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“Better how?” Daron had simply changed his mind, and she was expected to come to his hand like a pony eager for the treat long denied her?

She stared at Anne, at the woman she’d matured into from the meek, dainty girl.

Anne represented the life that had ended for her when Gwen received Daron Sutton’s scrawled note that he was marrying another.

Ruined, penniless, as good as orphaned and carrying a child, she’d been cast wholesale from polite society, Anne’s world.

Pen’s world.

Not her world. Not any longer. There was no going back.

Anne watched her, eyes wide with innocence. As if Gwen could simply step away from her new life back into the old one. As if there wasn’t a chasm between them large enough to bury her.

“Daron wants to marry me?” Gwen repeated.

“That is my greatest hope,” Daron Sutton said.

He stepped through the door leading outside, entering the kitchen as if he owned the place. Dovey and Cerys grew as still as the air before a storm whirled up from the bay.

Gwen gaped. He wasn’t as tall as she remembered.

He wore a bright blue coat of superfine tightly fitted about his broad chest and middle.

His pale blond hair swept forward over his cheeks and brow.

His deep-set eyes looked smaller than she remembered, his nose larger.

His lips still had their childish, Cupid’s bow shape, but his jawline had grown soft and fleshy.

Nothing remained of the boy she’d wildly adored, who had so excited her with his whispers and touches that she’d snuck off to the castle ruins at the edge of his property and let him plow her in the grass as if she were a dairy maid.

His face registered surprise, a hint of shock he quickly hid, and then a gleam of approval, even satisfaction, as if he recalled those stolen moments, too.

But he didn’t raise a flicker of excitement in her. Not anymore.

“Daron,” Anne said, “Gwen doesn’t know that her father?—”

“Our condolences, I’m sure.” Daron swept her a courtly bow, then reached for Gwen’s hand. She leaped to her feet, wild with the urge to escape.

“Gwen, darling.” His voice boomed. “Caught you off your guard, I see. But surely Anne told you why we came?”

“She said you wanted to see me.” Her words came high and thin. Dovey stood behind her. She had allies. She was on her own turf. He had no power to cast her out—not here. “I cannot imagine why.”

“This is your welcome for old friends? Gwen. My soul.” He bent to one knee, quite prettily, though his waistcoat strained across his middle as he reached out to grasp her hands in his.

The Suttons’ English cook had been feeding him well.

“I’ve come to fulfil my vow at long last. You must forgive me for how long it took. ”

“I thought you married someone else.” She felt as if she’d lost too much blood, dizzy, heart pounding, though the cut on her finger was but a scratch. He’d sent the note. She’d read it. He was to marry a coal mine owner’s daughter, one with more money than Gwen would ever see in her life.

He pouted, his lips thin and sulky—had they always been so?

Nothing like Pen’s firm, well-shaped lips, full and yet somehow masculine.

Pen’s nose was assertive but not nearly so heavy, and the lines of Pen’s jaw were etched as firm and clear as dressed stone.

Pen’s eyes had a mischievous slant. Daron’s eyes were round and childlike, his lashes so pale his lids shone through them.

His hands were sweaty without his gloves.

“I was—mistaken in her,” Sutton said. “Gwen! You can’t imagine the agonies I’ve endured without you. How could you leave without word?”

“How could I?” Gwen pulled her hands from his and went to the fire, taking a cloth to wrap about the handle of the hissing kettle. She felt like that, boiling and ready to scream.

Sutton lurched to his feet and cleared his throat. “As to the matter of the—little stranger that, er, was of some concern to us?—”

She waited, against her will wanting to hear what he would say about the babe he had denied.

Anne came to his rescue. “Not an issue,” she said.

Sutton relaxed. “Then all is well!” he said heartily. “Where should we have the banns read—your parish or mine? I imagine there will be many improvements you wish to make to Vine Court, and I for one?—”

“I’m good enough for Vine Court now, am I?” Gwen asked. The hot water seethed as she filled the teapot. “What changed your mother’s mind?”

“Oh. Er. You see…” Sutton glanced at Anne. Her delicate brow furrowed. “Ah, well, the mater has come round,” he said. “Persuaded of my affections, and all that.”

