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He cleared his throat. When had his thoughts grown so foolish as to turn to love? He’d been thinking of kissing her, of peeling off the lace and the woolen shawl and the outdated gown and browsing on the treasures beneath. None of which had aught to do with love .

“When did you learn to harp?”

“Ah, my mother played. She had a small telyn in our house. I brought it with me when I went to the Suttons. Anne’s mother let me sit in on her lessons, and I liked to play, and was told I had some skill at it.

So when they turned me out, I took the harp with me.

I imagined, at the time, Daron would find us a house of our own, and I would set up like a lady.

” She fell silent for a long moment. “In any event, I learned I could play for the occasional meal or coin. I am no Marged ferch Ifan, though.”

“Who?” Pen pulled their trap aside to let a farmer pass with a wagonload of straw. The farmer touched the brim of his cap, and Pen returned the gesture.

“Queen of the Lakes, they called her. She lived in the north. It was said she could shoe a horse, make a boat, play the harp and the violin. And she could out-wrestle any man.” She sent him a sly, mischievous smile.

“I will be happy to help you improve your wrestling skills,” Pen said, straight-faced. “Any time.”

“Have a care what you offer, Pen,” she teased.

“Wales is full of fierce women. Have you not heard of Jemima Fawr, hero of the Battle of Fishguard?” At his scoffing look, her eyes widened.

“It was but two years ago! When the French troops landed at Llanwnda, she and a group of women caught and captured a dozen French soldiers, armed with nothing but a pitchfork. The soldiers had been drinking, but still. She locked them in a church for the night, and the next day the French surrendered, and that will teach any foreigners who try to invade Wales again.”

“She sounds fearsome indeed,” Pen agreed.

She plucked at the fringes of her shawl. “I heard she was awarded a lifetime pension by the crown. If only I could do something as brave or noble, and be granted St. Sefin’s as a result.”

Finally, an opportunity to be useful. “Have you sent word to the solicitor yet? Would it do to approach this lord and ask him to lower the price?”

She looked away, evading the question. Did she not have the courage to face an English lord? He could help with this. “I mean?—”

“Stop,” she said suddenly. “I mean, stop the horse. Here.”

He turned the horse off the road, where the verge disappeared into woodland. The ground was violet in every direction, a carpet of fragrant bluebells. Gwen scrambled down from the trap and ran into the midst of them like a nymph of the wood.

“I can distill these into perfume,” she called. “The women pay for it. Come help me gather, Pen.”

He looped the reins around a tree limb while the horse took the opportunity to munch the red clover growing along the road. But at the edge of the patch he paused, arrested by the delicate fragrance. Something stirred in the fog of his head.

“Bluebells,” he said. A memory formed. The shape of her standing in a room—not a room he recognized, but she was wearing that dress, that shawl. “I know that scent.”

She turned her head, arms outstretched but frozen, as if she were a woodland fairy caught at frolic by human eyes. “Do you remember something?”

Yes. He had been struck by her, her beauty, her anger—she was angry with him about something. And he remembered bluebells.

He opened his mouth to say all this when some inner voice warned against it.

He’d never in his life, he would guess, been a man who listened to his inner voice.

But this time he did. It cautioned him to say nothing.

If he asked how he knew her from his former life, then this idyll—driving together, playing for a dance at Pencoed Castle, the closeness that was growing between them, and their cozy rhythm at St. Sefin’s—all would come to a cold and violent end.

He moved toward her. “You always smell of bluebells. I love that scent on you.”

He wasn’t certain she would yield to him, not even when he slipped a hand about her waist. But when he laid a finger beneath her chin she tipped up her head to kiss him, and he fell again into that new land where every color was brightened, every sense apprehended more beauty, where the world seemed shot through with wild joy.

Or perhaps that pulse was his heart hammering as she curved against him in surrender, slipping her arms around his neck, pressing her body into his.

He groaned with pleasure and kissed her deeply, tasting hawthorn blossom and her own delicious warmth, a well he wanted to drown in.

