“So how did you get Alice on a horse?” Nick asked, carrying bread, meat, and cheese to the table.

“She knows how to ride.” Ethan put salt, pepper, mustard, and butter down next to Nick’s tray. “She just needed an incentive to deal with her understandable fears.”

“Reese Belmont said she’d been hurt trying to report a crime of some sort.” Nick carried the pitcher of lemonade to the table, while Ethan opened a bottle of sweet white wine and found glasses.

“I don’t know the details.” Ethan set the wine on the table to breathe. “And I don’t want to know them unless Alice wants me to. It must be bad, though. Hazlit was out here, strutting and pawing like a papa bear.”

“Hazlit?” Nick’s eyebrows rose. “My Benjamin Hazlit?”

“He’s Alice’s brother. I assumed you knew they were related.” And wasn’t it gratifying to know something Nick did not?

“I had no idea,” Nick muttered. “How odd.”

Ethan poured them each half a glass of lemonade, added a portion of wine, and took a seat across from Nick. “For what we are about to receive, we are damned grateful, amen.”

“Amen.” Nick reached for the bread. “I cannot fathom Benjamin Hazlit confiding in you, Ethan. Meaning no offense, but the man’s lips are closed as tightly as a king’s coffin.”

“His younger sister works for me,” Ethan said, waiting for Nick to finish with the butter. “He told me he’d call me out if I offended Alice, and I had to like him for it.”

Nick set the butter knife down, his expression distracted. “You like him for threatening you?”

“He’s protective. I would want our sisters to be able to count on us for the same. Mustard?”

“Please.” Nick accepted the mustard and set it down beside his plate. “I feel as if… First, you find a lovely woman where Pris’s starchy little governess was standing when last I looked. Then you turn up living not in some gothic horror but on a gracious, perfectly pleasant and prosperous estate. And now you tell me Benjamin Hazlit is revealing family secrets to you, and you like him for threatening your life. Maybe the ale was bad at the last posting inn I stopped at.”

“What did you expect, Nick?”

“I don’t know. For Alice to be holed up in her room, reading over the boys’ school work, you to be scratching away at your infernal correspondence, Tydings to be somehow grimmer. I don’t know.”

“Are you disappointed?”

Nick smiled self-deprecatingly. “Maybe. You don’t need rescuing, do you? Mustard?”

“Please.” Ethan accepted the mustard and tried not to flinch at the question. “Reserve judgment on whether I am in need of rescuing until after the picnic. Greymoor himself came by to issue his summons for this bacchanal. I found him likable enough, and might have to return his call.”

“You don’t visit?” Nick scowled at his plate. “Not even Greymoor or Heathgate or Amery?”

“I know Heathgate slightly.” Ethan sipped his drink, wishing it was something more fortifying than this bland concoction Nick favored. “I’m hardly his social equal, and why would I visit the others?”

“Because that is what one does in the country, Ethan Grey.” Nick directed a pained stare at his drink. “You visit, and you talk about the hunting and the shooting and the crops, or the lack of hunting, shooting, and crops. You bump into each other riding out. You cadge a Sunday meal after church. You stay for a pint at the local inn. You stand up with the wallflowers at the assemblies.”

Ethan remained silent, regarding his brother levelly because he honestly did not know what to say.

“I’ll shut up,” Nick said. “Pass me that tray. Growing boys need sustenance.”

Ethan passed him the tray and the butter and mustard.

“I don’t go to church,” Ethan said. “I don’t ride to hounds, I don’t go to the assemblies, and I don’t frequent the local watering hole.”

“Ethan?” Nick’s voice held consternation and concern.

“I do ride out,” Ethan allowed, “and thus I bumped into Heathgate. I’ve met Greymoor and that other fellow.”

“Amery,” Nick supplied. “Have you met Westhaven?”

“Not that I recall.”

Nick put down his glass with a soft thump. “You can’t live here in legendarily pleasant surrounds, cut off from all around you. It isn’t… It isn’t right.”

“Not right for you,” Ethan said, his tone mild. “But I accomplish a great deal, Nicholas, when I’m not dancing, visiting, gossiping, and watching a pack of dogs tear an arthritic fox to pieces.”

“Miller told me you’ve promised to take the boys cubbing this fall,” Nick said, apparently willing to reserve further sermons for later.

“They need to know the protocol if they’re to be gentlemen, and they ride well enough.”

Nick set his second sandwich down only half-eaten. “I feel like you’ve gone away, like you grew up and became somebody my brother could not have turned into. You were not like this as a boy.”

