Alice. The way he used her name was sweet, special, and a little stern. “No trouble breathing. I cannot credit it. For the past twelve years, any time I have been at the mercy of a horse, I could not manage it.”

“You managed it today. I am pleased for you, Alice Portman.”

Alice recalled the feel of him at her back on the horse, steady, solid, and calm. She grabbed her courage with both hands and locked her gaze with his. “Pleased enough to help me try again?”

“Of course.”

How easily he assented. “It might not go as well. In fact it probably won’t.”

His lips quirked up. “Or it might go better.”

“I would settle for being able to start, stop, and steer at a placid walk,” Alice said. “I would be thrilled with that, to be honest.”

And when was the last time she’d been thrilled with anything? Anything save her employer’s kisses?

* * *

“You look so serious.” Ethan frowned at Alice, wondering what went on inside her busy head. Her second venture in the riding arena, between tea and supper, had gone without incident, much to his relief. “Are you doing as the jockeys do at Newmarket and reliving each moment of your ride?”

She walked along beside him in silence for a moment, the evening sun finding red highlights in her hair. “Hardly that. I am contemplating the contrasts in my life.”

“This sounds weighty. Shall we pursue the topic while we stroll?” He offered his arm, and she took it, something that might have been a minor struggle between them only days ago. “Tell me about these contrasts in your life, Alice Portman.”

“When I lived at Sutcliffe,” Alice said as they reached a gravel walk that turned toward the stream, “we had such quiet. Days and days of quiet, nothing louder than Reese’s voice in conversation with my own.”

“It sounds Gothic.” Also like a waste of at least two women. “Were you happy there?”

“I enjoyed Reese and Pris,” Alice said, “but it was a bleak place. Most of the servants did not respect the lady of the house, which meant a great deal of work went undone. We managed our own mending, much of our own cooking and cleaning. If we wanted a bath, we carried the water, or it would not come up hot.”

“You lived as if you had no servants.” As if she deserved to have no servants. “Shall we sit? The evening grows pretty, and we are not at the end of this discussion.”

“We aren’t?” Alice settled on a bench at the base of a venerable oak. The tree was so large two people on the bench could both lean back against the trunk comfortably.

“We are not.” Ethan lowered himself beside her and wondered idly how many kisses the tree had witnessed. “The topic is contrast in the life of Miss Alice Portman.”

“So it is,” Alice said. “In any case, my life now is different from what it was for five years.”

“Different, how?” Ethan let his back rest against the oak and crossed his ankles. He did not take her hand, not when she was working up to confidences of some sort.

“Sutcliffe was peaceful. Predictable, stable, and safe.”

“You aren’t safe now? Should I be concerned?”

“Safe…” Alice huffed out a breath. “It’s hard to define what I mean by that. Relative to my time at Sutcliffe, my time since then has been a constant uproar.”

Uproar was not a good thing. Something cold trickled down Ethan’s spine, so he went on the offensive.

“You wanted a quiet rural post, and instead you find yourself dealing with an oversized, widowed social misfit, riding a comparably oversized horse, and a neighborhood full of titles suddenly expecting you to provide your charges—among whose number I might include myself—for socializing.”

If she left them… that cold sensation congealed into that familiar and unhappy acquaintance: dread.

“I feel as if,” Alice said slowly, “the mild breeze I’d used to sail along in my little boat has turned into a fickle gale, tossing me in all directions at once.”

“You’re knocked off your pins. It isn’t a pleasant sensation.”

“I thought you were going to say, ‘I’m knocked off my horse,’” Alice said softly. “And maybe that’s it. I feel a little of the same disorientation as I did then, when I was minding my girlish business one day and then literally knocked off my horse the next.”

Rage at her malefactors warred with the compulsion to take her in his arms.

“Your disorientation is understandable. The sensation will likely fade in time, as you gather more confidence in your changed circumstances.” But always, upset like this took too bloody much time to fade. Years and lifetimes.

“It isn’t…” Alice bit her lip and colored up furiously. “It isn’t just my circumstances.”

Ethan had to lean closer to catch her words, which had the effect of filling his awareness with lemon verbena. “I beg your pardon?”

“It isn’t just my circumstances,” Alice said a little more loudly. “I am knocked off my pins by… you.”

