Prologue

Wiltshire, September 1812

Thomas, the groundskeeper, worked the brim of his hat between his hands, the felt softening rapidly under the strain. He stood at the water’s edge, leaning back slightly from the bank. It was an absurd, overly careful posture for a man who had walked these grounds since Severus was a boy.

“The pond is four feet deep at the center, Your Grace,” Thomas reported, keeping his tone carefully neutral. “Closer to three at the margins. In a dry summer, which this was, perhaps less.”

Severus looked out at the water. He had made the two-hundred-mile journey from Harrod Hall for this, two months after Margaret had been lowered into the earth. The groundskeeper shifted his weight, the fidgeting sending a faint scrape of boots across the gravel. Severus ignored the sound.

The September chill cut through his dark worsted wool coat. A heavier garment might have been prudent, but he preferred the bite of the wind. The cold kept his thoughts sharp, and at that given moment now, clarity was far more useful than comfort.

He had paced the perimeter for the better part of an hour before summoning the man, checking the trailing sweep of the willows on the far side and estimating the distance from the bank to the center.

Thomas cleared his throat. The groundskeeper, having known the Duke through his difficult teenage years, clearly did not know what to do with the silence. An outburst of aristocratic passion, or perchance of affliction, would have been looked for by the company. Society, after all, prescribed a strict etiquette for such moments. Instead, Thomas was forced to stand by while the tragedy was measured and quantified, an auditing of a bankrupt ledger that made the older man swallow hard.

“Three feet at the margins,” Severus muttered under his breath. He rolled the number around, forcing the hard, physical data to sit beside the messy facts he had accrued since July.

Margaret’s childhood tutor had insisted on practical skills. At eight years old, she had taken to the water with assertive, unthinking competence, and she had swum here every summer until the one she drew her final breath in it. The pond was familiar ground to her. She was a young lady of moderate stature, standing five feet and four inches in height

A woman of that height had a clear sixteen inches of air between the surface of the deepest section and her nose. The finding of accidental drowning pronounced by the magistrate sat ill alongside that physical certainty, a seamless conclusion, yet one Severus could by no means bring his mind to accept.

When Thomas found her, she had been lying near the willows in eighteen inches of muddy water. Her dress was soaked, her hair spread out in a dark fan. Her fingers, the groundskeeper had noted reluctantly that morning, were splayed against the bottom. She had been pushing herself up.

A person pushing against the mud was trying to reach the air. Failing to reach air in water that barely covered the knees meant something else was keeping her down.

He had said none of this to the magistrate. The inquiry was closed, and demanding a new one required evidence he did not yet possess. His mother’s family wanted the tragedy neatly packed away. To speak the suspicion aloud would have imparted a cruel reality to his darkest fears, transforming a shadowy dread into an absolute certainty. His sister had met her end by a murderer’s hand. The man responsible had shaken his hand in a London drawing room. He had observed the courtship with mild disapproval, paying far too little attention to the details. Severus shifted his stance on the bank, a tight, uncomfortable knot forming at the base of his neck. He would carry that failure regardless of what the coming months produced.

There were letters. Margaret wrote faithfully from Hampshire during her summers, filling the pages with vivid observations of the neighboring estate. He had skimmed them at the time, pleased enough that she was happy. Now, reading them late into the evening at Harrod Hall, the spaces between her sentences took on a different shape. A name appeared with increasing frequency, and then, in the final letter, vanished entirely.

A girl featured in those pages. A baron’s daughter. Bookish, argumentative, and possessing views on everything. According to Margaret, she was an extraordinary friend. Reading the old correspondence offered Severus the strange disconnect of learning about a person through the words of someone he would never see again.

Hampshire was the only logical direction. He would visit the dower house, walk the lanes, and find the baron’s daughter. She might know something the magistrate had neglected to ask. If she didn’t, he would find another thread to pull.

Chapter One

“That leaves only you, my dearest. Whatever shall we do?”

Mama delivered the question from the far side of the carriage, her tone carrying an entirely settled confidence. She had already decided what to do and was merely inviting the universe to admire her planning. The traveling coach lurched through a rut, throwing Marietta slightly against the squabs. She caught her balance and smoothed a wrinkle from her skirt. Outside, the spray of late April rain against the glass lent the afternoon a theatrical melancholy, and Marietta suspected her mother was enjoying the gloom rather more than the occasion warranted.

It was, by any honest reckoning, the second most dreadful day of Marietta’s life. She had been bracing for it since January.

The worst had been two summers ago, on the breakfast-room morning Papa set down his newspaper and announced, his voice stripped to a careful quiet, that Margaret was no more. She had drowned at the Dower House pond adjoining the Clyde estate. Nineteen years old and gone. That morning had taken the floor out from under the world, leaving nothing reliable in its place for a very long time. The grief was older now, and Marietta had packed it into a smaller compartment, folding it out of sight like a heavy winter coat too good to discard entirely. She had not walked near the water since.

Today was a different sort of ending. It was only her elder sister’s wedding, bringing with it the slow, certain reality of a door swinging shut. It was the last door, in truth, that Marietta had been pretending she could still walk through.

“I said,” Mama repeated, in case the carriage and the rain and the studied blankness of her younger daughter’s expression had conspired to bury the question, “that leaves only you.”

