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Daron curled his lip in distaste, regarding her as he would a poisonous viper. He snapped his fingers at his sister. “Come, Anne! We won’t stay and listen to this vicious diatribe. If this person has no sense of the honor I do her in offering her my hand, I won’t stay to importune her. Vaughn?”

Daron hastened toward the carriage standing in the drive. Anne wavered with indecision. Vaughn glared at Gwen, his pale eyes glittering with malice.

“You fool,” he spat. “You stupid tart, so high and mighty. Your mines could keep both our families plush in the pocket if you weren’t so selfish.

” His thin lip curled, and the glint in his eyes turned to lust. “What are you holding out for, then? Want my hand instead of Sutton’s?

Leave him and his puling sister in the cold.

He’s got nothing, but I’m son to a knight. Bit more tempting, is that?”

He moved closer, and with a sick rush Gwen remembered the press of his fleshy body against hers in the shrubbery, his slobbering lips, his member probing at her hip. She shuddered with revulsion.

“I’d rather you kill me before you try to mount me again, drewgi .”

Red blotches sprouted on his pale face. “Mind your manners, you filthy trollop. You don’t know what I could do to you. Bring evidence to the magistrate that you’re running a disorderly house. Strip you of everything and see you locked in the bridewell besides.”

Gwen lifted her chin and hid her shaking hands in her shawl. “There is no evidence. You have no case.”

“Don’t I?” He thrust his face near hers, spittle flying from his lips. “Whole town knows you’re an odd lot. Wouldn’t take much to convince a justice you’re running a brothel of some sort. Men coming in and out of here all the time.”

“What men?” Evans asked.

He stood in a gap between the outbuildings and the tall back of the priory.

He leaned on his cane and held a sack slung over his shoulder from which emanated the distinct smell of fish.

Pen, as if remembering Barlow’s scorn, stepped behind Evans and pulled down the brim of his woolen cap, hiding his face.

Gwen’s stomach dropped into her old worn boots. This was the end. Pen would recognize Vaughn, or any moment Vaughn would look at Pen. She’d wanted the lies to end, hadn’t she? But not like this. Not so soon. She steeled herself for the killing blow.

“Miss Gwen?” Evans searched Gwen’s face. Then he looked to Dovey, who had come out of the kitchen without Gwen noticing. “Mrs. Van der Welle,” he said gently. “Is everything all right?”

“We had guests for tea,” Dovey said. Her expression was taut, her cheekbones standing out as she clenched her teeth. “Friends of Gwen’s.”

Gwen held back a sob of breath. Dovey stood to lose everything, too. When Pen recovered his memory. If Vaughn made good on his threats.

“We’re leaving.” Vaughn’s pale, watery eyes flicked over Evans, then passed with the same contempt over Pen, who studied the ground as if watching for snakes.

“Tea at Greenfield tomorrow, Gwenllian, and we’ll settle this proper,” Vaughn said.

“Mayhap my intended can remind you how to behave like a lady.” He extended an elbow to Anne.

Anne glanced at Dovey, then Gwen. A wistful expression crossed her face. “I’d like to be sisters again, Gwen,” she said softly, and took Vaughn’s arm.

They headed for the carriage. The moment they left, Pen lifted his face.

Gwen froze at his expression, as flat as stone and as unreadable.

He dropped his own sack, and the top burst open to reveal the glassy eyes and speckled silver scales of salmon, an enormous catch. Then he strode into the brewhouse.

Gwen bolted after him.

She flinched as Pen threw down a wooden cask with a crash. She’d seen before how he needed exertion to vent his emotions. She supposed it was the reason he had taken up sparring with Gossett.

His growl was that of a wounded bear. “He wants to marry you.”

He reached for a bucket from a high shelf. “No!” She leapt forward, snatching the bucket from his hands.

“No, you don’t want my help? Or no, your old lover didn’t ask you to marry him, and then Vaughn made you an offer straight after?”

