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he’d left the horse grazing, near a wooden stile that served as the only gap in the field’s waist-high stone border.
    Miss Taylor followed him. “Corporal Thorne . . .”
    He vaulted the stile, putting the fence between them. “We need to get back to Spindle Cove. You’ve missed lessons with the Youngfield sisters this evening. They’ll be wondering where you are.”
    “You know my schedule of lessons?” Her voice carried an interested lilt.
    He cursed under his breath. “Not all of them. Just the irritating ones.”
    “Oh. The irritating ones.”
    He tossed the pup a scrap of rabbit hide from his pocket, then began checking over the horse’s tack.
    She placed both hands on the evenly mortared top of the stone fence and boosted herself to sit atop it. “So my lessons and your drinking sessions just happen to coincide. At the same times and on the same days, to the point that you know my schedule. By heart.”
    For God’s sake. What heart?
    He shook his head. “Don’t tell yourself some sentimental story of how I’ve been pining for you. You’re a fetching enough woman, and I’m a man with eyes. I’ve noticed. That’s all.”
    She gathered her skirts in one hand, lifted her legs, and swung them to his side of the fence. “And yet you’ve never said a word.”
    With her sitting on the stone wall, they were almost equal in height. She crooked one finger and swept a curling lock of hair behind her ear—in that graceful, unthinking way women had of pushing men to the brink of desperation.
    “I’m not a smoothly spoken man. If I put my wants into words, I’d have you blushing so hard your frock would turn a deeper shade of pink.”
    There. That ought to scare her off.
    She colored slightly. But she didn’t back down.
    “Do you know what I think?” she said. “I think that maybe—just maybe—all your stern, forbidding behavior is some strange, male form of modesty. A way to deflect notice. I’m almost ashamed to say it worked on me for the better part of a year, but—”
    “Really, Miss Taylor—”
    She met his gaze. “But I’m paying close attention now.”
    Damn. So she was.
    He’d been avoiding precisely this for a year now—the possibility that she’d someday catch sight of him in church or the tavern, hold that glance a beat longer than usual, and then . . . remember everything. He couldn’t let that happen. If Miss Kate Taylor, as she existed now, were ever connected with the den of squalor and sin that had served as her cradle, it could destroy everything for her. Her reputation, her livelihood, her happiness.
    So he’d stayed away. Not an easy task, when the village was so small and this girl—who wasn’t a girl anymore, but an alluring woman—had her toes in every corner of it.
    And then today . . .
    A year’s worth of avoidance and intimidation, all shot to hell in one afternoon, thank to that wrongheaded, stupid, goddamned glorious kiss.
    “Look at me.”
    He leaned forward and braced his hands on the stone wall, confronting her face-to-face. Daring her; daring fate. If she was ever going to recognize him, it would be now.
    As she took him in, he did some looking of his own. He drank in the small details he’d denied himself for long months. Her sweet pink frock, with ivory ribbons threaded through the neckline like little dollops of confectioner’s icing. The tiny freckle on her chest, just below her right collarbone. The brave set of her jaw, and the way her pink lips crooked fetchingly at the corners.
    Then he searched those clever, lovely hazel eyes for any hint of awareness or flash of recognition.
    Nothing.
    “You don’t know me,” he said. Both a statement and a question.
    She shook her head. Then she spoke what were quite possibly the most foolish, improbable words he’d ever heard. “But I think I’d like to.”
    He gripped that stone wall as if it were the edge of a precipice.
    She said, “Perhaps we could—”
    “No. We couldn’t.”
    “I