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“ T ell Mr. Pen to hold still, or I’ll get his hair crooked,” said Cerys, waving her shears.

Pen, sitting with a towel around his shoulders, widened his eyes at Gwen. “Tell Miss Cerys I’m here for the barbering, not the surgery.”

With a look of intense concentration, Cerys pulled Pen’s wet hair straight with her comb and, at her mother’s direction, made a few careful snips.

Gwen smiled and turned back to the scullery sink, where she was washing the equipment to make a batch of small beer.

Watching Pen move about St. Sefin’s like he belonged among them made her heart feel as if it were being squeezed into a bottle.

Since their first night together, her days—a week?

Nearly two?—had been filled with stolen kisses, whispered promises, caresses snatched in passing when they thought no one else might see.

She slipped into Pen’s room each night and woke each morning entwined with his naked body, heavy and satisfied, more alive than she’d ever felt.

They orbited in a strange limbo, a dreamworld of passion in the dark, and in the daylight hours they fell into a growing rhythm of companionship, a connection deeper than anything she’d ever shared with a man.

The cold truth hovered around them, waiting to snap shut its ruthless jaws, but she’d shut her eyes against it like a child safe from monsters as long as she didn’t see.

“Cyw hungry,” Tomos announced, kicking his boots against the doorframe to shed them of mud.

He entered the kitchen carrying Pen’s latest addition to their community, a chicken.

Pen had engaged Gossett to improve his fighting skills, and Mrs. Gossett, who hadn’t sported a black eye in weeks because her husband had other places to spend his energies, had gifted Pen the poultry, a game fowl that Gwen suspected had been retired from Gossett’s cock-fighting brood.

Tomos took immediate charge of the creature and named it the Cymric word for chick.

When the thing wasn’t clucking, scratching, or diving beneath one’s boots for a bug or worm, Cyw was content to be carried about by Tomos like a fat feathered infant or minor god.

Tomos’s glee over his pet was as enormous as Gwen’s joy in her stolen time with Penrydd, and they were both, she feared, in for eventual heartbreak.

“And here’s licorice.” Mathry entered, shaking dew from her shawl and holding up a basket full of slender brown sticks.

“Licorice! How is it you have licorice?” Pen started from his seat and earned an immediate reproof from Cerys.

Mathry sauntered his way, a hand curving over the tiny bump of her belly.

In the past few days she’d quickened and had settled into making infant clothes like a woman on a mission.

She pitched in to help with a new zeal, was pestering Gwen to teach her herb lore, and moreover had dropped her flirtatious manner toward Pen.

Gwen wondered how much Mathry or any of the others knew of what was developing between her and Pen. Even the sound sleepers must notice how he took every opportunity to be near her. And how she melted with delight each time he did.

What was developing between them? She didn’t know what to call it. His kiss made her forget where she was. His touch made her body feel as if music sang through her veins. She craved him and couldn’t get enough.

“A priest brought licorice plants to St. Sefin’s from Turkey during the Crusades.

” Gwen busied herself with her task so she didn’t stand there gaping at Pen with that broad, foolish smile.

“Or so the legend goes. Cerys never found the treasure, but she found the old records of the priory bundled in an altar cloth and stuffed in a trunk in the abbess’s rooms. It’s been growing wild for a long time, but good enough for all that. ”

Pen bit into a licorice root, and Gwen stared too long at his straight teeth, the flicker of muscle in his firm square jaw, the pleasure on his face. She was going soft in the head. Licorice was a feeble return for what she’d done to him. Was doing.

“My turn for a trim?” Ifor stepped into the kitchen with Gafr on his lead and a boy near his age behind him. “Here’s a lad from Greenfield to see you, Miss Gwen.”

“ Bore da, Gareth,” Mathry said with surprise. “Is everyone well?”

“You’re all right, that’s clear,” the boy said with a bold grin. Then his eyes flickered over Pen and he ducked his head in instinctive deference. Gwen’s throat closed before she realized Pen hadn’t been to Greenfield and the servants there wouldn’t know him.

She wasn’t ready to lose him. She’d agreed to keep up the ruse, telling herself it was for Dovey’s sake, that she still needed to win him to the cause of St. Sefin’s and persuade him to let them stay.

But the truth was that, like a greedy harlot, she wanted her hands on him every minute, and she didn’t want to give him up.

She’d have to. She knew that. But since he appeared to be in no hurry to reclaim his memory, even after seeing his estate, she saw no reason to rush him out the door. Not when she could spend one more night, one more day with him.

