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“You’re not still soft on him, I hope?” Pen growled.

She knew he wasn’t speaking of Vaughn. “I’ve no wish to see him again. Ever.”

“Good.” Pen moved closer and she shivered as the warmth of his nearness teased her skin. He smelled like freshly turned earth and a hint of honey. “I’ve been trying to blot him entirely from your mind,” he whispered beside her ear.

His breath wafted across her neck, stirring the delicate hairs, and the flare of awareness plunged through her body, lighting an instant sliver of heat between her legs. St. Meleri’s marrow, how could he enflame her with a mere whisper? Was she that desperate for the touch of a man?

Not just any man. This one.

She turned toward him like a flower unfurling in the sun.

The unholy gleam in his hazelnut eyes said he knew he’d aroused her, exactly as intended.

The man played her body as confidently as she strummed her harp, and she thrilled to his handling.

He knew how to satiate them both, and each night he feasted on her sighs and tremors as if her satisfaction heightened his.

No need to tell him the pleasure they found together far surpassed anything of her experience. Or that he was quickly erasing the possibility that she could ever want anyone else.

“Perhaps a bit more blotting is called for,” she murmured.

She smiled as his eyes narrowed and he gripped her waist with a warm, heavy hand, thumb brushing her ribs. “As much as it takes,” he said, his voice a low rasp.

Evans thumped into the room, and Gwen broke free of the spell.

Her head had been moving toward Pen’s, mouth tipped up to invite a kiss, in front of nearly every person she knew in the world.

St. Teilo’s teeth, what had come over her?

Did she want everyone to know she was tupping the man who held all their fates in his hands?

Pen’s hand fell from her waist and cool air rushed in when he stepped away. She barely heard what she said in farewell as the men took their leave, Gareth with them.

Dovey watched her, one hand on her hip, wooden spoon raised in the air. Her eyes bore lines of strain and worry.

“What are you about, dearie?” she whispered as the others shuffled off to their tasks.

Gwen turned to the stove, cheeks burning. “It’s not to barter with him, much as it might appear,” she said. “And it’s nothing to do with his earlier offer, either. What it is, is?—”

A torrential passion that had upended her world. Like the merfolk of legend he’d called to her and she’d followed, the foolish maiden risking her future and her life for the sheer bliss of being desired by him.

“I fancy him, is all,” she said lamely.

“Fancy,” Dovey said. She popped a licorice stick in her mouth and chewed.

“Well, I can’t say I blame you a bit.” Mathry took the basket of licorice root into the stillroom. “He is a lush one, though I take a fright when he gets all lordly.”

But he didn’t belong to her, and he wouldn’t stay in her world.

Gwen knew this as she collected her bottles.

She was the mermaid, stealing him from his life.

And keeping him because she loved who she became in his arms, a woman confident, capable, desirable.

With Pen she wasn’t spoiled by betrayal or broken by loss. With him, she was whole.

The dream wouldn’t last. No dreams did, not even for those more deserving than she.

Gwen heard the delicate footsteps first, then saw the woman’s shadow fall over the hard-packed dirt.

That was all the warning she had. Her heart dropped into her belly, though she couldn’t see the figure framed in the doorway of the brewhouse, outlined in shadow by the afternoon sun, the blooming dogwood on one side and the crimson rhododendron on the other.

“Gwenllian! Is it really you? I thought I’d never see you again.”

The woman’s soft voice held the cultured accent of the upper-class English. The stick Gwen was using to stir the vat of malt slipped through suddenly nerveless fingers.

“Anne.” Her voice scraped through a throat gone dry. “You ought to have come to the front door.”

“I knocked. No one answered.”

Anne Sutton of Vine Court, and she had found Gwen in the outbuildings, cap discarded and shawl tied up, sweating like a scullery maid.

No. Working in good faith to tend the home she had built with her own two hands. Why did she fear Anne Sutton was here to take everything away from her? Again?

Gwen wiped her hands on her shawl. She had abandoned her friend along with everything else when she left Vine Court all those years ago.

Anne might have believed what her parents told her, that Gwen was a grasping orphan who had tried to seduce, then trick Daron into marriage, and had been turned out on her conniving ear.

“Come into the kitchen,” Gwen finally managed to say. “There’s bara brith for tea.”

Anne Sutton was accustomed to fine tea in formal parlors served from dainty porcelain dishes, and Gwen smelled like beer malt and sweat.

Even so, Anne untied the ribbons of her bonnet and seated herself at the huge oaken worktable in the kitchen as if she’d come to tea at St. Sefin’s every day of her life.

