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He stumbled, then paused. Anne swallowed the bitter taste in her mouth and focused on unwrapping her pie.

“It shames me to say it, but you should know. My superior officer was angry with me because he thought I had taken his woman.”

She froze, fingers curled over the oiled paper like talons. “What do you mean?”

“He’d found a local woman. A—courtesan. He was besotted.” Hew frowned at the golden-brown crust of his pie. “He discovered she made an advance to me.”

“Oh.” Anne shoved her own pie in her mouth so she did not reveal the jealousy, the rage, that sheared through her at the thought of another woman in Hew’s arms. Pleasing him. Pleasured by him. Someone more beautiful and seductive, who might be in the back of his mind even as he?—

“I turned her down.”

She glanced up and her gaze collided with his, blue and steady on her face. “I do not poach on other men’s claims,” he added.

“Oh,” she said again, considering this. Hew did not poach. As if a woman were an acre of property or a hound or a gun, not to be borrowed without permission.

His eyes widened. “I phrased that badly.”

Anne clapped a hand over her mouth. “Did I speak aloud?”

She adored that crooked smile of his, bashful and burning all at once. “I wish you would always speak your thoughts to me. Whatever they are.”

“I could wish the same.” She lowered her hand, resisting the urge to fret with the fabric of her skirt, a nervous habit. “I am not sure I will remain sanguine while I listen, though. Gwen was the only person who spoke frankly to me, whether I wished it or not, and we quarreled often.”

Anne winced now at the memory of her younger, righteous self.

The Anne so certain that what she wanted was just and proper and true.

Then she had come south to Newport, into a world where she was no longer the hub and darling center, and the shreds of her old self were falling away like linens cut up for rags.

She was still discovering who stood in the midst of it all, the Anne she was becoming.

But this man had played a part on her shattering, and he had a part to play in her recovery. She was certain of that.

She managed a smile. “As a woman who also did her part to entice you, I suppose I have no call to be outraged that other women have tried the same.”

“Anne—may I call you Anne? Or is it yet Miss Sutton?” He unwrapped a paper full of chicken pieces, baked with spices and breadcrumbs, and laid one on her plate.

Warmth climbed her neck, circling her throat. “It is Anne to you,” she whispered. “Given our other intimacies.”

He didn’t draw back. He was so close, his shoulder nearly brushing hers, that strong, firm shoulder she’d clutched when she gave herself to him.

She smelled him, that combination of spice and earth that haunted her dreams, the musk of the man himself, muscle and iron.

His lips drew close to her ear, and she shut her eyes as his breath drifted across her neck, calling up tiny currents of light that raced from her skin to her core.

“I have been thinking of those intimacies. All of last night, and all of today.” His voice, a low murmur, was as heavy and warm as a hand on her cheek. She wanted his hand on her cheek. On her neck, her throat, her breasts, her—everywhere.

She squeezed her eyes shut. How was she to prevent herself from turning toward him, tossing aside everything in her hands so she could wrap herself around him again, press her body to his chest, claim his mouth?

She wanted to claim everything about him.

She wanted to plant herself in his arms and never leave.

She wanted him bound to her by oath and fire, sealed to her in that most primal of promises.

She shook with longing and the fierceness of her cravings, raw, unchained, unlike anything she’d known.

Anne opened her eyes. “You did poach me,” she said suddenly.

He reared back his head, eyes flaring. Something about the gesture, about the sheer masculine grace of him, wore her restraint to the merest thread.

He sat like a king of the forest, a primal force tucked beneath the veneer of a gentleman’s coat, but beneath the tailored clothes beat a wild heart, a passionate nature, a vein of tenderness with iron beneath.

Not forged iron, fired to the hardness of steel, but iron as it came from the earth, able to bend under blows, but not break. Not ever break.

“I was to be your brother’s,” she reminded him. “But I came to your bed, and you took me.”

The words were out before she considered them, and the blush climbed to her brows. Took had such a carnal sound to it.

“You were to be mine first,” he said softly. “Don’t you remember?”

“You turned me down.”

Say you regret that now. Say if you had only met me. Or, now that you have met me, say you would have chosen me.

It mattered that he might have chosen her, once.

