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He joined the small knot of people clustered around the boys. Most of the men, like Davy, were thatched with straw-colored hair, and the women and reedy girls sported blond braids. Strouts. They began to walk up to the village, still in a huddle. Loveday and Tomas followed. Families took care of each other here.

None of Lavinia’s relatives had written her or her mother during or after the trial. They maintained what Lavinia had once thought a necessary and universal distinction.

There was family, and then there were poor relations.

“Why were you in the water?” Neal’s voice was husky. They fell into step behind the others. She slanted a look up at him.

“They were going in the wrong direction, the boats.” She glanced back at the bay. The wind had calmed and the water looked dark and glassy. “I saw you, you and that boy, but I couldn’t make myself heard.”

“So you strode into the sea to save us.” Neal smiled faintly.

“You make it sound dramatic.” She swallowed and stopped short. He was teasing her, but his eyes shone with peculiar intensity.

And it was real. This moment. She had stridden into the sea, just as he said. She had. Not Muriel Pendrake. That intense look was for her alone. Her chest expanded.

“I suppose you do have me to thank for your life,” she conceded, as her heart—given more space to soar—fluttered wildly against her ribs.

He laughed, gave an admiring shake of his head. Admiring but also . . . negating.

“You were magnificent,” he said. “But I was paddling us toward the Cow Tooth. It’s what they call that round flat rock. There.” He pointed. “You can barely see it. It disappears at high tide, but even then if you climb atop, the water doesn’t reach your knees.”

Unbelievable.

“So you had everything under control.” She stared at him. “Cliffs, storms, inaccessible bonnets, drowning boys—all fun and games to Neal Traymayne.”

“About your bonnet.” He pushed back his hair. “It was the one casualty. I might be able to retrieve it tomorrow, although I can’t vouch for its condition.”

“Retrieve it?” Now she gaped. He was joking, yes. She knew him well enough to recognize the glint in his eye. But he meant it. He’d go down the cliff again. “Have you a death wish?”

“Not at all.” He shrugged. “Or—not anymore.”

She understood then. He was so kind, so straightforward, so admiring, so different from other men she’d known, that she hadn’t realized until now.

“You are atrociously arrogant.” She couldn’t help but look again at the jagged cliffs, the drop down to the sea. What a good opinion he had of his own physical prowess! She shifted her gaze to scowl at him, at the wide neck, broad shoulders, and thick arms he esteemed so highly. “What would your sisters say?”

“They’ve known me to climb worse.” He was grinning. He really hadn’t experienced a moment of fear, getting spun about in that crushing water, with his life and the lives of those two boys hanging in the balance.

Perhaps it wasn’t arrogance, but a mental infirmity. But of course, plant hunters were lunatics. She’d lost sight of that essential fact because Muriel Pendrake made it all seem so mortally dull in her manuscript. Why, just the other day he’d laughed about battling condors in the Andes!

“Also, I am a member of the Swimming Association of Great Britain.” As he uttered this ridiculous line—with a breeziness that indicated perfect awareness of its absurdity—he pushed up his sleeves, and she saw that the hairs on his arms were standing on end. How long had he been in the water? He must be congealing with cold. But he seemed completely unconcerned. He was enjoying himself. The danger had passed and now he relished the aftereffects. Any scrapes or bruises would be his to wear as badges of honor. Fool man.

“My friend Alan—who fought the one-sided duel with his writing—we joined together,” he continued. “We’re passionate advocates of the sport. I sponsor a club in Truro, or rather Varnham sponsors it. Alan edits a weekly swimming paper, The Swimming Record. He’s won dozens of quarter-mile championships himself. Timed races in artificial pools. He can’t get enough of them. I prefer tidal swimming myself, rivers and ocean, the long-distance challenges. Shorter races too. Jump from a boat at London Bridge and swim to Greenwich.”

The Thames. Her breath stuttered. How casually he said it. Jump from a boat.

“This wasn’t the day I’d have picked for a diving competition.” A water droplet running down his forehead rolled off the bump on his nose, fell, and divided at the corner of his mouth. He licked it away with the tip of his tongue. “But I beat my personal record.”

He stood there, dripping with brine, large, confident, casual, joking about everything that had happened. It wasn’t a joke, what they’d all just experienced. It had been a harrowingly close call. A reminder. So what if he was skillful, strong, young, thought himself bloody invincible.

Fate didn’t care what he thought.

He turned, started walking again toward the village, but she didn’t move. She was rooted in place.

“What if you’d drowned?” The question came out with ugly force, a bark. “Who would care about your personal record then? He broke his damned neck, but what a dive, forty feet.”

Her heart had ceased to flutter and beat thickly. Doom-doom. Doom-doom.

“You could have drowned,” she said. “Anyone can drown.”