“What?” She looked disdainfully at him instead of recoiling in horror as he had expected. It was very difficult to ruffle the outer feathers of Lauren Edgeworth. Good Lord, he had been aroused by her last evening, and she had been standing flush against him and must have realized it unless she was more of an innocent than she could possibly be at her age. Yet she had appeared as cool as a spring breeze when she drew away from him and informed him that his duty was done for one day. “I absolutely do not swim, my lord.”

“Kit.”

“Kit. I do not swim, Kit. That is my final word.”

“Two strokes and a bubble?” he asked sympathetically, cupping his hands for her booted foot and tossing her up into the saddle. “You sink like a stone?”

“I really would not know,” she said, arranging her skirts and sitting so gracefully that she looked as if she might have been born in the saddle. “I have never tried.”

Never tried. Good Lord! What kind of childhood had she had? Or had she skipped childhood altogether? Perhaps she had been born a lady.

“Then you will start this morning,” he told her, swinging up onto his own mount and leading the way out of the cobbled yard. “I will be your instructor.”

“I will not.” She rode after him. “And you will not.”

If Vauxhall had not happened, he might have been repelled by her. So coldly dignified. So perfectly ladylike. So lacking in spirit and humor. So absolutely joyless. Though even then, perhaps, he would not be able to resist goading her. But Vauxhall had happened. And he knew that somewhere beneath layers and layers of cool decorum, behind mask upon mask of gentility, lay a woman desperate to come out into the light but not knowing the way. Like a child waiting to be born but clinging to the familiar, confining safety of the womb.

Keeping his promise to her was the one redeeming act he could do in his life. One small act, which would bring him no personal absolution, but which might set a fellow mortal free. He could teach her to embrace joy. It was something he could never do for himself, though his acquaintances might be skeptical if ever he were to say so. He wore very different masks from Lauren’s. But it was possible to teach what one could not practice. It must be possible.

He led the way down the drive and across the bridge before turning to his right onto the path that followed the river and then skirted the bank of the lake. The trees were denser on this side than on the side closer to the house. Sometimes the path wove deeper into the wood so that the water was lost to sight altogether for a minute or two. He stopped at one such point and looked back to make sure Lauren was having no trouble following.

“What do you think?” he asked her.

She looked reproachfully at him. “I think,” she said, “that all civilized mortals are still in their beds at this hour. And I seem to remember that you promised to show me the formal gardens today, not the wild woods. If this is your idea of giving me enjoyment, I made a sad bargain.”

He was getting under her skin, then. The oh-so-proper Miss Lauren Edgeworth had allowed annoyance to creep into her voice. Kit grinned.

His destination was the temple folly. It had been built close to the water’s edge years ago for picturesque effect, mainly for viewing from the opposite bank, where its marble perfection could be seen reflected in the lake on a calm day. But it also had a practical function as a resting place for those energetic enough to stroll all about the lake’s perimeter. It had been used by his brothers and his boyhood self as a bathing hut. Bathing had always been permitted in the lake—provided they were supervised by an adult. The catch had been that only very rarely had any adult been available and willing to accompany them, and even then there had always been an adult voice yelling at them not to dive off tree branches, not to swim underwater, not to go out of their depth, not to ambush one another or squirt water at one another or pull one another under. So they had bathed here, where they were out of sight from the house and were likely to remain undetected.

He dismounted when they reached the folly and tethered his horse to a tree branch. Then he lifted Lauren down before untying the bundle that he had secured behind his saddle. He led the way around to the front of the folly and up the shallow flight of marble steps to open back the double doors beyond four pillars.

A wooden bench lined the three interior walls. The floor was tiled, the walls plain except for an intricately carved frieze, across which naked, curly haired youths chased fleet-footed nymphs through unlikely groves of riotous flowers and ripe fruit. He and his brothers had more than once stood on the bench in order to ogle and snicker over the nymphs, whose flimsy, diaphanous garments hid nothing whatsoever of the feminine charms beneath. Small wonder that the youths were in eternal pursuit.

