Heather pressed her lips tight, holding back a laugh as she bent to blow out the candle. Breckenridge looked faintly stunned at being called a “lad.” But he followed Mrs. Cartwright back into the kitchen, stepping in to relieve her of the heavy soup pot and lift it onto the hook over the kitchen fire.

Without being asked, he crouched and tended the blaze.

Mrs. Cartwright smiled down at him approvingly, then looked at Heather. “Come along, dear, and I’ll show you the necessaries.”

The “necessaries” proved to be a small bathing chamber-cum-washhouse giving off a tiny back porch, and an outhouse beyond. The main chamber contained a pump, which Mrs. Cartwright said came off the outside well.

“Plenty of water, bracing cold though it may be.” Mrs. Cartwright pulled a clean towel from a shelf. “I’ll just leave this towel here for you, dear.” Setting the towel on the washstand, she glanced around. “My son built this for us when he and his wife were living here.”

“You must miss them,” Heather said.

Mrs. Cartwright sighed. “Aye, we do, but you can’t keep young people from living their lives, now, can you? Wouldn’t be right.”

She led the way back into the kitchen. Heather followed her in, then excused herself to return and make use of the “necessaries.” After washing her face and hands, she felt considerably more presentable. A tiny mirror hanging above the basin allowed her to neaten her thoroughly disarranged coiffure. If her London maid could see her, she’d faint.

Feeling considerably more the thing, she rejoined Breckenridge and Mr. and Mrs. Cartwright in the kitchen. Breckenridge and Mr. Cartwright had settled to discussing the land around about and local farming.

Mrs. Cartwright ladled out two steaming bowls of soup and set half a loaf of bread and two pats of butter on the table, then directed Breckenridge and Heather to “eat up.”

They sat and did, while Mr. Cartwright produced a pipe and quietly puffed, and Mrs. Cartwright filled their ears with a catalogue of little things — like the harvest she hoped to get this year from her prize damsons, and speculation that their son and his wife would return for a few days at Easter.

It was a curiously soothing half hour, a reminder that, despite their flight and the potential threat posed by the mysterious laird, life still went on in myriad calm and quiet ways.

By the time she mopped out her soup bowl with a piece of bread, Heather felt a lot more inwardly settled and satisfied than the soup alone could account for.

This was the country. The Cartwrights, like all country folk, retired early. They bade Breckenridge and Heather a good night, and left them seated about the kitchen table, a single lighted candle between them.

Heather studied the flickering flame, then sighed. “We should get to bed, but I’m going to seize the chance to have a proper wash first.”

Breckenridge pushed the candlestick toward her. “Go ahead.”

Heather rose, and with the candle retreated first to their little room to fetch her cloak and shawl, then out to the bathing chamber. There she set her teeth, stripped to the skin, washed, dried herself, then, teeth close to chattering, hurriedly redonned her chemise, wound the shawl about her torso, then enveloped herself in her cloak. Slipping her feet, now clean, back into her new walking boots, swiping up her gown, she rushed back into the kitchen and straight through into their little room, saying as she passed, “I’ve left the candle in there for you. There’s another one in here. I’ll light it in a moment.”

Breckenridge watched her streak past. Any impulse to laugh was slain by the thought that she almost certainly wasn’t wearing much beneath her cloak.

Which wasn’t going to make the night any easier for him, trying to find sleep while in the same room as temptation incarnate.

Why she now figured as temptation incarnate to his lustful mind wasn’t a question he wished to dwell on.

Rising, he retreated to the bathing chamber and made use of the facilities, taking his time in the hope — almost certainly vain — that she would fall asleep before he returned to the room. He examined his beard, now grown in and thickening, and made a mental note to hunt out his shaving kit in the morning. And washing and combing out his rumpled hair wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

Eventually acknowledging that there was a limit to how long he could put off the inevitable, he picked up the candle and headed back to the kitchen. He checked that the fire was nicely banked, then pushed open the door to their room. . to see Heather snuggled down in the bed, closer to the wall, leaving more than half the bed vacant.