“I see,” Gwen said. “Your affections have persisted all this time? And you suppose I’ve likewise been biding here, waiting to marry you, all this time.”

Cerys sucked in a breath and fisted a hand in her mother’s skirts. The remaining teacups trembled as Dovey set them in a line.

“Well, no one else’ll have you!” Sutton blurted. “Ruined as you are.”

Gwen stared at him. He dared come here, after years of silence, and presume she would tumble happily into his arms? Without even an apology for the way he’d destroyed her life, without the least effort?

She had the fleeting and unworthy wish that she’d worn a gown more fitting for such a dramatic moment.

She’d dreamed of this reunion, in those first early dark and hopeless nights.

She’d dreamed Anne Sutton would seek her out, weeping and penitent about her parents’ cruelty.

A hundred times she’d imagined Daron Sutton crawling back, begging for forgiveness, a return of her love.

And here she stood in her worn flannel gown, her much-used woolen shawl, her hair straggling free of its ribbon like Medusa’s snakes.

“Can’t see why you refuse me. Me!” Daron looked truly surprised.

“You cannot?” Her voice strangled in her throat. “Past circumstances aside, I have nothing to offer you. I have no dowry. No property. No family, not any longer. What possible interest could you have in me?”

Anne stirred. “Gwen, dear, your father?—”

“Not now, pet,” Sutton said. He advanced toward Gwen with a fulsome smile. She held the teapot before her as a shield.

“Rushed my fences, I see!” he exclaimed.

“Too much, too soon. Of course, you’re overwhelmed.

Take a day or two to consider, Gwen, but I know what your answer must be.

You gave your heart and your troth to me long ago, and I have come to claim them.

” He placed a pale, fleshy hand on his embroidered waistcoat beneath the elaborate cravat.

Gwen glanced at Dovey. Her friend clutched Cerys’s hands, her face brave and resolute. At Gwen’s look she briefly nodded, as if giving her permission to depart.

The longings Gwen thought dead and buried stirred in the ash of her old sorrows. This was the fantasy that had sustained her through many lonely years. Daron before her. Asking her to be his wife. Offering her a home.

Vine Court was a beautiful place, and she could be its mistress.

She liked Llanfyllin, a market town nestled on a river near the foot of the mountains.

People would know her yet, though it had been eight years since she left.

There were other great houses nearby that could offer her society, and she would be considered a gentlewoman. She would be safe. Supported.

She would not have children to raise, not with the damage the previous birth had done to her womb.

And Daron would be her husband, the boy who had pleasured himself with her body in tall grasses and dark halls, moaning desperate vows that came to nothing when his family intervened.

He would be a husband who followed his whims wherever they led and he would expect to be obeyed.

She would have his name, but, she suspected, not much else. And for that, for Vine Court, she would give up the home she’d built here with Dovey and the others. She would give up her freedom to carry her basket around town upon her own business. He might ask her to give up harping.

And she would have to give up Pen.

Pen wasn’t hers anyway. She stifled a bolt of pain at the thought.

She was stealing him and would have to give him back eventually.

But in his embrace she had healed at last of the wound dealt her soul when she was cast out of her former life.

With Pen she was desired, adored. Cherished.

He was her match in passion, in intellect, in determination.

And in him she had found a man of wit and humor, a man who had himself struggled to heal, and who had learned self-awareness as well as compassion for others. He had changed.

Daron Sutton was simply an older version of the boy he’d been, petulant, self-interested, glib of tongue and shallow of nature. Daron Sutton and Vine Court were not what she wanted, not any longer.

Penrydd was the man she wished she could have. Pen and St. Sefin’s and her life with her people here, even though she knew one or all would be taken away from her. She couldn’t have Pen any more than she could have had Daron, all those years ago.

A sudden grief surged through her breast, climbing her throat in a choking wave. She had to escape before any of them saw her tears.

“I’m afraid I must decline the great honor of your hand, Mr. Sutton,” she said, clinging to the last shred of her self-control. “I?—”

She rushed from the room.