Kit stared at her over his shoulder, but she was looking at the hands spread in her lap, as she had done at Vauxhall, he remembered. What the devil? He certainly wished he had known this two weeks ago.

“My grandfather would have taken me, I believe, if he had been asked,” she said, looking up at him again, a slightly defiant tilt to her chin, as if she expected him to argue the point. “But he would have thought, correctly, that I was better off with children of roughly my own age.”

Galton had never offered to take her, then?

Kit grinned at her suddenly. “We are wasting the best part of the morning,” he said, “when the water is at its calmest and freshest.”

“Go and enjoy it, then,” she said somewhat tartly. “I will sit here and watch you, though I would ask that you not remove your shirt. It would be most improper.”

He laughed outright. “For propriety’s sake,” he said, “I must bathe in my coat and boots, then, and you in your habit and feathered hat? We would ruin perfectly decent clothes and look like a couple of drowned rats at the end of it all.”

“I am not bathing at all,” she said. “You may get that notion out of your head, my lord. And you might have the decency to do that outside where I will not have to watch you.”

He had stripped off his coat and flung it onto the bench. He was tugging at one of his boots.

“What are you more afraid of?” he asked. “Getting your toes wet? Or allowing me to see them bare?”

Her cheeks turned slightly pinker. “I am not afraid of anything,” she said.

“Good.” He tossed his one boot under the bench and tackled the other. “You have five minutes to get down to your shift. After that you are going to be tossed in, ready or not.”

“What?”

“Four minutes and fifty seconds.”

“My sh-shift?” Her cheeks were flaming.

“I suppose,” he said, “you are wearing one. I perceive a slight problem if you are not. I may not be able to restrain my blushes.”

She stood up, all polar righteousness as his second boot disappeared beneath the bench. He was unbuttoning his waistcoat.

“I am going back to the house,” she announced. “I begin to see that I should have listened to my relatives in London after all. Stand out of the doorway, if you please, my lord.”

He grinned, and his waistcoat landed on top of his coat. He began tugging his shirt free of his riding breeches. “Four minutes.”

Her nostrils flared. “You would not dare.”

“Ah. That ill-advised word again.” His shirt came off over his head and he wondered if she would swoon.

But she was made of sterner stuff. “You are no gentleman, my lord.”

He tipped his head to one side as he mentally debated with himself whether he would bathe in his breeches or—far more sensibly—in his drawers. “You really ought to aim for some originality, you know. Three minutes fifteen seconds.” He decided reluctantly on the breeches. He had brought an extra pair with him, after all. He lifted one leg to peel off his stocking.

“Please,” she said quietly, “let me go.”

Would he really toss her in, fully clothed? Probably not, he decided. Undoubtedly not, in fact.

“You wanted an adventure, Lauren,” he said. “You wanted a summer quite different from any other you have ever known. You wanted to know what it feels like to live as other people live—people who do not have to earn the respect and love of those who nurture them. You wanted to know exuberance and happiness and freedom from restraint. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot expect these things to drop into your lap if you do not reach out to embrace them. I cannot keep my side of our bargain if you will not allow me to.”

“I do not know how to swim,” she said.

“I will teach you,” he told her. “The water is not even very deep at this point. It is less than shoulder deep.”

“I cannot remove my . . . I cannot,” she said.

It was a definite problem. He could see that, given the type of woman she was.

“I’ll jump in and swim for a few minutes,” he said. “I’ll not even glance in this direction. I’ll not even know it for a while if you decide to steal off back to the house. When you are ready, wrap one of the towels about you—they are large—and come to the bank. I’ll help you into the water. Or you can jump in unassisted if you prefer and I’ll not see you at all.”

“Kit,” she said, “I did not know it was going to be like this. I did not mean this.”

“Or kisses. Or passion. Or riding. What did you mean, then?” he asked her. “Go back to the house if you wish. I will not stop you.”

He turned and strode away to the bank. He dived in headfirst and came up a short distance out into the lake, gasping from the shock of the water’s coldness. He shook the drops out of his eyes and then put his face back under and began a slow crawl in the direction of the opposite bank.

