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Anne. She stood on the set of shallow stairs that led to the verandah of flagged stone that ran along the back of the house, where the French doors let into the gallery and the windows looked into his study.

She wore a shawl draped around her gown, and in the silver glow of the moon she was a statue of Greek antiquity, a column of poured light, a lady of the lake dripping magic.

A goddess of old coming to visit her wrath on mortal men.

“What were you speaking of?” she asked Daron, her voice low. Hew heard the music in it and wondered why he hadn’t noticed before what a rich, powerful voice she had. He remembered her song, the haunting lament for the lost beloved, the cry for where redemption could be found.

Hew moved toward her. He had been moving toward Anne Sutton his whole life and only just now realized that.

“Tied yer garter but good, haven’t you?” Daron said, his voice a grim crack in the shadows. “Chose the close-fisted one to cast yer lot with. The milksop. He’ll not raise you nor any of us. All his counters are for Greenfield.”

“This is his home. That is his right. It was you and Calvin who planned otherwise.”

Her voice was equally cool, but Hew sensed a painful rigidness in the line of her shoulders and spine. She, too, saw where Daron’s thoughts went, and he hadn’t a care for her.

Daron looked her up and down. “After everything Mum and the pater have done for you. What I’ve done for you. This is how you repay us.”

His words were careful, sharp points that fell clearly, not slurred in the least. Daron pushed past her, climbing the steps, and Anne’s shoulders slumped.

Hew didn’t have the right to draw her into his arms. He’d tossed a net over her head like a hunted reedling on the river bank, but that didn’t mean she would come to his hand.

“What are you doing out of doors?” Hew asked.

She moved down the gravel path toward him. Moonglow bathed her neck and the artful coils of her hair. She looked made of spun sugar, impossibly sweet, and when she stopped before him and tilted back her head, her eyes were silver pools of light.

“What am I doing? The same thing you are, I suppose.”

He traced a finger over the gloved knuckles clutched at her bosom, holding her shawl together. She smelled of night flowers, of fancies that rode to earth on showers of stars.

“I’ve been wandering the paths in the moonlight, waiting for a magical woman to rise from the mist over the Ebbw and come to me.” Hew glanced at the stars wheeling above their heads. “Or descend on a spill of starlight, though one hears less about those.”

The corners of her mouth perked up. Her smile wavered when a thump behind her said Daron had slammed his way into the house, but she held his gaze.

“Don’t be absurd,” she said. But she allowed him to slip his fingers beneath her palm and lift her hand.

“I am Orfeo, searching for my Euridice,” he said.

He wasn’t customarily fanciful; the moonlight must have touched his head. Or the sight of her, every pure and astonishing thing that he would never, with his bloody, soiled hands, be allowed to touch, to hold.

“Now you make fun.”

He tugged lightly, coaxing her to walk beside him. “I would never mock such beauty. I had no notion you could sing like that. You made my mother speechless for five entire minutes. She adores fine music.”

“I hardly think I will win her over by singing.”

“I think you could win anyone by your singing,” Hew said. “Like the sirens that lured Odysseus. You have certainly captured me.”

The enchanting corners of her mouth pressed into a solid line. “You made it sound as if you’d won a prize.”

He tucked her hand beneath his arm, the way he had pulled her to his side in the drawing room. It felt right to have her close. Necessary.

He’d sprung a trap on her again, this time before all his mother’s friends—the people that, should she live at Greenfield, would become her friends, her community, her neighborhood.

“Your brother forced my hand,” Hew said quietly. “He was spreading tales that you were found in my bed. My mother had tried to keep it a secret, so you could be free of me, I suppose. But John Jones heard, and what he discovers, he will make sure everyone knows about in the span of an hour.”

“You could have refused me,” she said. “Let me twist on the wind. Hang myself with my own rope.”

“I told you I would not refuse you. You must be the one to jilt me.” He tried to keep the growl out of his tone.

“Now?”

“Take what time you need. To decide what you want.” He was doing it, keeping his voice level, the register of logic and reason, not howling need. “Only, where will you go? And who will support you?”

“I suppose it is ridiculous to think I might support myself.”