“I heard you, Mama.”

“And?”

“And I remain deeply moved by the confidence you place in my matrimonial prospects.”

Papa, in his corner of the carriage, made a sound that might have been a laugh suppressed into a cough and then suppressed further into a gentle snore. He had been half-asleep since they had cleared the chapel gates, which was, Marietta suspected, less a product of the wine at breakfast and more the deliberate self-preservation of a man who had been wedded to Lady Clyde for twenty-six years and knew which conversational weather to sleep through.

The morning she had survived deserved, she supposed, a brief accounting.

Sophia had been luminous in cream silk and their grandmother’s pearls, gazing at her new husband across the altar rail as though he had personally arranged the constellations and then, in a further gesture of benevolence, had placed the moon in the most flattering light available. The vicar had read the service with an efficiency that suggested he was expected at a second wedding before luncheon, and Marietta had sat in the third pew with her gloves folded in her lap and her face arranged in the sort of expression that conveyed appropriate sisterly joy while concealing the distinct impression that her own future was being read aloud, in Latin, by a clergyman who charged by the quarter-hour.

Viscount Crale preened. There was no kinder word for it. The intricate folds of his cravat spoke of two valets and a draughtsman’s design, whilst his chin was held at so practiced an angle when speaking to servants that each footman might have been a humble spectator, generously permitted to admire him. He laughed at his own remarks a half-second before anyone else had finished hearing them, which gave every conversation the unnerving quality of a performance in which the applause line had been written in advance. Sophia adored him. Mama declared him a marvel. Papa had shaken his hand with the vague, kind bewilderment of a man who could not remember precisely how he had come to be standing in a chapel watching his eldest daughter enter into matrimony with a man whose cologne preceded him into rooms by a full five seconds.

Marietta had private doubts about Crispin Crale. She kept them stowed behind her teeth, where they belonged, and smiled at her sister’s happiness, and found that meaning the smile cost her something she was not yet prepared to name.

Mr. Pinkerton’s wedding toast had referenced three Greek philosophers, none of them relevant to the occasion and one of them, Marietta was fairly certain, invented on the spot. The throwing of the rice. The kissing of the bride. The stiff embrace of her new brother-in-law, who smelled, somewhat alarmingly, of bergamot and ambition. The wedding cake was lemon, which had been Marietta’s sole consolation. She had a private weakness for lemon cake, and she had eaten two slices with the quiet dedication of a woman storing provisions against a long winter.

In the dim carriage, Mama’s eyes shone with the sharp gleam of matrimonial victory. Sophia’s wedding breakfast had scarcely concluded before her mother had begun charting the next campaign.

“Lord Bramley,” Mama began, adjusting her shawl.

“Has eleven thousand a year, I know.”

“And a very fine estate in Yorkshire.”

“I am aware of the estate, Mama.” Marietta pulled her cloak a fraction tighter against the damp chill.

“The grounds are said to be extraordinary. Lady Merton described the park as the finest she had seen north of the Cotswolds, and Lady Merton, as you know, has exacting standards.”

“Lady Merton also described Mr. Fitch’s hunting dog as the most civilised creature in three counties,” Marietta pointed out, “and the beast bit two footmen by Christmas.”

“The dog is irrelevant.”

“He is usually irrelevant, right until he bites you.”

Mama closed her eyes, adopting the slow, deliberate patience of a martyr who had been promised lions but found only minor inconveniences. “Lord Bramley is a handsome man, Marietta.”

That was true enough, provided one’s standards for beauty began and ended with sheer symmetry. Lord Bramley stood tall, possessed broad shoulders, and retained excellent teeth. The latter trait was apparently highly prized in gentlemen who kept horses, though Marietta struggled to see how livestock dentistry reflected upon personal character.

He also possessed the conversational repertoire of a root vegetable. A well-intentioned turnip, certainly, equipped with a reliable veterinarian and a guileless, slow-blinking confidence born of never having been asked to produce an interesting thought before half past four. Generosity might label him handsome, but it did not make him engaging.

She had been awake since five on the hour. Her sister had just entered into matrimony with a man who announced intensely his presence with an overwhelming excess of bergamot, the carriage was miserably damp, and the road ahead was the identical path she had traveled for four Seasons. She could see exactly where it ended.

“We shall continue this discussion,” Mama said, opening her eyes and smoothing her gloves, “when you are less impertinent.”

Marietta pressed her forehead to the cold glass. The green Hampshire countryside rolled past in wet April splendor, and she reminded herself, as she had done endlessly since Sophia’s betrothal that there were worse fates than spinsterhood. Dwelling on the better ones had never been a useful exercise.

She had a plan, at any rate. A small, entirely ridiculous plan, and she intended to put it into motion the moment they reached home.

The carriage arrived at Clyde Park shortly before three. Mama disappeared into the house to begin the campaign of congratulatory letters that would sustain her through the week. Papa retreated to his study with the contented air of a man released from public life. The servants cleared the last of the breakfast things. The house settled into its post-wedding quiet, and Marietta, who had been waiting for precisely this, went upstairs and locked her bedchamber door.