“They want you at Greenfield for dinner tonight, Miss Gwen.” The messenger boy sat at the table next to Ifor, who pulled a steaming plate of cakes their way and offered him one.

Gwen spoke above the sudden roaring in her ears. “They can’t want me to harp.”

Gareth licked a finger. “They’ve guests from Llanfyllin and want you to dine with them. A fancy pair, they are.”

The prickle along her neck told Gwen that every eye in the large kitchen was fixed on her. She felt Pen’s stare like the heat of full sun in summer.

Dovey swooped in, scolding the boys as she slid the plate away from Ifor’s nimble fingers. “My picau ar y Maen , is it! I made those cakes for Mr. Evans and Mr. Pen to take to town today, and if you eat them all, then you feed two hungry men when they return.”

Gwen kept her voice level, despite the wild skitter of her heart. “Lady Vaughn can’t pay me enough to return to Greenfield. I’ve no interest in meeting her guests.”

“None?” Dovey questioned. They still needed money, after all, to buy St. Sefin’s from Pen.

Gwen shook her head. Calvin Vaughn would leer at her. She couldn’t bear facing Anne after all that had happened. And if Anne’s brother had come with her?—

“No.” She struggled for air.

Gareth sighed. “Mr. Vaughn won’t like that answer,” he said.

“Calvin Vaughn knows why it’s a no.” Gwen reddened and dragged a brace of bottles towards her.

Mathry slid her basket onto the table. “Ah, Gwen bach. Did he?—?”

“Tried to put a slip on your shoulder, didn’t he?

” Pen ducked out from beneath Cerys’s shears and shook off the towel, ignoring her outcry.

In two long strides he came to the sink to Gwen’s side and with a warm finger under her chin turned her face toward him.

His brows lowered as he read her expression.

“I knew he was a dirty dish,” he swore softly.

Alarm rose from the rush of soupy heat that filled her at his touch. “How did you know?”

“Er—gathered. From Mathry’s tale of woe.

” He dropped his fingers from her chin and ran a hand through his damp hair.

She wanted to take his hand and draw it back to her face.

She wanted to put both his arms around her and lean into him like he could be the only thing she needed, the pillar that held up her world.

“What’s a slip on the shoulder?” Cerys asked.

“Nothing you’ll let a man give you, pwt, ” Dovey said. “All right, Tomos, take a seat.”

“Who’re the grand folk that want Gwen?” Mathry asked.

Gwen flinched. She’d tried so hard to run from her past, and now the shadows were reaching out to swallow her. How had they found her, after all this time? And what did they want with her now? It couldn’t be to make amends. The time for that was long past.

“Vaughn thinks to marry Anne Sutton,” Gwen said, eyes on her task. “That’s the girl I was companion to before her family turned me off. Can you believe the cursed luck? Of all the families in Wales, he’s settled on her.”

“The gentry world’s a small world, and the great world smaller still.” Pen said this as if he knew the great world, and alarm prickled Gwen’s scalp.

“Does she know of Mr. Vaughn’s reputation around here?” Dovey draped the cloth around Tomos’s neck as he settled in Cerys’s chair.

Gwen’s shoulders slumped, and Pen lifted a hand to rub the back of her neck, loosening the knot of tension.

She sighed and leaned into his warm, strong fingers.

Those clever, clever fingers had been on every part of her body, mapped every inch of her, and yet this small, intimate touch was just as thrilling.

“She deserves to know,” Gwen said. “But she might have to marry him just the same. I’ll wager her parents decided the match, and Anne would never go against them.”

Men of means were not expected to limit their affections.

The higher the class of man, the more businesslike his marriage.

His wife provided pedigreed heirs, and he searched elsewhere for pleasure.

Her throat ached and she reached unthinkingly for the water heating over the stove.

She forgot to wrap her hand with a cloth and cried out when the searing pain registered.

Stifling a curse at her stupidity, she crammed her scalded fingers in her mouth.

Pen would expect a similar arrangement in his marriage. He wouldn’t marry a girl from the Welsh hills. Though he might offer to make one his mistress.

Pen tugged her hand from her mouth and examined the reddened tips. “Shall I call Vaughn out and maim him for you? Geld him, perhaps.”

Dueling was illegal, and only gentlemen had the right to call each other out in a supposed matter of honor. Rougher men used their fists to settle an insult. Was Pen remembering he was a gentleman?

But why would he remain here with them, if that were the case? A rush of helpless longing weakened her knees as he kissed her burned fingertips.