“Kit?”

Several minutes had passed and, though he had not looked back to the folly, he was convinced that she must have started back to the house, probably on foot. But before he could turn his head to look, she called his name again.

“Kit.”

She was huddled over at the edge of the bank, kneeling, all except her head from the chin up wrapped inside the blanket in which he had rolled the towels. He swam a few strokes closer to her.

“The water is freezing,” she said. “I cannot do this. Please don’t make me.”

What she could not do, he guessed, was take off that blanket and expose herself to his view, clad only in her shift. He felt his temperature rise a notch, cold water notwithstanding, at the realization that she must indeed have removed most of her clothes. He swam the rest of the distance and stood a couple of feet from her, both his hands outstretched.

“The moment of truth,” he said. “How strong is your desire for adventure? How great is your courage to attempt something new and different? And undeniably daring. This is it, Lauren. Now or never.”

She drew the blanket tighter about herself, if that were possible.

“Take my hands,” he said. “Or go back home.”

Back home, he had said deliberately. Not back to the house. He could see from the look in her eyes that she understood him. If she wished it, the whole charade could be over with this morning, almost before it had begun. She could return to Newbury or to London with her aunt and cousin.

She moved into a crouch and set first one and then the other hand in his, and with nothing left to hold it about her, the blanket slipped to the grass. Her cheeks flamed, he tightened his grasp on her hands, and she jumped—the lesser of two evils, he supposed, since her slim, shapely legs had been suddenly exposed from the knees down as well as her arms and shoulders and a generous expanse of bosom. She looked a good deal younger than usual.

And then she was gasping convulsively and clawing at him with both hands in utter panic. He grasped her waist and drew her under with him until the water covered their shoulders and she would have only its temperature to contend with and not the morning air as well. He was laughing—mainly at the impropriety of what he had coaxed her into. Her bare legs brushed against his and he was very aware that there was almost nothing between his hands and bare, inviting flesh.

“You are not going to drown,” he assured her, “or freeze to death. You will be used to the water soon. It is not so very cold. Hold your breath.”

He drew her down with him until they were fully submerged. He felt her fingernails dig into his arms and saw that her eyes were tightly closed and her hair floating in a dark cloud about her face. He lifted them both to the surface almost immediately.

She surprised him then. She opened her eyes, stared at the bank and at the water, and then into his eyes, droplets gleaming on her thick lashes. “I did it,” she said. And then again, as if it were a moment of immense triumph, “I did it.”

He threw back his head and laughed.

He began her first lesson, teaching her how to put her face in the water without panicking, how to blow out through both her nose and her mouth. She was a surprisingly apt pupil. Though perhaps it was not so very surprising. He suspected that she had always been diligent in her efforts to master whatever she set out to accomplish.

Finally he taught her how to float on her back. Once he had convinced her that she would not simply sink like a leaden weight to the bottom and neither be seen nor heard from ever again, she relaxed and followed his instructions. But she would do it only as long as he had a firm hold on her back beneath her shoulders. The last time she tried, he kept his hands braced beneath her until he knew she was relaxed and buoyant, then he slipped them away. She floated alone, her arms stretched out to the sides, her eyes closed. After a few seconds he stepped away and waded around until he was a little way in front of her feet.

“The sky is lovely this morning,” he said. “There are just enough fluffy white clouds up there to accentuate the blue.”

She opened her eyes and gazed upward. “Yes,” she agreed—and then realized where he was. She sank, came up sputtering, and wiped water from her eyes with both hands.

“I might have drowned!” she scolded. And then she lowered both hands, fixed him with a wide gaze of astonishment from her lovely violet eyes, and . . . smiled. A full, sunny smile that lit up her face and made her suddenly and radiantly pretty. “I did it, Kit. I floated alone.”

She came wading toward him and somehow—his mind did not follow the full sequence of events—her arms were twined tightly about his neck and his about her waist and he was twirling her in the water, taking them downward as he did so, and covering her mouth with his own just before they went right under.