She moved quickly and precisely. The maid had been dismissed with a fictional headache, the kind that required darkness and solitude and certainly not the presence of any person who might notice that her mistress was changing out of her afternoon dress and into a plain muslin she had not worn in public since the previous autumn.

Her stoutest laced boots were drawn snug above the ankle; her stays, mercifully fashioned to allow for bending and inverting alike. She had bound her rich honey blonde hair in tight plaits against her skull, doubled and pinned with a grim severity calculated to withstand hanging inverted for any length of time. Opening the lowermost drawer of her dressing-table, she took out a ribbon, bound the tail of the plait twice over, and pulled the knot with a tightness that made her wince.

She studied herself in the glass. She looked, she decided, like a governess who had been recently discharged for being too practical.

She slipped out the servants’ door behind the laundry, through the kitchen garden where the lettuces were coming in, over the stone wall at the orchard’s western corner, and ran.

The barn sat at the western edge of the Clyde estate, on land held in tenancy from the Hampshire holdings of the Duke of Harrod, a man Marietta had never met and did not think about. The Beresford barn was unremarkable. Stone foundation, timber frame, a roof of thatch that had sagged into a pleasingly rumpled disarray over the course of several decades and now looked rather like an elderly gentleman who had fallen asleep in a comfortable chair and could not be troubled to straighten his waistcoat. Its principal virtue was that it stood empty for nine months of the year, a fact Marietta had confirmed the previous spring with a carefully worded question to old Mr. Beresford, delivered with an air of polite agricultural curiosity she had been rather proud of.

Inside, the barn smelled of old timber and dust and the faint sweet ghost of last autumn’s hay. Sunlight came through the high gable window in a single long slanting bar, catching the drifting motes and laying a bright column across the rough planking of the center floor. She pulled the great door shut behind her and dropped the wooden bar across it.

She stood for a moment, breathing as the day fell off her shoulders.

His raising himself to balance upon his hands had begun at Lord Clyde’s country picnic the previous June. The ribbons in the trees, the hog on the spit, the fiddler imported from Winchester at an expense Papa would wince about until September. Late in the afternoon, the younger gentlemen, fortified with cider, had begun a contest of athletic prowess that started with wrestling and progressed through a footrace and arrived, for reasons Marietta had never entirely established, at young Mr. Hesketh throwing himself and standing upon his hands on the grass. He had held himself there, inverted, with his coat gathered absurdly around his shoulders and his face going slowly purple, while his friends counted aloud and roared encouragement. Marietta had stared. She had been holding a glass of lemonade, and her aunt had eventually been obliged to take it from her hand before it spilled.

The brazen impossibility of the thing. To put one’s body in defiance of the natural order. To balance the entire weight of oneself on the inadequate platform of one’s hands and see the world inverted, the green grass overhead and the bright sky underfoot, however briefly, before tipping back into the proper arrangement of things. She had been thinking about it for the rest of the afternoon, through the dancing and the cold syllabub and the long carriage ride home, and by the following Tuesday she had decided, with the quiet resolution of a woman whose options for rebellion were, admittedly, limited, that she was going to learn how to do it.

Nine months of practice. From holding the inverted position for the duration of a sneeze to holding it against the far wall for the count of forty, which was an improvement she measured with fierce private pride and shared with absolutely no one. The wall was a crutch, though. The true test was freestanding, in the open middle of the floor, with nothing to lean against and nothing to catch her and nothing between her balance and the unforgiving ground but the strength of her own arms and the hard new muscles beneath the skin of her upper arms, muscles which Mama, were she ever to discover them, would consider a moral catastrophe of the highest order.

She could manage four heartbeats freestanding. On a good day, five. She was close. She could feel it in the way her arms had learned to lock and her fingers had learned to grip and her spine had found the fine invisible line where weight became weightless, if only she could hold it long enough.

She set her bonnet on the corner of an old grain bin, smoothing her shawl over the wood before turning her attention to her sleeves. Undoing the buttons with practiced ease, she rolled the muslin high above her elbows. The cool barn air slipped over her heated skin, raising a faint shiver along forearms that were considerably more muscled than her mother would ever approve of. She toppled one half-boot against the wall and kicked the other aside, sighing as the chilled dirt floor met the soles of her stockinged feet. Wiggling her toes in the damp earth offered a small, illicit rush of liberty, a private breath of contentment that belonged to no one else.

Bending forward, she gathered the back hem of her skirts up between her legs and tucked the bunched fabric firmly into the front of her sash. The makeshift pantaloons left her calves entirely bare from knee to ankle, exposing a stretch of skin that would have ended betrothals and turned the local rector a deep, apoplectic red. The barn, securely barred from the inside, offered absolute privacy for this scandalous display, and the heavy thrum of her own pulse drowned out any fleeting sense of guilt.

She walked to the center of the clearing, planted her hands shoulder-width on the rough planking, and kicked her feet upward. After three futile trials, which she stubbornly deemed mere preliminary testing rather than defeat, she caught the fine thread of her balance and held it.

The world inverted, rushing blood to her head and heat to her chest. Above her stretched the dirt floor and the solid base of the grain bins, while below, the high beams intersected with a thick, golden bar of slanted sun. Her plait swung heavy against the floorboards. Her heartbeat thudded a slow, steady rhythm in her ears, vibrating through the quiet space.

