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“Whatever you had planned when you invited me to Cornwall.” She bit her lip. “Her. When you invited her to Cornwall.”

Both brows climbed his forehead. “Botanizing? It hardly seems to agree with you.”

She flushed as he let his gaze travel from her limp, dispirited hair down to the filthy wreckage of her shoes. The old Neal Traymayne would never have treated her to such a mocking survey.

“Now who’s lying.” She saw his lips part in startlement and snorted. “Botanizing! You took her to meet your cousins. You pretended to like every page of her miserable, plodding tome. You kissed her.”

“You,” he corrected, eyelids lowering so the lashes shadowed his irises, made his expression dark and inscrutable. “I kissed you.”

She ignored the flutter in her stomach. “You were trying to seduce her.”

“And you wished to transform into Muriel.” He wore a faint smile. “Why? If you’re longing to be seduced, you might as well have stayed closer to home, and kept your own . . .”

He hesitated, sweeping her again with that sardonic gaze, attention lingering on her lips, her breasts.

“Identity,” he finished.

“I don’t want to be seduced. I want to be . . .” Horrified, she slammed her mouth shut.

Loved. Unsaid, the word seemed to hang between them.

She rushed to fill the air.

“I made the wish for all sorts of reasons. If I were truly Muriel, I wouldn’t be lying, for one thing.”

“Forget your objections to women’s education and get thee to Girton,” he murmured. “With logic like that, the sky’s the limit. You might end up admitted to the Aristotelian Society.”

She flushed at his withering tone. But she continued.

“If I were Muriel,” she said, “I’d be fascinatedly fascinated by shrubs and fluent in Mongolian and I’d find your special dandelions with the purple dots and there wouldn’t be an end. We’d have an unfashionable feather-free wedding in Penzance and give our children botanical names like Basil and Heath and Lily and Rose and live happily ever after.”

“And the real Muriel? What happens to her in this fairy tale? Does she transform into Lavinia?” He said it lazily, but he’d stilled every muscle, something inside him snapping to attention.

“I wouldn’t wish that on her.” She frowned. “I don’t know what happens to the real Muriel. Lavinia . . . That’s easy. She disappears.”

She realized her knees were trembling with fatigue, but her vision had cleared. She no longer saw through a haze of tears.

“She won’t be missed overmuch.” It was a fact. She could say it without emotion. “Lavinia was empty-headed. Also, vain, spoiled, and a terrible snob, always making things more difficult for everyone around her. She had no friends to speak of and thought only of herself and—”

He interrupted her with a groan. “Stop. I’m not a judge on the court of assizes. I don’t have a taste for self-flagellation. Besides, in my experience, it’s simply the flipside of self-indulgence.” His gaze was assessing. “You’re not as thoroughly odious as you’re making out.”

“I’m not?” She blinked. His mouth tipped at one corner with derision, then he shook his head.

“I’ve certainly observed behaviors that support your claims.” For a moment, she thought he might begin to list them, instances of her empty-headed, vain selfishness. Instead, he shrugged. “I’ve observed other behaviors as well, which contradict them. You did, after all, wade into frigid waters after a drowning child.” He paused. “After me. Saving our lives made things significantly easier for the whole village.”

“I thought you had the situation well in hand,” she whispered. “Paddling toward the Cow Tooth, you said.”

Something sparked behind his eyes, a hint of the old teasing friendliness.

“I might have been overstating the chances of a positive outcome, due to my atrocious arrogance.” Now the quirk of his lips looked faintly humorous. “No one is without flaws. You’ve established yours.” He grew serious again. “I’m not trying to defend you, or condemn you. I’m simply adding to the data. You got sunburned as an urchin picking wildflowers for a village party, which doesn’t accord with vanity. You danced on a barrel in a spider-filled storeroom, uncommon for a terrible snob. I could go on.”

She felt herself gaping at him. “But . . .” she said into the silence, throat working. “But I was trying to be someone else.”

“You didn’t succeed.” He searched her face, his look penetrating, as though he could see through to her brain. As though he wanted to see her brain and suss out her thoughts.

“Every brave and generous act, every kindness . . . that sense of fun that I . . .” He rolled his shoulders uncomfortably.

“It was you,” he said at last. “Lavinia. Just Lavinia. A woman neither all good, nor all bad.”