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did to her than the arms that held her against him. He was watching her with that same intense expression, the fiery one she felt go through her earlier, when he was looking at her from all the way across the lists.
    She took a breath, a small shallow one, but to her ears it sounded as loud as a scream.
    His eyes narrowed slightly as his gaze shifted to her mouth, then he slowly let her slide down his body in mere inches, until her feet were barely touching the ground and her mouth was dry as sea salt.
    She stepped back as if she were burned and dusted off her gown. “Sir.” She gave him a curt nod of thanks without meeting his eyes, because if he called her bluff she would just die. Right there in the center of the green. She would melt into the ground and cease to exist.
    “You should thank Sir Tobin for saving your neck,” Edith told her distractedly, frowning down at her empty bag of sweets.
    Sofia froze. Her words came out in nothing but a whisper. “What did you say?”
    “This is Sir Tobin de Clare,” Edith said as if Sofia should have recognized him. “You have met before.”
    Sofia’s head shot up and she stared at him. His look had not wavered, had not changed.
    “I am off to the date seller again, Sofie. You will be fine with Sir Tobin to escort you. I shall meet you at the races, where we will look for your man.” Edith took off toward the booths, completely abandoning her with, of all people, Tobin de Clare, the Earl of Gloucester’s eldest son.
    Oh, she had met him before.
    But she had never seen his face.
    Three years earlier, Camrose Castle
    Sofia stood just outside the huge, carved oak doors of the great hall, away from the boisterous crowd of merrymakers that spilled from inside, where all were celebrating the wedding of Lady Clio of Camrose to Lord Merrick, Earl of Glamorgan, a de Beaucourt and her cousin Edward’s close friend and vassal.
    Well into the wedding feast, the Glamorgan heralds had entered the hall and captured the company’s attention with a few long and triumphant notes on their horns, then Lord Merrick had presented his bride with a delicious and rare white-flour cake in the shape of Camrose Castle, complete with spun sugar towers, stone walls made of rose petals over almond cream, and with a working drawbridge over a golden honey moat that had sugar swans swimming atop it, a wedding gift from the earl to his bride, one that made Lady Clio look softly to Lord Merrick just before she began to laugh and cry at the same time.
    Sofia had two pieces of that delicious cake, a trick that took some plotting on her part, since some would have accused her of Gluttony—one of the Seven Deadly Sins. But what foolery she thought that was. She was no glutton; she just happened to like cake. How could liking sweet white cake be a sin? Much less a deadly sin?
    While she was deviously plotting a way to nab her third piece of cake, she had glanced up and to her surprise found that everyone her age, the youth of the group, squires and ladies, daughters and sons of the noble families, her friends and a few youths who were her cousins, had disappeared completely from the Great Hall.
    So she left the hall to search them out and stood outside, looking and wondering where everyone had gone.
    “Come, Sofie!”
    She turned, recognizing her young cousin’s voice.
    Princess Eleanor called out to her again. “Come join the game!”
    Sofia had to step around a tall and robust acrobat who was shepherding a pack of dancing dogs through the crowd hovering at the doorway. She looked west, and there in the inner bailey, between the stable and the buttery, were most of her friends and all the other young people who had been arriving from every corner of the land just to attend this wedding.
    “’Tis hoodman blind! Come! Quickly!” Her cousin Edward’s eldest daughter, Eleanor, was standing in a large circle with the other young people.
    In the center of that circle stood a tall youth. He had a black hood