One. Two. Three. Four.

At twelve, a deep, satisfying burn ignited in her shoulders. By fifteen, she allowed herself to tip backward, yielding to gravity in a slow, controlled arc that dropped her onto the cushioning pile of hay. She lay there breathless, her chest heaving against the tight bodice of her dress, laughing softly into the warm, sweet dust. The exertion left a fine sheen of dampness at her nape, a singular weekly pleasure she would gladly trade a year of sugar to protect.

Brushing the stray stalks from her clothes, she tried again. Sixteen heartbeats this time, ending in another clean drop and a wide, triumphant grin aimed at the rafters. The third attempt wavered at fourteen, sending her tumbling sideways with a bright laugh that echoed against the stone walls.

Deep in the count of her fourth attempt, the burn in her arms crested into a fierce, trembling heat. She was closer than she had been in nine months to perfecting the hold when the iron bar across the door lifted with a harsh scrape.

The heavy wood swung inward, throwing a long, dense shadow across the floor. Her breath caught sharply in her throat, halting her count entirely.

Her balance, however, possessed a stubborn momentum of its own. Conditioned by months of practice, her body kept her hands planted flat and her legs suspended vertically for two excruciating heartbeats while her mind raced in appalled, chaotic circles. A reasonable woman would have collapsed instantly, folding into the dirt to yank her skirts over her exposed legs while feigning mild surprise.

Panic overrode all reason. She tipped sideways, landing hard on her hip with a breathless gasp, and rolled frantically onto her stocking-clad knees.

He filled the doorway, backlit by the afternoon sun, a severe silhouette cutting through the slanted light.

He was of a disagreeably towering height, possessing six feet and several unmeasured inches besides. His shoulders carried the solid, uncompromising breadth of one no stranger to hard physical labour,a circumstance made all the more striking by the scandalous absence of a waistcoat. The dark linen of his shirt stretched across a broad chest, his sleeves turned back to reveal wrists and hands of formidable strength. A mass of dark hair was swept clear of a heavy brow, defining a jawline that seemed hewn from granite by a relentless chisel.

Steeling her courage to meet his countenance, she was met by a gaze of pale, smoky grey, observing her with deliberate, unhurried composure. He did not offer the civility of looking away; instead, those smoky grey eyes took in the full, disastrous extent of the barn before returning to rest upon her face, as if quietly assessing the absolute reality of the catastrophe.

Silence stretched between them, thick and humming with a sudden, suffocating tension.

Kneeling in the dirt, the full, mortifying reality of her situation washed over her in a wave of hot, prickling heat. Her skirts were still securely wedged into her sash, leaving the curve of her calves entirely exposed to the cool air and his unwavering scrutiny. Damp tendrils of hair clung to her flushed cheeks, her chest still rising and falling rapidly from the exertion.

“I was looking for an owl,” she announced. The excuse arrived in a bright, cheerful rush, slipping past the three vastly superior fabrications she had been desperately attempting to invent.

He crossed his arms, the dark fabric pulling tight across broad shoulders. “An owl.”

Marietta smoothed a stray piece of hay from her skirt, keeping her gaze firmly fixed on the scuffed leather of his boots. “Yes. In the rafters, you see. They prefer the height.”

“And the most effective way to spot them is upside down.” He didn’t phrase it as a question. The observation simply hung in the quiet air between them, dense and unyielding.

She abandoned the hay and forced herself to look up, squaring her shoulders. If a Clyde was going to be caught indecent in a borrowed barn, she would at least burn with dignity. “It is a particular sort of owl. Extremely rare.”

Silence stretched over the dirt floor. The pause grew thick and heavy, expanding large enough to house several mortified prayers and a brief, silent negotiation with the Almighty regarding the possibility of the earth opening to swallow her whole.

Then, slowly, a single corner of his mouth twitched upward.

“My apologies,” he said, his voice a low, gravelly drawl that seemed to vibrate against the floorboards. “I have been remiss in my acquaintance with the local wildlife. Though I must point out you are trespassing.”

“I am a guest.” She lifted her chin, aiming for haughty and suspecting she landed somewhere much closer to flushed. “On my own authority, primarily.”

The single twitch of his mouth finally gave way. The smile broke across his face in a slow, unhurried shift that softened the forbidding angle of his jaw and entirely altered the geometry of his brow. The sheer warmth of it hit her squarely under the ribs, a sudden, complicated tightening that left her completely bereft of breath.

He dropped his arms to his sides, the amusement now fully settled in his pale eyes. “And did you find it? This rare specimen that requires such athletic observation?”

“No,” she managed. Her voice lacked its previous absolute certainty as she took a slow, unsteady step backward. “It eluded me.”

“A truly sad affair.” He tilted his head, his gaze dropping briefly to her hem before returning to her eyes. “I imagine it would have been quite the sight.”

He remained leaning against the doorframe, his arms loosely crossed over his chest, looking entirely too amused. The truly appalling realisation, blooming somewhere deep in her chest alongside her racing pulse, was that some treasonous corner of her own mind was enjoying the encounter. That was not how abject humiliation was supposed to function.