“No, you can’t put that in our brew. It’s not malt.” Her voice was unsteady, and she clutched the bucket to her middle as if it could hold her together. The cut on her finger throbbed as her heart drummed.

He scowled. “Looks like grain.”

“This is darnel. Delerium grass. I spent all day picking it out of our barley, and I put it high so the goats can’t find it.

” She moved to replace the bucket on the shelf.

“It looks like regular grain, but its effects are worse than drunkenness. A man can go mad, hallucinate, develop tremors. Too much will void the stomach, enough will stop the lungs.”

Pen reached for the bucket, his warm, strong fingers clasping hers. She wanted to sag against him, let herself bask in the heat of his touch. But he was angry, and she had to know why.

He stared into the bucket of innocuous-looking seeds. “And you put that in beer? Or bread?”

“Of course not. It’s poison.”

Slowly Pen tugged the bucket from her grasp. “I want to use it.”

On them? Her heart clenched with fear. “Why?”

Lines fanned from his eyes as his face tensed.

He’d grown tan from working outdoors, wearing the face of an honest laborer as well as the attire of one.

Next to Daron’s or Vaughn’s milky whiteness and silk waistcoats, he exuded virility, assurance, strength.

A tendril other than fear curled through her belly.

Simply being near the man made her vibrate like a string on her harp.

Seeing only his rough clothes and ungloved hands, Vaughn had dismissed the Viscount Penrydd as a rough laborer, just as Barlow had. But had Pen recognized Vaughn?

He swiped up an empty bucket and stomped to the well. “Are you going to take him back?”

“No.”

He grunted as he hauled on the winch, muscles flexing across his shoulders and back, visible beneath his rough woolen coat. She longed to touch him, to smooth away the tautness in his body, the grim lines around his eyes. She longed to hide within his arms and let the rest of the world float away.

“But he wants you.” He unhooked the full bucket and set it on the ground. She passed him an empty bucket and shivered as their fingers brushed.

“Wanting isn’t having,” she said, heartache in her voice.

He lowered the second bucket into the cold depths of the well. His tense, coiled strength sent a thrill through her, but she couldn’t tell if it was danger or desire.

“Isn’t he rich? He could give you the money to buy this place from that lord you mentioned. Take you away, give you fine things. Treat you like a queen.” A long pause filled with the creak of the rope as he hauled up the bucket. “Isn’t that what you want?”

“I want to keep St. Sefin’s.” Her voice shook. Was this the reckoning at last?

“You wouldn’t give it up to be a rich man’s wife?” The second bucket sloshed as he dropped it to the ground.

“Daron isn’t rich any longer. He came here because he thought I have money. That’s the only reason he offered.”

His snort startled her. He lifted the heavy buckets with ease and strode back to the brewhouse. “Gwenllian ap Ewyas. Are there no mirrors in this place? Neither of those men wants you for a dowry.”

Was he trying to tell her that was how he felt about her? It was purely a sexual urge, the instinct of a man to sow his seed?

She watched as he returned to the brewhouse and poked at the oven, spreading the fire to heat the water he poured into a second vat. The first, the ale she’d made that morning, belched the thick, yeasty smell that told her it was ripe and nearly ready to be poured into casks.

“Why do you want the darnel?” she asked again as he took the bucket of poison from the shelf. The grains held the blackish tint of the fungus that caused hallucinations. She’d learned the hard way how to distinguish them.

“Revenge.” He emptied the bucket into the vat of fresh water.

Her heart stopped. “On us?”

He scowled and, with a long stick, poked at the sodden mash in the vat. “Are you the only one allowed to keep secrets?”

Her throat closed completely. He knew she was lying to him. He just didn’t know how much.

What would he do to her once he knew?

He dropped the stick and stalked toward her.

Gwen backed up until the rough wooden wall of the brewhouse bumped against her rear.

He braced an arm against the wall and leaned in, and her head swam with the delicious scent of him, earthy heat and virile male.