“Have a seat,” he offered, and Lauren sat against the inside wall, facing out toward the lake view, her feet set neatly side by side, her hands cupped one on top of the other in her lap. Kit set his bundle down and seated himself on one of the side benches. She looked severe and somewhat brittle.

“Newbury Abbey is close to the sea, is it not?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “The beach is part of the park.”

“But you never swam there?”

She shook her head. “I have never liked the beach,” she said. “Sand gets in one’s shoes and clothes, and the salt wind off the water dries one’s complexion. And the sea itself is . . . wild.”

“Wild.” He looked curiously at her. “You do not like wild nature?” Did not everyone love the sea? Was there really, perhaps, nothing but primness to the very core of her?

“Not the sea.” She gazed out at the lake, which this early in the morning was like a smooth mirror reflecting the rays of the sun. “It is so vast, so unpredictable, so uncontrollable, so . . . cruel. Nothing comes back from the sea.”

What or who had not come back? Had someone she knew drowned? And then he had an inkling.

“When your mother and your stepfather went away on their wedding trip,” he asked her, “did they go overseas?”

She turned her head to look at him, rather startled, as if he had changed the subject.

“They went to France first,” she said, “during a lull in the wars, and then gradually south and east. They were in India the last time I ever heard from them.”

The sea had not brought her mother back.

“I am told that my uncle and aunt took me to see them on their way,” she said. “Apparently I waved my handkerchief until the ship had disappeared beyond the horizon. It must have taken a very long time. But I have no memory of the event. I was only three years old.”

No memory? Or a memory pushed so deep that it could not surface into her conscious mind?

The sea had never brought her mother back.

But this was not the sea, and he had not brought her here to make her melancholy. He got to his feet and stood in the doorway, looking out.

“Did none of your childhood playmates swim either?” he asked her. “Even in that pool you told me about?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Neville and Gwen both did. It was forbidden, of course, but whenever they arrived back at the house with wet hair on a particularly hot and sunny day Aunt Clara would pretend not to notice and my uncle would purse his lips and ask if it was raining.”

“But you never broke the rules yourself?”

“It was different for me,” she said.

He looked back over his shoulder. “How so?”

“I was not their child,” she explained. “I was not even a blood relation. I was a stranger foisted upon them by circumstances.”

He felt angry on her behalf. “They treated you like an outsider, then?” he asked.

“No.” Her answer was very firm. “They showered me with love. They treated me no differently than the way they treated their own. I was as much Neville’s sister as Gwen was. And Gwen and I were bosom friends almost from the day of my arrival. You must have seen yesterday that Aunt Clara and Gwen both hold me in affection. They came here with me. But they . . . Well, I owed them so much, you see. How could I disobey my uncle and aunt? How could I not every day of my life do everything in my power to show my gratitude, to prove myself worthy of their affection?”

He believed that Lauren Edgeworth had just presented him with an answer to some of the questions he had about her. This was why she had shaped herself into being the woman she was—no, not woman. Lady was a far more appropriate word. In order to earn acceptance and love? This was why her whole life until a year and a half ago had been devoted to Kilbourne, who apparently had told her when he went off to the Peninsula that she was not to wait for him? Because her adopted parents had planned a match between them? Because in a marriage to Kilbourne she had foreseen final acceptance, final security?

But that security had been cruelly destroyed.

Was she in fact, despite all her control and dignity, the most insecure person he had ever known?

“Do you have much to do with your father’s family?” he asked her.

“No. None whatsoever,” she said. “After my mother had been gone for a year or so, my uncle wrote to ask if my own family wished me returned to them until she did come home. Viscount Whitleaf, my uncle, who succeeded to the title after my father’s death, said no. But I did not know this until after I wrote to him myself when I was eighteen and he wrote back to tell me that—that it was a practice of his never to encourage hangers-on or indigent relatives.”