He shifted his weight, and the late afternoon sun highlighted the tense line of his forearms. Four Seasons spent in appraising the single gentlemen had trained her to notice details, but the resulting observations offered no comfort here. His palms were visibly roughened from labor, marked by a pale scar along the ridge of one knuckle, and the sheer masculine capability of those hands did catastrophic things to her remaining composure.

“Madam,” he drawled.

Marietta lifted her chin arrogantly, her pride was all she had right now. “Sir.”

“May I observe, with all the deference owed to your station and the privacy of your peculiar sport, that your calves are uncommonly fine?”

The breath vanished from her lungs. She had once taken a glancing blow from an archery target, and this felt remarkably similar, an invisible impact striking her squarely in the chest. A furious, searing heat rushed up her neck and flooded her cheeks.

“You are the rudest farmer I have ever encountered,” she snapped, clutching the side of her skirt.

“Possibly true.” He did not look particularly repentant.

“You ought to be horsewhipped.”

“I have frequently been told so.”

Marietta took a sharp, uneven breath. “My legs are entirely none of your concern.”

“On that point, madam, we agree.” He let his head rest back against the doorframe. “They are entirely your concern. And yet you have been displaying them in my barn for the better part of a quarter of an hour.”

Several stinging replies fought for dominance on her tongue, resulting in absolute silence. Her inability to speak had nothing to do with the fact that his voice had dropped an octave on the words uncommonly fine, or that the low vibration of it had pooled heavy and warm in her stomach. The flush in her cheeks spread rapidly down her throat. She became acutely, unreasonably aware of how far her neckline had slipped during her acrobatics, exposing bare collarbone to the cool air and his unhurried attention.

Gathering her shredded dignity, she snatched her shawl from the grain bin and dragged it around her shoulders. She crossed the dirt floor to retrieve her boots.

The man made no move to clear the exit.

Halting a yard shy of his chest, she realised just how much taller he was up close. She had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes, a shift in perspective that sent the barn spinning all over again.

“If you would kindly step aside,” she demanded, her boots dangling from one hand.

“In a moment.”

“Sir.”

“What is your name?”

“That is none of your concern.”

He offered a slow nod. “Equally true.”

She glared upward. He met her hostility with one raised brow and that infuriating curl at the corner of his mouth. Her pulse kicked against her ribs in a frantic, uneven rhythm that owed nothing to her recent exercise. He smelled of clean linen, horse, and a dark, warm musk that thoroughly scrambled her common sense.

His gaze dropped. It traced the long line of her throat and settled on the disordered neckline of her gown, lingering where the muslin had pulled dangerously loose at the shoulder. He studied the exposed skin with deliberate, appraising scrutiny before letting his attention climb slowly back to her mouth. The heat of that stare felt physical, brushing against her bare shoulder and stealing the air from her lungs.

“My barn is my barn,” he said, his voice dropping another fraction. “Do you understand?”

“I understood it to be Mr. Beresford’s barn.”

A fleeting shadow passed behind his grey eyes. It was a rapid, razor-sharp calculation that did not belong on the face of a rural laborer. The mask slipped back into place before she could draw her next breath, restoring his easy composure, but the brief crack in his facade left an uneasy knot in her chest.

“Mr. Beresford rents this land,” he corrected smoothly. “The barn, however, is mine.”

Marietta forced her fractured thoughts to align, fighting past the mortification and the deeply inconvenient distraction of his forearms. The Beresford’s were tenants of the Duke of Harrod’s Hampshire holdings. The duke himself was a notorious London recluse, leaving the estate management to a steward. This man, holding himself like a soldier while speaking with the polished cadence of a barrister, must be the steward’s man. A senior tenant taking liberties.

“My apologies, sir,” she said, scraping together the last dregs of her pride. “I had not understood the arrangement. I shall not return.”

“Excellent.” He stepped fractionally aside, though he did not lower his arm.

She was obliged to stoop beneath it, passing close enough to feel the solid heat radiating from his shirt.

“And madam,” he murmured, his breath stirring the loose hair at her temple.

She froze. Her hand gripped the weathered doorframe while her pulse hammered a frantic, humiliating rhythm against her throat.

“The owl of the particular sort,” he amended dryly. “Should you ever encounter it again, I should very much like to be informed, it is most unusual to expect to see an owl at this hour of day.”

She kept her chin locked high and marched out into the fading daylight. Taking the long way around the structure ensured she was free of his heavy gaze before she reached the stile at the orchard wall. Resting a hand against the worn post, she inhaled a ragged breath of April air, violently refusing to attribute her shaking hands to the man in the doorway.

True composure did not return until she slipped through the laundry door and hurried up the back stairs. Safely inside her bedroom, she shut the door and leaned hard against the wood, pressing a hand over her mouth as a suppressed, breathless laugh finally escaped.

Her cheeks burned. Her muslin was wrinkled and smelling of hay, and she was absolutely, fiercely determined to never set foot in that barn again.

She lasted until the following afternoon.

Chapter Two

“You cannot possibly have lost a ribbon between the breakfast table and the front door, Marietta.”

“And yet here I am, ribbonless. It is a mystery for the ages, Mama. I shall retrace my steps across the south meadow and recover it before tea.”

