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George in his charcoal-gray suit, eyes staring, flopped onto the shore by rivermen. Shivers moved up her spine.

He’d turned back around, and he watched as her mouth worked. His face became grave. Slowly, he reached out, cupped her elbows, exerting just enough pressure for her to know she could choose.

They were in public. But no one else lingered so close to the shore. Lights were twinkling above them in the village, signs that the villagers had returned to their houses, their fires. Her breath grated in her throat and her weight tipped toward her heels. Resisting him.

“Anyone can drown. Anyone can die in any number of ways.” He said it in a low voice. All his sunniness—suddenly clouded. He was looking not at her but at a point over her shoulder. He, too, saw someone’s blank face, staring eyes. With a jolt, she recognized his haunted expression.

But he blinked away the apparition, focused. On her. Wet, his lashes were more winglike than ever, black and curved.

“The miracle is—we’re alive.”

His hands on her elbows felt warm and steadying. Between those dark, beating wings, his eyes beckoned. She didn’t realize her weight had pressed forward into her toes until he was bending over her.

His face was cold. But his breath blew hot and sweet, and his tongue warmed the curves of her lips. She swayed closer, twitched at the contact with his clammy shirt. Her soaked skirt made an upside-down funnel and the cold traveled up from it, against gravity. He drew back a fraction of an inch, fingers massaging along her jawline, and then he settled his mouth on hers. A lingering kiss. The heat they built there, at that junction—it flickered through her. Her lips were vibrating.

She pulled away. “Your teeth,” she said. “They’re chattering.”

“Are they?” He sounded bemused. “I hadn’t noticed.” He chafed his biceps, stamped his feet. Literally. His feet. She stared.

He was barefoot.

He grinned at her with clenched teeth, grinding them together.

“Careful,” she muttered. “You’ll chatter your thick skull.”

He laughed as though he weren’t about to freeze solid.

The moment had been real. But it couldn’t last.

He was an unshod arrogant lunatic gardener, and she was a flibbertigibbet who didn’t know a Chinese shrub from a hill of potatoes.

A married flibbertigibbet.

What she’d felt in the Traymaynes’ kitchen—that had been real too, the warmth of the fire, of Loveday and Kelyn’s laughter, of the dough in her hands.

If only she could be who everyone thought she was.

She took Neal’s hand, his broad palm stretching hers.

“Toasted saffron buns,” she said. “That’s the answer. We must make haste.”

Toasted saffron buns. A delicious, temporary solution to all life’s woes. He tugged her forward and they set off across the sand.

Chapter Seven

No bonnet. Four hours of morning sun. Lavinia examined her face from every angle in the mirror mounted atop the oak dresser. All things considered, the damage had been minimal. She tolerated sun, it seemed, in larger doses than she tolerated strawberries. She looked blooming, rosy. The rosy nose was not optimal, of course. Rosiness, if it had to occur, should be of mild degree and confined to the upper cheeks. But at least her skin remained smooth.

She’d spent ages in the dim chancel of the church wrapping lichens in paper while Neal and the vicar alternately hammered and chiseled them off the rock wall. Maybe that sunless interlude had been her saving grace.

Before she left the well-appointed bedroom, she applied a thin coat of Varnham’s Ointment. A woman should be pictured on the advertisements, all dewiness. She’d tell Neal that this was an essential stratagem. Not her, of course. She’d suggest Emmeline.

Which reminded her.

She found Emmeline in the kitchen preparing lunch for the twins, milk pudding and soft-boiled eggs. Now or never. She plunged ahead without even a greeting. Their track record with pleasantries being what it was.

“Upstairs, in my trunk,” she began, “I have a gown, a lovely gown, lace and pale pink silk, from Paris.”

“How nice for you.” Emmeline dealt a severe blow to the egg in her hand and flicked shell at the table.