She was lying on her side, the covers outlining the quintessentially feminine curves of her hip and shoulder. Her hair was down. She’d brushed it; gleaming strands of gold laced the ivory pillows.

She’d left the candle burning on the cabinet beside the bed. Shifting her head, she looked at him as he paused in the doorway.

Her expectation couldn’t have been clearer.

Moving slowly, thinking furiously, he stepped into the room and shut the door. He hadn’t got much sleep in the barn the previous night; if at all possible, he’d like to sleep tonight. Blowing out his candle, he crossed to place it with the other still burning on the cabinet. Keeping his eyes from Heather’s, he moved back to the end of the bed, sat, and pulled off his boots. Setting them by the door, he straightened, glanced around at the available floor, then bent to pick up his cloak.

“What are you doing?”

Without looking her way, he flicked out his cloak, let it fall. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw her jerk upright. Fleetingly — instinctively — he closed his eyes, then peeked sideways through his lashes. She’d clasped the covers over her breasts as she’d sat up — thank Heaven; beneath the sheet, all she appeared to have on was her flimsy chemise.

The candlelight flashed off the gold band on her finger. His ring. The sight momentarily transfixed him. He shook off the effect, told himself he might as well get used to it; that band and all it proclaimed would be real soon enough.

Predictably, she frowned at him. “Don’t be ridiculous!” The words were a forceful whisper. She hesitated, then said, “I know a bed is — stupidly in my view and very likely yours, too — considered to be a somewhat different proposition than a pile of hay in a barn. But I’m no princess, and you’re no lowly knight. We’re in this together, and there’s no reason we can’t share this bed.”

Oh, yes there is. He was tempted to tell her why, graphically, but stating such facts aloud might not help.

Stating, for instance, that he no longer trusted himself to keep a proper distance — not after last night, not after the events of the day. A thousand little things had abraded his control; he didn’t need it stretched further, put under more strain.

And on top of his own compulsive desires, there were hers to manage as well. She was attracted to him; most women, most ladies, were. And young unmarried ladies — like her — were the worst; as a rule, they glorified him, more or less casting him as some sexual god. That was simply a fact — one he’d grappled with all his adult life — and as he knew to his cost, in a deeper sense that type of adulation meant nothing at all.

In this, he trusted her even less than he trusted himself.

And while not being able to trust himself to keep her at arm’s length — even though she was virginal, totally inexperienced, enthusiastic rather than accomplished, in uncounted ways the antithesis of the sophisticated ladies whose beds he occasionally deigned to grace — was of itself distinctly odd, that was another issue he didn’t want to dwell on.

Not now. Certainly not here.

Slowly turning his head, he met her gaze, his own steady, his expression impassive. “I’ll sleep on the floor because we don’t need any further complications in our relationship at present.”

When he was serious, as he was now, most people had the sense to give way.

Her lips thinned. Her eyes narrowed on his. “I realize,” she stated, her tone sharper, but still at a whisper, “that you want to be bullheadedly protective, honorable, and all the rest. But in case you haven’t noticed, the temperature is already falling, and will assuredly fall even more dramatically before dawn, and as there’s no fire I’ll freeze, and be too busy shivering to sleep, so if you really wanted to be protective and honorable you’d lie down here”—she jabbed a finger at the bed beside her—“and keep me warm.”

She held up the finger. “Furthermore, if you look down, you’ll see that the space between the bed and the wall is significantly narrower than your shoulders — which is why you’re standing at an angle right now. If you try to sleep there. . what if you turn over and knock yourself out on the bottom of the bed? Who’s going to protect me from that damned laird if you’re unconscious?”

Hands rising to his hips, he narrowed his eyes back at her. That she was attempting to manipulate him shouldn’t be a surprise. Regardless. . his ring continued to flash in the light, taunting him. “I—”

Up shot her hand; the ring flashed again. “I haven’t finished yet.”

Heather held his hard gaze, driven by she knew not what to win this argument. The notion that he would rather sleep on the cold floor than in the comfort of the bed beside her offended her, infuriated her, at some level she didn’t truly understand. If they were partners, equals, together facing all this, then they should share the bed; that was all there was to it.