Mama, who had been arranging dried lavender into a bowl she would later claim had arranged itself, glanced up. Marietta held her expression steady. She had practiced this in the glass that morning, the bland, slightly injured look of a young woman who had genuinely misplaced a ribbon and was being unfairly interrogated about it.

“Take a bonnet,” Mama said, and returned to her lavender. “The sun is high.”

Marietta took a bonnet. She also took the south path through the orchard and over the stile and down the Beresford lane at a pace that was, she told herself, entirely appropriate for a woman recovering a lost ribbon and not at all suggestive of a woman who had spent the previous night staring at her bedroom ceiling and thinking about the forearms of a farmer she had been raised to consider several stations beneath her notice.

She had resolved, during those sleepless hours, on a number of things. She was going back to the barn because the barn was hers, because she had nine months of practice invested in it, and because a single impertinent farmer was not going to rob her of the only private freedom she possessed. She was not going back for him. She was going back despite him. If he happened to be there, she would be civil, retrieve her ribbon, which she had in fact left on the grain bin yesterday, and depart. If he happened not to be there, she would practice her standing on her hands in peace, and the afternoon would be precisely as it should have been before he interrupted it.

These were the facts. She had rehearsed them since dawn and was almost persuaded.

The barn door was ajar.

She paused at the threshold and strained her ears. No sound reached her, neither voice nor footfall. The interior was empty, the same long bar of gable light falling across the center planking, the same sweet dusty silence, the same hay piled against the far wall. Her ribbon was still looped over the edge of the grain bin where she had left it, pale blue against the grey wood.

He was not here. Relief should have been her first response, a clean, sensible emotion that lasted exactly until she crossed the dirt floor, discarded her bonnet, and rolled up her sleeves. By the time she braced her hands against the rough wood to begin, that sensible relief had entirely evaporated, replaced by a low, simmering restlessness that made her skin prickle in the cool air.

She planted her palms and kicked her legs upward, finding her center and holding it for six solid heartbeats before dropping cleanly into the hay. The second attempt faltered at five, sending her wobbling to one knee. By the third attempt, her breath was coming faster, the muscles of her shoulders aching with a deep, heavy heat. A sudden, reckless impulse seized her, born of the April damp, or perhaps the lingering, infuriating agitation of a night spent violently refusing to think about the line of a man’s forearms. She shifted her weight, determined to attempt the hold one-handed.

Bracing her right palm against the floorboards, she kicked upward. The balance proved sharper, incredibly precarious, yet for one suspended heartbeat, the inverted world was entirely, recklessly hers.

Then her shoulder gave out. The floor rushed up sideways, promising a brutal impact, right until a large, rough hand clamped firmly around her bare ankle, arresting her fall mid-air.

She hung suspended above the dirt, with her honey blonde hair, tied in a braid, brushing the planking. All the breath vanished from her lungs. His grip was an iron band of heat against her bare skin, his thumb pressing directly into the sensitive hollow beneath her ankle bone. The sheer, solid shock of his touch scattered every coherent thought she possessed.

He lowered her to the hay, shifting her weight with slow, deliberate control. She scrambled into a sitting position, tucking her legs beneath her. She was acutely conscious of her hair, half-loosened and straying from its braid and the furious heat flooding her cheeks as she finally met his gaze.

He had abandoned his coat. His linen shirt hung open at the throat, the slanted afternoon light catching the stark line of his collarbone and the deep hollow beneath it. Sun-warmed skin at his neck faded into a paler stretch of chest where the fabric parted, a contrast that drew her eyes downward and lodged a thick, heavy knot of tension directly behind her ribs.

“You are here again,” he murmured, his voice a low vibration in the quiet space.

“I came for my ribbon.”

He shifted his stance, tipping his head toward the grain bin where the scrap of blue silk hung in plain, undisturbed view. He let his gaze drift back to her flushed face, one dark eyebrow lifting in a silent challenge.

“And my balancing on my hands,” she added, her voice betraying a slight tremor, “was entirely incidental.”

“Naturally.”

“I was practicing.”

“One-handed.”

“I was experimenting.” She tugged uselessly at her crumpled skirt, wishing the heavy muslin offered more protection against the weight of his attention.

“I see. And how did the experiment conclude?”

“It concluded with your hand on my bare ankle, sir,” she shot back, fighting to ignore the lingering brand of his touch. “An intervention I did not invite and do not require repeated.”

That infuriating half-smile broke across his face, the slow, uneven curl at the corner of his mouth that had plagued her sleep for hours.

“What are you going to do, sir?” The words slipped out before she could catch them. “Punish me?”

She had aimed for sharp defiance, but the question landed in the space between them as something entirely different. It came out breathy, low, hanging in the dust like a dare layered in dangerous confession. The amusement vanished from his smokey grey eyes, leaving behind a stillness so absolute it made her chest ache.

The barn went utterly quiet. The everyday sounds of the rafters and the distant wood pigeon seemed to drain away, replaced by a heavy, suffocating tension that pulled the air tight around them. He stared down at her, the casual irony stripped from his expression, replaced by a focus that was dark, unhurried, and devastatingly deliberate.

He closed the distance between them with slow, measured steps, dropping to one knee beside her in the hay. The heat of his body enveloped her, carrying the scent of clean linen, horse, and that dark, intoxicating musk. He lifted a hand, unhurried, and brushed a tangled stray curl back from her temple.