“Would you have accepted me?” He turned the question back on her.

“It was not given me to accede or refuse. My parents had that power.”

“Would you have chosen me , Anne?” he asked softly. “If you could?”

She tore off a piece of chicken, still warm, the crispy skin parting to reveal the tender meat beneath. “Can you see yourself being married?” she asked instead. “To me.”

“Yes.” He didn’t hesitate, but he didn’t hold her with that smoky gaze, rather turned to his own plate. “Can you see yourself with me?”

She nibbled at her chicken, looking across the meadow and into the brown trunks of the trees as if she could peer through to the rise of mountains beyond.

“All my life, I’ve been told I must marry.

It was all I was meant for. Trained for.

When Calvin went for Gwen, I was at sea.

And when I saw Gwen taking everything I thought I should have had …

” She swallowed hard, the crumbs clinging to her throat.

“But Prunella—that is Penrydd’s sister-in-law—and the women of St. Sefin’s, Dovey, Eilian, they have shown me there are different ways a woman can exist in the world.

I might have more choices than I thought.

” She closed her eyes, breathing deeply.

The air smelled of water mint and harebell.

“And when you said you must marry me because I’d ruined myself … ”

“Nothing about you is ruined, Anne.”

He sounded so certain, his voice a low rumble, soothing as the lap of waves upon the shore.

“I think, now, there should be more to it,” she said. “To marriage. Money should not be the reason. Or station or name. Nor to stave off a scandal. I think … in the end there must be more. For a marriage to be strong and true.”

Dovey and Evans had known each other for years, worked side by side in the keeping of St. Sefin’s and its fragile residents.

Gwen had kept Penrydd in her care for weeks, learning who the man was at his core, with naught else to define him.

If Anne could bring Hewitt nothing else—not a dowry, not a family with wealth and connections or a title and a name reaching back to centuries of nobility—then she ought, at the least, bring him her heart, her loyalty and affection and the promise to put no other before him.

How could she bear to vow all this to him knowing in return that he wed her only for honor, a slender shield of respectability, and once yoked to him she was bound forever, no matter whom he might go on to be enticed by, no matter whom he might love?

She could not bear that. She was both too proud and too sensitive to be the abandoned wife. She would not be able to lead a separate life, knowing this man existed in the world. She would always long for him. She would always want to be with him. She would seek him in everything she did.

And if he did not want her the same way, she would slowly bleed to death from the thousand tiny cuts of humiliation. She would die of a broken heart.

“Good marriages have begun on less ground than what we have,” Hew said softly.

But did that mean he wanted her, in the ways she was asking?

She could not press the question past her lips.

She’d had a lifetime of being taught to be quiet, docile, demure.

A lady did not trouble or demand. She was graceful courage in every circumstance, soft pride when her heart was broken.

She never offered more than she ought, and she never showed weakness or disappointment or despair.

“We know so little about one another,” she whispered.

What she meant was, could he love her? A love that was honest and deep and true, a treasure they could mine their whole lives and find the delights never ceasing.

She had no right to ask for any of this, any of the things that a couple might share in love and devotion and mutual sacrifice, because she had not wooed him, she had not won his heart.

She’d chosen him on a mad, selfish impulse before she even knew what a deeply honest and just and true man he was, and she’d trapped him in a scandal just as surely as she had herself.

Ask him anyway .

But New Anne had not yet vanquished the old Anne, at least not the old chains that bound her. That deep-driven belief that she would only be loved if she were quiet and pretty and good . Those foundations ran to her core, and they were made of stone.

He leaned forward. Close enough to kiss.

Close enough that she could press her mouth to his mouth, pull his full lower lip beneath her teeth, slide her hands to his jaw where the beginnings of stubble would be the softest velvet against her palms. Perhaps he would slide his tongue into her mouth in that way that made her feel he wanted to devour her, that made her turn to liquid in her legs and between. She was turning to liquid now, and?—

“Someone is approaching.” Anne drew back her head.

A dog bounded into the clearing, crashing through the stand of ash trees and buckthorn bushes. The spaniel spotted them and charged, jaws parting, paws thudding into the thick grass. Anne froze in terror.