Silence, as Ethan studied Alice’s profile, from the compressed line of her lips, to the brilliant blush on her cheeks, to the quiet misery in her eyes.

“Alice?” His voice was carefully neutral. “Can you explain yourself?”

He gave her credit for turning to face him, despite the blush trying to swamp her dignity. “You are part of this gale-force wind, Ethan Grey. You…” When she might have risen and paced off to a safe distance, he laced his fingers around her wrist.

“Tell me,” he commanded softly. “Please.”

And because of that one entreating word, he knew she would.

“You touch me,” she said, dropping her gaze to her lap. “When I had such a bad breathing spell, you weren’t too fussy to offer comfort to a mere governess. At Belle Maison, on Argus, you put your arms around me, and I did not fall. Here, on the horse, you don’t let me fall, and then too…”

“Then?”

“You kissed me,” Alice said, her voice dropping again. And Ethan realized that she’d gone long years without a friend, but far longer years without a kiss.

“I kissed you,” Ethan said, “but you kissed me as well.” He was fiercely glad to recall this.

“And there is the problem.”

“Are you making too much of a single incident, Alice? You aren’t going to leave your post over some backward female notion of protecting my honor, are you?”

“It isn’t that one kiss. It’s that I want another.”

Thank God for all His mercies. “Does this have to be a problem?”

She was female, and she was Alice, so his question was rhetorical.

“Of course it’s a problem. You are my employer, and by all rights, if you’re kissing a decent woman, you ought to be doing so in the interest of finding a mother for your boys. You need not humor a lonely governess.”

“Good God.” Ethan shot to his feet and jammed his hands in his pockets. “Is that why you think I kissed you?”

“You’re kind, though you’re shy about it.” Alice rose as well, her chin coming up as her blush faded. “I know this about you, and I know as well that in the years I’ve been in service, I haven’t exactly had to fend off the advances of drooling hordes of fevered men.”

“I should hope not!” Ethan looked at her in consternation. “You wear those great ugly glasses that distort your lovely eyes, you scrape the most glorious hair on God’s earth back into an old woman’s snood, you dress as if in half mourning for your former life and in gowns that hide the most luscious…” He glared at her then reached for her with both hands, anchoring her by the upper arms and bringing her flush against him.

“I did not kiss you out of some condescending motive like pity, Alice. I kissed you because I had to, and I have to.”

He framed her jaw gently in his hands, angling her face toward his, and then brushed his lips across hers in a whisper-light warning caress. When she made a yearning sound, he joined their mouths and gathered her to him.

“Ah, God, Alice…” His sigh held longing, humor, and resignation to go with her name, and then got down to kissing her in earnest. One hand slid down her back, to press her tightly against his groin; the other drifted to her nape and buried itself under that scraped bun, and held her captive for his mouth.

He did not plunder, not exactly. He tasted and hinted and suggested, until Alice’s tongue was tangling with his, and her breathing was accelerating. Her hand found its way into his hair and, if anything, she was pressing her body eagerly to his.

Eagerly!

Which would lead them… Ethan withdrew his mouth and rested his chin on her crown. He wasn’t about to let her go, not when she rested against him nigh panting with the effects of a brief, fully clothed kiss.

“Dear Almighty God,” she whispered. “Dear Almighty, Everlasting God.”

“Amen.”

Alice raised her face from Ethan’s chest and regarded him curiously. “Are you laughing at me?”

“Good heavens, no.” Ethan stepped back, ignoring the shriek of disappointment echoing through his body. “I need to sit, Alice, and so do you.”

Though she at least wasn’t hiding her arousal.

And arousal itself was a relief for Ethan. He’d begun to conclude his capacity for unbridled passion had prematurely aged. In almost two decades of sexual experience, he couldn’t once recall being so physically enthusiastic about a woman so quickly. He’d learned caution at a high price, but with Alice…

“I’ll go,” Alice said quietly, and Ethan realized she was sitting a few inches from him on the bench, primly not touching. To blazing hell with that. He threaded his fingers through hers and drew her wrist to his lips, because nobody was going anywhere just yet.

“Back to the house? Or you’ll sail your little skiff right out of my life, out of the boys’ lives, and find another bucolic retreat where you can once again impersonate a forty-nine-year-old spinster?”