The rough pad of his thumb traced the delicate edge of her hairline, the scrape of calloused skin sending a violent shiver down her spine. Her breath hitched and held. The blood roared in her ears, rushing hot and heavy, pooling low in her stomach and entirely abandoning her common sense.

“I should leave,” she managed, her voice barely a whisper. She made absolutely no effort to rise.

“Yes,” he agreed, his gaze dropping to her mouth. He stayed exactly where he was.

His thumb slid down to rest against the edge of her jaw. His eyes tracked the slight parting of her lips, a slow, consuming perusal that felt as intimate as a physical caress. All the lingering tension from her fall melted into a heavy, liquid heat. Without a single conscious thought, she leaned into his touch, her cheek turning just a fraction into the rough heat of his palm, surrendering to an instinct she could no longer fight.

He leaned in and captured her mouth. It held none of the fumbling haste or eager clumsiness she had secretly anticipated when lying awake in the dark. Instead, he kissed her with a slow, devastating thoroughness. His mouth moved warm and firm against hers, his hand anchoring her jaw, turning the deliberate, unhurried slide of his lips into a demanding question. She answered by curling her fingers tightly into the open collar of his shirt, dragging him closer. A small, desperate sound caught in the back of her throat, an involuntary gasp she surrendered into the quiet barn.

He eventually drew back, retreating no more than a single inch, resting his forehead heavily against hers. His chest rose and fell in a ragged, uneven rhythm, a fractured breathing that filled her with a terrifying, absolute thrill of triumph.

She pulled him down, kissing him with a desperate, crushing pressure that erased the need for any further questions.

He met the demand for a long, bruising moment before tearing his mouth away. Shifting his weight, he braced his forearms in the hay on either side of her head, leaving his scorching skin hovering a tantalising inch above her bare breasts.

“We met yesterday,” she whispered raggedly. Her fingers remained tangled in the dark hair at the nape of his neck, her body entirely unwilling to let him retreat.

“I am aware.” His chest heaved with the same uneven, desperate rhythm as her own.

“I do not even know your name.”

“You did not ask for it.” He dragged a rough thumb along the swollen curve of her lower lip. His gaze dropped, tracking the exposed line of her torso down to where her chemise remained bunched at her waist. “And considering what we are currently doing on this floor, I am not entirely convinced a proper introduction is the detail that matters.”

A sudden shiver wracked her, born of the cool April draft and the terrifying, electric heat of his attention. He caught the tremor instantly. The slide of his thumb halted, and the muscles in his arms locked tight.

“You can walk out that door,” he murmured. The words were a low, dark vibration that bypassed her ears and settled directly between her thighs. “You can pull your dress up, walk back to the manor, and pretend you never fell in my barn.”

She swallowed hard, fighting the frantic hammering of her heart against her ribs. She was a baron’s daughter. This was absolute madness, a total and complete ruin waiting in the dust of a rented outbuilding.

“And if I do?” she asked, her voice trembling over the syllable.

“Then you will be perfectly safe.” He leaned down, pressing an open, wet kiss to the frantic pulse beating at the base of her throat. “But you will be missing exactly what I can give you.”

She arched upward, chasing the searing heat of his mouth. Her nails bit blindly into the hard, smooth muscle of his back. “What can you give me?”

He lifted his head. The cool irony she had seen in the doorway was entirely gone. His eyes had gone completely dark in the slanted light, stripped down to a raw, consuming focus that left her entirely bereft of breath.

“Pleasure.”

The word was a rough, fractured promise delivered against her skin. He shifted his hips, his calloused hands sweeping down her ribs to grip her waist with uncompromising possession. He dragged her fully beneath him, aligning his body perfectly with hers. The heavy, unyielding ridge of his arousal pressed flush against the aching cradle of her thighs through the tangled layers of her petticoats and his breeches.

The sheer, shocking friction of that contact shattered the last fragile remnant of her aristocratic logic.

“Then give it to me,” she breathed.

He took the surrender exactly as it was offered, his mouth crashing back down onto hers.

His hand found the hem of her chemise and pushed it up, over her thighs, over her hips. His fingers on her bare skin, the inside of her thigh, and she jolted and he slowed, his palm flat and warm and steady, waiting. She shifted toward him. The shift was answer enough.

His touch fell upon her then with a deliberate purpose that caught her unawares. His fingers finding the place where the heat was gathered, stroking through the slick warmth of her with a patience that was, she decided later, completely unreasonable and possibly illegal. She heard herself making sounds she had never made before, small desperate catches and low wordless pleas that bore no resemblance to any noise she had previously associated with her own throat. Her hips moved against his hand and he let them, and his thumb found a particular spot and pressed, gently, circling, and the world narrowed to the point of that pressure and the building gathering tightness in her belly and the sound of her own breathing, which was no longer breathing in any meaningful sense but something ragged and open and helpless.

She dissolved beneath his touch. A long slow wave started deep in her stomach and rolled outward through her limbs and her fingers and the soles of her feet, and she cried out into the dusty silence of the barn and he caught the sound with his mouth, kissing her through the whole shuddering length of it, his hand still moving, drawing it out, until she pushed his wrist away and gasped against his jaw and was, for several seconds, not entirely certain of her own name.

