simply follow the sound of Mrs. Atwell’s voice.

“Dear heavens, what a sight they were! What a miserable journey they must have had to wind up in such a state… Bless me, but they have been through quite enough I think to last a lifetime. That coachman ought to be strung up in the village for taking such risks. Only to think what might have happened to them had we not had the good sense to send you out after them, Lord Elwynn! Isn’t that right, Simon?… Simon?… Are you listening to me at all, Simon, or has some strange malady suddenly struck you deaf?”

“I have not the kind of luck required to be struck deaf, madam,” came the quiet and heavily put upon answer of Mr. Atwell.

“Indeed, I should say not. You are a blessed man!” Mrs. Atwell continued, blissfully, or perhaps willfully, unaware of her husband’s sarcasm.

Bracing herself to face the barrage that passed as conversation from Mrs. Atwell, Augusta took a deep breath and offered a slight nod to the waiting footman who then opened the door for her. Rachel had not yet come down, no doubt as Alice was just doing her hair. But he was present, sitting in one of the chairs that flanked the fire in a pose that hinted at the power of his form. Upon her entrance, he rose to his feet in a graceful movement that reminded her all too clearly of what it had been like to dance with him, to be held however briefly in his arms.

“Good evening, Miss Penworth,” he offered evenly but she could see he was as tense in her presence as she was in his. It was apparent in the clenching of his jaw and the slight furrowing of his brows.

“Good evening, Lord Elwynn,” she replied coolly. Turning to her hosts, she sketched a slight curtsy. “Mr. Atwell, Mrs. Atwell… thank you so much for your hospitality. You’ve been all that is gracious and kind.”

Mr. Atwell accepted her thanks with a nod. Mrs. Atwell let out a squeal of what might have been either distress or delight. It was impossible to tell. “Oh, my poor dear Miss Penworth—,” the woman began, “What a trial you’ve suffered to get here! Hospitality is but the very least we can offer after what you have suffered.”

“It was only mud,” Augusta replied easily, uncomfortable at being the center of attention. “Unpleasant but hardly worthy of consequence.”

“Hardly worthy of consequence!” Mrs. Atwell scoffed. “My dear, I would have to take to my bed for a month to recover from such an ordeal. You might have been killed! It could just as easily have been some brigand on the highway who came along as our dear Lord Elwynn. And what an heroic thing that was for him… so dashing, to simply volunteer to go in search of two lone women stranded out in the elements! Positively Herculean, I say!”

Augusta desperately wanted the floor to simply open up and swallow her. “It was nothing really!”

“Nothing, indeed!” Mrs. Atwell continued. “You are made of sterner stuff than I, my dear. Brigands, darling girl! Brigands on the road. It is the very stuff of my nightmares. Is it not, Simon? Did I not tell you at breakfast this morning that I’d had just such a dream? Overtaken by villains and robbed of my precious jewels!”

The woman stopped, took a breath, looked at her husband for confirmation. It was not forthcoming. As Mrs. Atwell opened her mouth to continue her diatribe, Lord Elwynn stepped forward. “Forgive me, Miss Penworth, but there’s a fine prospect from the terrace. We’re unlikely to get another break in the rain today. Perhaps you’d permit me to show you?”

He was offering her a reprieve. She could either remain in the drawing room and allow Mrs. Atwell to assault her senses with incessant chatter about brigands or she could take a walk onto the terrace with him. Alone. Just the two of them.

A quick glance at Mrs. Atwell was the deciding factor. The wheels and gears so obviously spinning in the woman’s mind as she prepared to launch into her next long winded speech spurred Augusta’s reply. “That would be lovely, Lord Elwynn. Thank you.”

Mrs. Atwell’s eyes sparkled with glee as she watched Lord Elwynn step forward and offer her his arm. Augusta ignored it. She had no time for matchmaking or gossip. Her one and only goal was to extricate herself from the house party as quickly as possible and remove herself to the safety of the small cottage she and Rachel had leased. Let them think what they will, she thought rebelliously.

Once outside, Lord Elwynn cast a sidelong glance at her. “My apologies, Miss Penworth, but the prospect is not as dazzling as I might have implied. It is, however, infinitely preferable to a week long soliloquy regaling us with the dastardly deeds of the local brigands. Judging by the age of most everyone in the village, said brigands would be in their dotage and therefore their escapades would likely be less than thrilling.”

“I see. Should I thank you for lying to my rescue then?” she asked sharply. She didn’t want to be charmed by him. Not again.

“No thanks are required… and I confess it was not your rescue I sought but my own. May I ask you a question, Miss Penworth—Augusta?”

“You may ask, Lord Elwynn. I cannot promise an answer.”

* * *

Hugh looked at her for a long moment, before turning to face the barren landscape before them. The question burned inside him but he feared the answer as much as he required it.

“Must you hate me so completely, then? Might we not at the very least call a pax and put the past behind us?”