He kissed her endlessly, their bodies fused, a dance of lips and tongue that was like delirium, while his hand slid up her side slowly, fingers skimming her ribs and the shape of her stays beneath, sliding beneath her arm, then closing over one perfect breast. Her heart pounded as wildly as his own.

But she stopped and pulled away, as if she felt her nipple piercing his palm as sharply as he did. “Bluebells,” she muttered, her eyes huge grey-green pools.

“Yes.” He tried bending his head, but she turned her chin, then peeled herself from his arms. He stifled a groan of disappointment and frustrated desire.

“We’ll be late if we stop to gather bluebells,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

Tomorrow, would she consent to lie with him? Perhaps here in this very field. He could strip her naked, lie her down on a silken carpet of purple-blue blooms, and every part of her would smell, and taste, of bluebells. His arousal bobbed in agreement.

“I was hoping we would wrestle,” he said, his voice thick. He took a moment to gather his composure before returning to the trap and helping her climb in.

She looked ahead, a flush climbing her cheek. Her throat knotted as she swallowed. At least he had the satisfaction of knowing she wasn’t unaffected by that deluge of a kiss.

“Tell me why I love the scent of bluebells,” he said. That image of her in the room, staring at him with wide accusing eyes, seemed burned now into his brain. Had she known him in his former life? And if she did, why had she said nothing about it?

Had she forgotten meeting him, while he remembered her, even though he could remember literally nothing else?

He took the reins and urged the horse to walk on, giving her a moment to compose herself. He sensed she would not be entirely truthful.

“They mean humility, for some,” she said, watching the road ahead.

“Everlasting love, for others. There’s an old superstition that you aren’t to pick bluebells or bring them into your home because they are beloved of fairies.

You can call a fairy by ringing a bluebell, but a bluebell patch like this is thick with magic. ”

Oh yes, he felt that. Thick with magic.

“But you can pick bluebells,” he said. She was lying. Or withholding. Why? “Because you are a fairy?”

“Because the bulbs help pass water and stop bleeding,” she said. “But don’t eat these plants, mind! They’re poisonous.”

A woman who handled poisonous plants fearlessly. Who faced life and all its injuries and losses, fearlessly.

But there was something she wasn’t telling him.

He watched her carefully, waiting for his moment as they arrived at Pencoed Castle, a majestic structure sitting incongruously at the end of a farm lane.

Gwen pointed to the tall rectangular gatehouse as they approached from the west. “The same red sandstone used to build St. Sefin’s,” she said. “Isn’t it a lovely color?”

But instead of proceeding through the gate to the courtyard at the front of the house, Gwen directed him around a tall stand of trees toward a dower house and the outbuildings to the side, which included the carriage house.

Inside she was warmly greeted by the housekeeper and shown the room she was given for the night, high in the third story among the servants’ quarters.

Pen was greeted with friendliness, too, but he felt odd entering the house from the back.

Perhaps his former self used the front entrance to such homes.

Pencoed was a fortified manor house on a grand scale, with the ruins of an old wall encasing the front courtyard and battlements along the roof.

Inside, the walls of dressed stone and timber-framed ceilings lent a severe beauty to the large staterooms, while the leaded glass windows let in gracious light and the plentiful hangings and thickly upholstered furniture offered luxury.

Gwen looked as at ease in the grand surroundings as she did in the kitchens of St. Sefin’s.

While the guests gathered for their dinner and Gwen set up with her harp in the formal parlor among the other musicians, he thought with her beauty and quiet grace she belonged more among the gentry at the table than she did among the servants.

That was where Pen was, pressed by the butler to help serve at table and then carry refreshments among the guests as the diners mingled after, chatting and only half-listening to the music.

An impressive livery was found and brushed for him, the thick cotton finer than anything he’d worn at St. Sefin’s.

He wondered what Gwen would think when she saw him in the saffron breeches and stockings, the embroidered gold waistcoat and cuffs over a cutaway tailcoat of navy blue with large bronze buttons.

He looked well in it—so he was informed by the glances of the maids and the female diners alike—but all he cared for was Gwen’s smile when she saw him moving about holding a platter of Champagne flutes, one gloved fist behind his back.