He rested his forehead against her temple. His breathing was uneven just as she could feel him hard against her thigh, and the wanting in him, held in check, and communicated itself through the tension of his shoulders and the careful deliberate stillness of his hips.

She reached between them, her fingers wrapping directly around the heavy, driving heat of him. His entire body locked rigid. A harsh, broken syllable tore from his throat and buried itself in the loose hair at her temple. She stroked him once, a slow, deliberate drag of her hand, and watched the severe control of his features fracture completely. The sheer, physical reality of unmaking him sent a fresh rush of adrenaline straight to her pulse, a dangerous and intoxicating power.

He shifted his weight, pulling her beneath him. He did not move immediately, his chest heaving, his dark eyes searching her face in the slanted light.

“Are you certain?” he rasped, the words vibrating against her collarbone.

She lifted her chin, answering the silent question by shifting her hips upward. “Do not stop now.”

He pressed forward, slow and relentless. A sharp, stinging stretch tore the breath from her lungs, forcing a gasp that she bit down against his shoulder. He froze instantly. The heavy muscles of his arms shook violently as he braced his weight away from her, his jaw clenching hard enough to snap bone. When she forced herself to look at him, the stark panic in his pale eyes was devastating. It was a man terrified of the damage he was inflicting, and that sudden vulnerability cracked something wide open in her chest.

“I am well,” she whispered, smoothing her hands down the rigid line of his back to grip his hips. She pulled him firmly downward. “Please.”

His breath rushed out in a ragged exhale. He began to move again, maintaining a cautious, agonisingly slow rhythm until her body adjusted to the intrusion. The sting ebbed, melting into a deep, heavy friction that her senses caught onto before her mind could fully comprehend the shift.

“You are so slight a thing,” he murmured, his lips brushing the delicate curve of her ear.

“And you are far too overwhelming,” she gasped, the protest escaping her as a breathless, desperate sound.

He groaned, a dark vibration that echoed in her own chest. The pace shifted, driving deeper, and she wrapped her legs around his hips to anchor him there. She closed her eyes. The dusty barn and the April light completely ceased to exist, replaced by the scent of hay and salt and the consuming pressure of his weight.

The tension coiled tighter with every thrust. When it finally broke, the sound that tore from her throat was a loud, sustained cry she would never have recognised as her own voice. He followed a heartbeat later. His hips stuttered against her, his forehead dropping heavily to her shoulder as his spine bowed taut. She held him through the violent tremors, threading her fingers deep into his dark hair, entirely unwilling to let him go until the trembling finally subsided.

They lay tangled in the hay while their breathing slowed. The golden slant of the afternoon sun had moved across the floorboards, illuminating the drifting dust motes.

She rested her cheek against his bare chest. His arm remained wrapped securely around her shoulders, his calloused thumb tracing an absent, repetitive path along her upper arm. The gesture carried a quiet domesticity that sat violently at odds with the frantic ruin they had just achieved on a dirt floor, bringing an unfamiliar sting of tears to the back of her eyes.

“I still do not know your name,” she pointed out, breaking the heavy quiet.

He went still for a fraction of a second, his thumb pausing on her skin before resuming its slow path. “Severus.”

She tipped her head back to observe him. His expression gave nothing away in the dimming light.

“Severus,” she tested the syllables. “That is an extraordinary name for a working man.”

“It was my grandfather’s.” The corner of his mouth twitched, an ironic shadow of a smile. “He was an extraordinary man.”

“And what does your grandfather’s grandson intend to do with a ruined baron’s daughter?”

He shifted, pulling the edge of her discarded shawl over her bare shoulders to ward off the chill. “The baron’s daughter,” he murmured, his gaze dropping to her mouth, “seems entirely capable of deciding her own ruin. Though I suspect she will return to her manor and pretend to be exactly what polite society expects of her.”

“That sounds remarkably dull.”

“It sounds safe, Etta.”

The pet name slipped out so naturally she did not even register the impossible familiarity of it, her mind too clouded by the warmth of his chest and the heavy lethargy in her limbs. She rested her head back against his heartbeat, letting the strange, formal name settle in her thoughts.

The dressing proceeded in a much thicker silence. He fastened the small buttons of her bodice with the same unhurried hands that had undone them, though his jaw remained tightly locked. When he plucked a stray piece of hay from her hair and began to weave her loose braid back together, the sheer competence of his fingers startled her. The movement suggested a history of doing exactly this, for someone else, and the sudden, irrational spike of jealousy was harder to swallow than the lost virtue.

They walked together to the edge of the orchard, navigating the tall grass behind the barn where the nettles grew thick. He stopped at the weathered wooden stile.

She climbed the steps and turned back to face him, the apple blossoms framing the meadow behind her. The late sun cast long, golden shadows across the grass. He stood with his hands resting on his narrow hips, a dark silhouette against the barn, watching her with that same unreadable intensity.

The church bell struck six as she reached the kitchen garden. She paused with her hand resting on the iron latch, listening to the heavy chimes echo across the Hampshire valley. A blackbird called from the orchard. She stood perfectly still, letting the cool evening air dry the dampness at her nape, before pushing the gate open and stepping back into the world she was supposed to belong to.