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His stomach did a languid, delicious flip when she fixed him with a level gaze. Her eyes were a sort of faceted blue ringed in darker blue.

“What if I am?” she said softly. “Do you never take dares? Are you so very, very obedient, Mr. Redmond, so proper, so upright?”

He threw back his head back and released a whinny so competent birds exploded from the trees in fright.

Isolde gasped and staggered backward a few feet and clapped her hands over her mouth. Her eyes were flared in shock.

After the alarmed flapping of wings faded, all was deafening silence.

Isolde remained frozen. Her eyes were still wide with what appeared to be horror.

Isaiah’s knees nearly buckled from humiliation. Inwardly, he flailed in panic.

What the bloody hell had he done? Why had he done it? How had a Redmond come to be whinnying in a graveyard? Was he ruined? Would she mock him?

Who the devil was he anymore? He was tempted to turn tail and run.

“I thought…” he stammered. “But you said…”

Finally, she slowly, almost somberly, lowered her hands.

“It’s just...” her voice was an anguished hush. “Your whinny was so much better than mine, Top Boy. I’ve never heard a better one. I'm bitterly jealous.”

He froze. His jaw dropped. He clapped it shut. Outrage surrendered almost at once to a flood of what felt like the purest happiness.

“Holy Mother of God. You are a minx .”

Suddenly, an answering whinny from an actual horse echoed from somewhere out on the main street.

They both burst into laughter.

They crouched down behind headstones like naughty children when the vicar popped out his head from the church, reflexively faintly smiling at the sound of merriment, even if it was occurring among the departed. Such was life. Presently he disappeared back into the church.

“You are a dangerous person, Miss Sylvaine,” Isaiah said with a sigh, finally. “A menace.”

“Your poor face.” Miss Sylvaine’s eyes were shining with laughter tears. “You were so worried. I’m sorry. What must you think of the Sylvaine girls?”

For a luxurious few moments, they merely regarded each other.

He was reasonably certain that she could see in his eyes what he thought of one particular Sylvaine girl.

Everything was wrong about this, at least according to everything he’d been taught.

He had an ironclad sense of honor and propriety.

They ought to be chaperoned. He was not, had never been, a cad.

And if this girl had been claimed by Eversea, Isaiah wouldn’t dream of overstepping, not even for the pure visceral pleasure of triumphing over him.

Gentlemen simply did not do that sort of thing. He was above all a gentleman.

Any day now he would be engaged to be married to a beautiful girl he greatly esteemed, and this alliance would bring happiness and honor to his family. Every beat of his heart brought Fanchette closer to Pennyroyal Green, and to that moment.

Yet when he looked into Isolde’s eyes, he could feel something long misaligned in his spirit notch back into its place. The result was an almost dizzying relief. As if he could finally, at last, take a full breath.

“You’re not sorry at all,” he accused softly, teasing.

She smiled again. The dimple at the corner of the pale pink curve of her lower lip beset him with the sort of spiky restlessness that was the very reason she ought to be chaperoned.

She sighed contentedly as she looked about. “I think I’d like to be buried here.”

He was amused. “Surely not for a good while yet.”

“Oh no, not until I have at least ten or twelve grandchildren.”

It was impossible to imagine this laughing, lithe girl as a grandmother.

But as a mother…

He suddenly imagined little girls like her and her sister, gamboling like horses around the lawns of Redmond house, and his heart squeezed painfully.

His heart accelerated to a gamboling pace as he asked the next question.

“Are you so very certain your life will always be in Pennyroyal Green, then, Miss Sylvaine?”

She abruptly went still. As though he’d pressed a bruise.

Then she smoothed her hands along her apron and matter-of-factly squared her shoulders, visibly tucking herself and her confidences away from him. Her expression was unreadable.

She carried her bucket over to the next nearest headstone that was wearing a little coat of lichen.

He stood, too, and followed her slowly.

He realized his heart had ticked up a notch in anticipation of her answer, which would either devastate or elate him, and by rights, should do neither. It should not matter to him at all.

Very belatedly, very carefully, she replied: “I suppose not.”

She sounded subdued.

His heart gave an unwise leap. If she was engaged to Eversea, this would be the moment to say so. Wouldn’t it?

Unless she was feckless, or coy.

He would swear on his life that she was neither.