Dovey barreled in from the hallway. “Gwen, there’s a Sais at the—” She faltered and drew up short.

“Hello,” Anne said coolly.

The timid girl Gwen had known was now a calm, self-possessed young woman. She’d be four-and-twenty, one year younger than Gwen. A surprise she wasn’t already married. Had her family hoped for higher and had to settle for Calvin Vaughn?

“Anne, this is Mrs. Van der Welle, widow of Lieutenant Jan Van der Welle of the Dutch Royal Navy. Dovey, this is Miss Anne Sutton, daughter of the Suttons of Llanfyllin.”

Dovey curtsied, her face a mask of exquisite politeness. “And this is Cerys, Dovey’s daughter,” Gwen added as Cerys, peering from behind her mother’s skirts, gazed wide-eyed at the grand lady. “Dovey is my friend and partner in running St. Sefin’s.”

“Yes, I’d heard the Vaughns’ housekeeper say you ran a house of refuge for the indigent.” A smile floated over Anne’s lips. “How like you to take up charity, Gwen.”

“It turned out a good fit for my talents, since my plans for marriage didn’t unfold as anticipated.”

Now where had that bitterness come from?

It wasn’t Anne’s fault Gwen had been turned out and forced to birth a stillborn daughter in a sty in the middle of winter.

No, her brother was solely to blame for that debacle.

Gwen would not ask about him. It was shock enough that Anne had come here, that she could so easily stir the old hurt Gwen thought she had long set aside.

And why was Anne here? What could she want?

Gwen pulled down the tin with the good tea, the kind they purchased rather than making up with their own cuttings. She nearly dropped the precious leaves all over the floor at Anne’s next words.

“We didn’t know what else to do when you turned down our invitation to dinner. Daron and Mr. Vaughn will return as soon as they’ve completed their errands in town. My brother is wild to see you again.”

Daron. Here. The man she’d given her body to, who had planted a child within her, then left both her and the babe to freeze in the Welsh winter.

“I thought your brother didn’t want anything to do with me.” Gwen forced the words through a throat gone hot and tight.

“Gwen.” Anne’s voice was gentle, full of sorrow. “My family treated you abominably. I regret what my parents did to you.”

Gwen’s hands moved like thick clumps of clay she couldn’t control. Against her will she knocked one of their precious jasperware teacups to the floor. The bowl shattered, pieces falling apart like petals of a flower past its blooming.

“Your parents behaved as might be expected, considering they would feel the girl they had taken in and nurtured betrayed their trust.” Gwen knelt to pick up the china shards and hissed as a sharp edge sliced her finger. “Your brother, on the other hand…”

Dovey nudged her aside and cleared the broken pieces, handing Gwen a cloth. Cerys swung the kettle over the fire, warming water for tea. Gwen wrapped her cut finger, trying to calm her galloping pulse.

Anne’s mouth twisted. “I believe he promised to marry you.”

“That, and more.” Gwen sank into a chair across from her former friend, this girl who had once been as dear as a sister.

Anne’s buttery blonde hair was piled in a smooth braided chignon atop her head, with perfect curls hanging at her brows and temple.

Her skin was as pale as skimmed cream. Gwen guessed that her high-waisted muslin gown, with the ruff of lace at the jacket-shaped bodice and embroidered hem, was the latest London fashion.

“But I thought there was a—?” Anne moved her gloved hand in a delicate motion around her middle, her eyes cutting to Cerys.

“Didn’t survive,” Gwen said, throwing up the wall in her mind against that old agony. Even now, the memory hurt.

Anne relaxed. “That’s a relief.”

Dovey whirled, her yelp of surprise matching Gwen’s. “What?”

“I only meant—” Anne’s cornflower-blue eyes widened. “It will make things easier. There will be no explanations that need be made when you marry. We will simply say you were parted, but have been faithful to my brother all this time.” She raised a pale eyebrow. “Might we?”

Gwen stared. “Faithful,” she echoed. An image swirled to mind of her entwined with Pen in his bed, moist and gasping.

“For that’s why we’ve come, of course,” Anne went on. “So Daron might offer his hand and make good his promise. Finally.”

Gwen reeled in her chair. “Did your parents die?” she blurted.

“No.” Anne winced. “Though your father passed. You did not know? I am very sorry.”

Blood throbbed in Gwen’s finger and her head. Her father, dead. But he had been lost to her long ago.

“His widow wouldn’t know where to find me, to tell me,” she murmured.

“Well, I am happy we found you at last.” Anne reached her small gloved hand across the table. “Gwen. Everything can be better now.”