“Like what?” Ethan was truly curious, but concerned too, because he could see Nick was getting genuinely upset with him.

No, not with him, for him.

“You enjoyed people,” Nick said. “You joked with the stable boys, flirted with the dairymaids. The little girls wanted you to read them their stories and braid their hair and check under their beds at night. You beat Papa at cribbage and led me into one silly prank after another. And now…”

“Now?”

“You accomplish a great deal,” Nick said in exasperation. “You may not write to your brother but once in seven years, but you accomplish a lot. You’ll take your boys cubbing so they learn their manners, but you don’t call on your neighbors, nor they on you. You’re a good-looking, wealthy widower, but you won’t stand up at the assemblies. You probably make more money year by year, but you couldn’t be bothered to tell me you were married, much less widowed, much less a father twice over. What happened, Ethan? What on earth happened to you?”

Nick’s tone was so bewildered, Ethan couldn’t have been offended if he’d wanted to be, and he did not want to be.

Nor would he tell Nick what had happened. Not ever. For his own sake, but equally for Nicholas’s sake.

“I grew up, Nick. It wasn’t my choice, entirely, but I’m doing the best I can with it.”

“Is this how you felt about me, when all the wild talk circulated about my womanizing?”

Ethan pursed his lips. “Felt how?”

“Like some strange man was using your brother’s name,” Nick said. “Doing things your brother wouldn’t, and saying things he’d never dream of uttering?”

“No.” Was that how Nick felt? “I worried, Nick. That much carrying on isn’t about having the occasional recreational tumble.”

“It wasn’t.” Nick scrubbed a hand over his face. “How did we ever get onto such gloomy topics?”

“You are disappointed in me,” Ethan suggested gently. “I am socially backward, reclusive, and much preoccupied with my commerce.”

“And all of that”—Nick waved his big hand again—“would be of no moment, Ethan, but are you happy?”

Ethan had stopped asking himself this question at the age of fourteen. It had no bearing on anything.

“Happiness is a luxury,” Ethan said, staring at his empty glass. “If it comes to pass, it should be appreciated, but life doesn’t owe us happiness. I am content, Nick, and much less unhappy than I was when Barbara was alive. If that makes me evil, then so be it. Before she died, we learned what it meant to hate each other, though fortunately that was not the last page of our dealings. I did not marry well, and you did. Can we leave it at that?”

“For now.” Nick looked mightily disgruntled at the idea. “It isn’t that simple.”

“No,” Ethan agreed, rising, “it isn’t, but you are my first houseguest in the seven years I’ve been here, and I am not inclined to spend your afternoon rehashing ancient history. How long can you stay?”

“Miller mentioned that George might be out this way,” Nick said, getting to his feet.

“I’ve invited him and Adolphus both. We’ll see if he accepts.”

“Let’s say I’ll head back to Kent on Thursday morning. My business in London is done, and if I can spend time with George, I’ll consider my travels a success.”

“You may already consider your travels a success,” Ethan said, pausing with the pitcher in one hand and the wine bottle in the other. “I am glad you’re here, Nick.”

“I’m glad to be here.” His tone and his expression suggested this was not an entirely genuine sentiment.

Ethan set his burdens on the counter. As younger men, they might have settled this—whatever this was—with a round of fisticuffs. “I know you mean well, Nicholas, but please bear in mind, I am not you, and I am not the affable, innocent boy with whom you shared your childhood.”

This was an understatement the proportions of which defied description. Ethan wasn’t going to tell Nick that, either.

Nick sidled along the counter and hooked a beefy arm around his brother’s shoulders. “You are my brother, and if you are not happy, it’s hard for me to be happy.”

“We aren’t boys anymore.” Ethan wanted to pull away, but that would hurt Nick’s feelings. “You can’t create happiness out of a long summer afternoon, two boys, bare feet, and a cold stream.”

Nick didn’t say anything. He just put his other arm around Ethan and hugged him until Ethan stepped back and resumed tidying up their lunch.

* * *

“It’s Sunday,” Ethan said as he crossed the threshold to Alice’s room. “You cannot be working, Alice.”

“Says who?” Alice put down her pen and capped her inkwell. Why was it that Ethan Grey in riding breeches, boots, and waistcoat looked handsomer than any man she’d laid eyes on? His sleeves were rolled back to the elbow, exposing tan muscle dusted with golden hair. She wanted to lay her cheek against that forearm, taste the strength in his wrists.