Perhaps she was concerned that speaking the word “Eversea” aloud to a Redmond was like holding a crucifix up to a demon.

Had she heard anything about his connection to Fanchette? He’d only been mentioned once in the newspaper this season. And never directly in connection with Miss Tarbell.

“Are you certain you’ll be in Pennyroyal Green your whole life, Mr. Redmond?”

“ Someone has to live in that big house the Redmonds built a century ago.”

She smiled at that. Which was much better.

“Have you ever wanted to see the world beyond Pennyroyal Green?” She was plucking weeds now; his view was the top of her straw hat.

He knelt across from her and set to work on the stone with the little brush.

“After university, I did the usual Grand Tour then came home. I enjoyed it very much.”

“The world world,” she said. “The places across the vast oceans, not just across the channel.”

This sounded both like a challenge and a serious question.

Jacob Eversea had just officially entered the conversation, if Isaiah was not mistaken.

He was suddenly oddly nervous and excited, as if he was confronting the man himself across a chessboard.

“I’ve always felt that Pennyroyal Green is a world unto itself, in many ways.”

She looked up swiftly, her eyes flaring in surprised pleasure.

She dropped her gaze again. “It seems that way to me, too. But I do love hearing about other parts of the world. It makes life here in Pennyroyal Green even more vivid.”

An unworthy, wayward surge of jealousy shortened Isaiah’s breath. With an unendurable clarity he imagined her listening with starry eyes to Jacob nattering on about distant lands, the way Fanchette listened to him go on about his investment group.

“What boy doesn’t dream about that sort of adventure?

I confess I have. But I’m my father’s heir.

I’ve a duty to our family to uphold. What if something became of me on my journey?

In light of this…it seemed to me selfish, perhaps even callous, to leave behind loved ones who would worry about me.

Especially since I know I intend to build my life and fortune here in England. ”

What the devil was he doing?

He didn’t know. He only knew what he’d just said was both truth.

And strategy.

She stiffened. Her face fleetingly tensed, as if she’d absorbed some inner blow.

She turned and wandered distractedly through the stones.

Isaiah stayed rooted to the spot, on the theory that perhaps a little physical distance from her would help clear his head and sort out his motivations. Because he suffered for two reasons: his truth had caused her pain.

And if she was hurt, it meant she must care very much for Eversea.

“Your sense of duty is very noble,” she finally allowed politely. “Your loved ones are fortunate.”

“Duty is love, Miss Sylvaine.”

She turned her head swiftly toward him.

He didn’t know why that “l” word would shimmer and echo in the air between them like heresy, or a magic spell. He wasn’t a poet. He never glibly came out with things like that.

He understood it was because he’d never before had a reason.

She appeared to be mulling this assertion. He sensed there were a dozen things she wanted to say, and he wanted to hear all of them.

“Duty is one expression of it, surely,” she agreed, finally.

The very way she moved—the sway of her skirts, the set of her shoulders, all of it—made him think untoward thoughts about other expressions of it.

Suddenly she halted near the little angel bench to read the inscription.

Bloody hell.

She slowly turned to him. A hesitant question was written all over her face.

Reluctantly he told her, “Yes. Nathaniel Duncan Redmond was my older brother.”

“Oh, my goodness. He was only nine years old.” Her voice drifted with sadness.

He moved closer to her. “Tragic, I know. He was remarkable. Far more brilliant than I, of a certainty. Could charm the birds from the trees. Born with intellectual and athletic gifts of all sorts. He was everything a man would want in a son and heir.”

He’d managed to make his tone match his usual internal dialogue about his brother: somber, yet lightly ironic.

Why he would tell her these things, he didn’t know. It was just that it oddly didn’t seem much different than saying them aloud to himself.

“He sounds remarkable, indeed,” she said gently. “And I’m not a wrangler, but I can do arithmetic, Mr. Redmond.” She tipped her head toward the dates on the plaque. “And if you’re just recently out of university, I do wonder how you know these things about him.”

He smiled faintly. “You’re right. I never met him. He died of an illness two years before I was born. But my father made certain I knew all about him. And my mother arranged to have the bench made.”

“Good heaven, your poor parents.” She paused. “It can’t have been easy at all for you to grow up that way, Mr. Redmond. Amidst their grief. I’m sorry for your loss, too.”

He went warily still. No one— no one —had ever before made such an observation to him. Let alone with such tenderness.