She was lost to coherent thought when he stood this close to her.

“That girl, the sister, didn’t recognize your name. Ewyas. What’s your real one?”

She stared into his eyes. “Gwenllian Carew.”

He stared back, waiting.

“My father was ambitious. He wanted to be accepted by the Saes .” Her voice was a whisper. It felt good to speak the truth at last, like setting down a stone she’d dragged behind her far too long. “But my mother was Cymry to the core.”

“So your name is Gwenllian, at least. Where were you born?” His breath brushed the hair above her ear, sending tingles down the backs of her knees.

She bit her lip. “We lived in a small village in Merionethshire called Llan Festiniog. The Moelwynion mountains to the north, a spectacular set of waterfalls, and Roman ruins close by—it was a lovely place to grow up. My father’s family farmed for centuries, and my mother’s family ran the Pengwern Arms.”

“Why ap Ewyas? For your false name.”

She sucked in a breath as he dragged a hand from her hip along her side, brushing her belly and ribs, resting in the curve below her breast. The wicked man knew his touch made her thoughts scatter like curlews startled from the riverbank.

He knew, too, how she craved him above all else, couldn’t deprive herself of his nearness.

“When St. Gwladys told me to stay here—I had to be from somewhere, and I didn’t want my past. My father had told me never to contact him until I had redeemed myself. I had no friends who could take me in. The man I’d trusted had betrayed me, and I’d buried my child.”

His gaze held on her steadily, without accusation, without scorn.

She ran her tongue over her lips, and his eyes followed.

“The old histories sing of Eudaf, Earl of Ewyas, who battled for the Silures against the Romans. He was father to Elen the saint, who became the mother of Constantine and the wife of Macsen Wledig, Maximus the Great. I wanted to be from a place that bore such strong, fearless women.”

His gaze dropped to his hand, continuing its path up her body. One thumb circled her breast, teasing but not touching the tip. He knew her body so well. She wanted, at last, for him to know all of her. For the pretense to be done.

“Properly it should be ferch Ewyas, since I am a daughter, and ap means son. But I was no one’s daughter.

No one’s wife. No one’s mother. I never wanted to be hurt again in the ways a woman can be hurt.

” She swallowed the hard lump in her throat.

“A man can be free to make his way in the world. So can a saint. And so would I.”

He raised a hand to her throat, placing a finger in the delicate hollow between her collarbones. “You hid your past, and I lost mine. But you don’t want your past back. I wonder what you can tell me of mine.”

Her breath scraped like gravel in her throat. His eyes held a guarded look again, a veil she couldn’t see through.

“Dovey,” she said, choking on the word.

He frowned. “What?”

“I—I have to talk to Dovey.”

His hand tensed at her throat, and she had a quick, wild thought that he wanted to throttle her into telling the truth. She too wanted to tear down this last wall between them. He’d never hurt her, and she wanted to stop hurting him.

“All this time,” he said in a low voice, “you’ve been protecting Dovey.

I ought to have guessed it.” He drew a long breath, as if steadying himself, and then with deliberate slowness let his hand drop as he stepped away.

“If I know anything about you, it’s that you would step in front of a cannon for Mrs. Van der Welle or her child.

” His mouth lifted on one side, not a smile, yet not a sneer.

“Would that you felt such loyalty to me .”

Gwen gasped for air. Her chest couldn’t take in enough.

She’d let this go on far too long. She wanted to tell him everything.

How ashamed she felt that she had ever let a boy like Daron Sutton use her.

How Pen had awakened her heart. How much it hurt that Calvin Vaughn would threaten to say foul things about St. Sefin’s when she had worked so hard to make a place of refuge for those like her whom life had broken.

Pen wouldn’t just hate her for lying to him for so long. He’d refuse to sell St. Sefin’s to her, too, and then she and her people would be in exactly the position she’d tried to avoid: turned out without a roof, without sustenance, without hope.

She’d be left with nothing. Again. And this time, she didn’t think she would survive.