“How?” He musn’t let his voice go sharp, reveal his hurt at the thought of her leaving. Weakness was despicable in any man, but more so in a man of the military, a man who was supposed to be made of iron and powder, not bone and blood.

She stopped in the pathway. The look she turned to him was so full of dismay, of appeal, that again he felt the overwhelming urge to pull her to him, wrap her in his arms as if he could be her shelter, her defense.

“I don’t know,” she said. “And I hate that I am so helpless. I hate that I know nothing. Of how to take care of myself, of how to—” She stopped, bit her lip, and a shadow moved over her face, a blush touched by moonlight.

“I know nothing of how to be alone, and nothing of how to be married. I know nothing . Except how to sing.”

“That is no small thing.”

This despair came from the thought of being married to him. Hew tried to force back the haze that laced his vision, that primal need to grab her, hold her, keep her. The beast in him wanted to weigh her down, chain her at wrist and ankle so she couldn’t escape.

“Will it earn me my supper? Will it earn me anything?”

“I suppose this is the sign that you are well cared for,” Hew said slowly. “That you are loved. Your family has protected you. Sheltered you.”

“Bartered me,” she said bitterly. “And much good it has done them, for how far my value has fallen.”

Hew felt that phantom shiver down his back, the memory of the cat-o’-nine-tails sinking its hooked barbs into his back, tearing flesh. If he held her, kept her, she would be disgraced by the marriage. Chained to a man who’d been court-martialed, if he wasn’t shot for treason first.

She would hate him for it.

“Your brother would rather Calvin for you. He thinks I am the worse bet.”

She pulled her lip between her teeth. “My brother is showing himself a fool. He has already squandered my dowry. I fear he will make a worse mess for himself, trying to find ways to support himself. Dishonest means.”

Heartbreak laced her voice, bare as a vein of ore in the mountain. Hew squeezed her hand. She was slender and warm.

“I will try to advise him. He should not be involved with Darch.”

“I fear he will not take advice. He is—” She caught herself.

Such admirable self-control the woman had.

Such unruffled calm, a will of iron, for all that she looked soft as silk.

“He is not the brother who raised me,” she said, something forlorn in her voice.

“Not the brother I loved. That brother would never try to sell me. He would have given me the moon.”

Hew wanted to sink his fist into Daron Sutton’s sulky face. He ought to have given his sister the moon. She deserved it.

Hew would give it her, if he could.

“My brother has changed as well,” Hew said, walking along the path beside her.

She moved like a whisper at his side, as if she were indeed made of mist and moonlight.

“Calvin was always a selfish little bastard, even when we were small. He’d cheat when you weren’t looking.

He’d cheat if you were. He always wanted to be the favorite.

He was, with our mother, and often with our father, too.

But I never thought he could become—” He hesitated.

“I’d hoped reaching manhood would teach him better. ”

“You ought to have been your father’s favorite.” Anne glanced his way. “You are the eldest. The heir.”

“One would think that the way of things, wouldn’t one? But I was a disappointment.”

“A military man? A hero, a disappointment?”

“When I was supposed to stay and take up the reins at Greenfield, yes. My father wanted a John Jones Junior.” There was the bitterness in his own voice, bare as a blade.

“A rousing Corinthian who could ride to the hunt, take any fence, lose his money on a horse or a cock or the card table with a jaunty grin. I liked to save my money to buy things I wanted. I liked to build things, not squander or play. I was too serious, too somber. He preferred Calvin’s company to mine, and so did our mother, to please him. ”

Anne turned toward him, a whisper of her alluring scent rising from her skirts, weaving into his brain.

He feared she could peer through his wooden face to the memories that were surfacing, the boy scorned by his father, the young man who again and again watched Sir Lambert walk from the room, shaking his head and muttering that he should be cursed with a tradesman’s son and not a gentleman.

His father’s back turned toward him, always.

That was reason enough to stay away for the funeral and after, doing estate business with the solicitor by mail at Southampton.

Too cowardly to return to Greenfield one more time, knowing he would never redeem himself, never be good enough to earn his father’s approval, no matter what he built, no matter what cities or islands or ships he saved, no matter how many decorations he received.

He wasn’t the son his father wanted. He was a gunner, a builder, a soldier, a captain of men, but he wasn’t a gentleman of culture and leisure, not now, not ever.