She turned toward him then, and while her posture never changed, her expression never altered, there was a fire in her eyes that should have set him ablaze there and then. “It isn’t the past, Lord Elwynn. And I’ll thank you not to use my given name as I have not given you leave to do so. Do you know what it was like for me in London after the announcement of your engagement?”

He did. But he was also quite aware that she needed to tell him, so he remained silent. If she were allowed to release all the vitriol, perhaps then she would be free of it.

“All of society, initially, looked on me with pity because it appeared that your affections for me were altered or that perhaps, as some suggested, they’d never been sincere at all.”

“That was not the case, Augusta. That was never the case,” he protested.

She didn’t acknowledge his assertion. He realized that in that moment, it was not about what he felt so much as it was about how others had perceived her in the aftermath of his rejection. Her pride, which she’d always had in abundance, had been sorely wounded.

“That all changed when the extent of my grandfather’s debts were discovered… Debts, Lord Elwynn, of which I had no knowledge, I was utterly innocent. Everything we had was borrowed or on credit and all of that to give me one season so that I might find a husband and be taken care of,” she continued softly. “Suddenly, the fact that our… unspoken arrangement failed to yield a marriage signified something much worse than simply a change of heart. It was decided by all those with influence that you had cast me off because I was the worst thing a woman could be in their eyes… a fortune hunter.”

“No one who knows you would ever think such a thing, Augusta.” He couldn’t defend himself when her anger was not at him but at what others thought of her afterward and yet that very much appeared to be the source of her anger. “I was aware that you lacked the fortune that others possessed and I cared not at all. You must believe that.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Your conceit is boundless, my lord. This is not about what you felt, what you thought, what you believed. This is about what happened to me and to my life after you simply walked out of it… Oh, I received many offers after that, my lord, but none of them were for marriage. I was as ruined as any woman can be… I was no longer deemed worthy of marriage.”

“I would have helped you,” he said. “I would have provided a dowry for you, I would have done whatever was necessary to ease your grandfather’s suffering. If you had but asked—.”

“Would you have done so?” she interrupted furiously. “Would you have gone begging to the woman who broke your heart? To ask for something as crass as money?”

They both knew the answer to that, so he remained silent on the matter. “I cannot change what happened and I cannot be held accountable for the actions of others.”

“I am not holding you accountable. I am simply relaying to you all the reasons that I could never permit you to be a part of my life again… I cannot trust you. I cannot depend upon you. And I cannot live every day of my life being reminded of what I have lost when that was my entire reason for desiring to leave London behind.” She paused then, a laugh bubbling up from her that was dark and bitter, bearing no semblance at all to humor.

When she turned away from him, her eyes were cool and distant as she stared across the fields and spoke as dispassionately as any woman could. “And yet, by painful coincidence or diabolical design, I find myself ensconced in the home of a woman who would have been my neighbor, staring across fields at a house that would have been my own, and standing next to a man who might have been my husband had he not chosen someone else. You’ll forgive me, my lord, if it puts me in an ill humor.”

“And what would you have me say to that, Augusta? It wasn’t a choice, I never had a choice.” Years of frustration and what might have been drove him to continue, “I was put in untenable situation… If I had turned my back on Felicity after being caught in such a compromising position, it would have ruined us both. I could not do such a thing. Honor demanded it!”

“And my honor demands that I hold onto my anger and my grudges and that I remember those who have wronged me. I cannot forget what happened to me.” Augusta stopped and drew a breath, hoping to collect herself enough to speak calmly. “I find that I am more tired from my journey than I initially believed,” she said finally. “Make my apologies to Mr. and Mrs. Atwell, please. I think I will retire without dinner this evening.”

Hugh watched her walk away, her posture rigid and head held high. Frustrated and angered by her intractable attitude, it was all he could do not to simply march after her. He desperately wanted that kind of fire and even that fury in his life, he realized with a start. To feel something after so long, to erase the years of, as unkind as it was to admit, boredom was something he hadn’t even realized that he longed for. Not until she’d entered his life again and reminded him of all that he’d lost when he lost her.

Augusta’s very presence made him sorely aware of just what had been absent in his marriage to Felicity. For the longest time, he’d put the deficits in his marriage and and thought of Augusta as far from his mind as possible. He’d done what he was supposed to do, what the laws of society dictated that he should. And the simple truth was that his life had not been unpleasant. Felicity had been a good wife, but she had not ever been the wife he would have chosen had the matter not be taken so resolutely from his hands.

But it wasn’t simply a matter of reclaiming the girl he’d once loved. There were glimmers of her in the woman who’d just marched away from him with her spine stiffer than any soldier’s. To deny that Augusta was changed by her experiences, to ignore the loss of naivety and idealism in her would be to do a disservice to them both. She had been forced to deal with the harsh realities of life, loss and poverty while still not much more than a girl and she had done more than just endured it all. Augusta had survived with her honor intact, as she pulled the shreds of her pride about her like armor. If he meant to lay claim to Augusta Penworth, it would have to be as she was in the present, thorns and all.