While Mary Fran blinked back the damnable and stupid urge to cry.

***

When a man who’d been celibate for some time declined a beautiful woman’s almost, conditional, not-quite invitation to dally, that man was entitled to consider the situation afresh, when his wits were not sent begging by the way dappled sunlight danced across auburn hair. Matthew assured himself of this as he approached his hostess.

“Lady Mary Frances, a word with you, if you don’t mind a small interruption of your breakfast?”

She glanced over at him as he slid into the chair next to hers, but didn’t quite hide the impatience behind her smile. “Of course, Mr. Daniels. Are we to racket about the garden while we chat, or perhaps take another turn in the woods?”

“If you’d prefer, but I was hoping you’d show me some of the property, assuming the stable can spare us a pair of mounts.”

The idea had come to him in the middle of the previous night, when recollection of the feel of her waltzing in his arms, the feel of her hand clasping his, and the sound of her musical burr had necessitated two occasions of self-gratification.

“You’re inviting me for a ride?” Her brows knitted, suggesting the prurient interpretation of her question had escaped her notice.

“It’s a lovely day, and I’ve heard rumors that visitors to Balfour might chance upon Her Majesty if they spend enough time in your woods.”

As if he ever again wanted to report to his Queen face-to-face.

“A short ride, then. I’ve—”

“Things to see to,” Matthew finished for her. “Shall we meet in the stables in an hour?”

Those delicately arched brows came down. “I hardly need an hour to pop into a habit, Mr. Daniels.”

Matthew leaned near to top up her teacup. “You would have made an excellent officer, my lady. You are disciplined, organized, and decisive, also indifferent to your own comfort.”

She watched while Matthew added cream and sugar to her tea. “I’m not indifferent to my own—”

He lifted the cup close to her nose, so she could see the fragrant steam curling up and catch a whiff of rich black tea. “You have not yet taken a single bite of your breakfast, and I would not hurry you through your meal. Part of the challenge Her Majesty’s forces face in the Balkans is the simple logistical difficulty of defending our interests so far from home. This is the same factor that eventually defeated Napoleon. Drink your tea and eat a proper breakfast.”

She took a sip. “The Russian winter had a hand in things, as I recall my history.”

He couldn’t help but smile. “You know some military history.”

She smiled back, a small but genuine smile that fortified Matthew every bit as much as a stout cup of breakfast tea might. “Four older brothers, Mr. Daniels, and more than a passing respect for Highland winters. I’ll see you in the stables in an hour.”

Matthew rose, intent on changing into riding attire, but was arrested by the gaze of Ian MacGregor, Earl of Balfour. His lordship was leaning against the doorjamb to the breakfast parlor, the look in the man’s eyes speculative.

“Daniels.”

“My lord.” Matthew hoped that would be the end of it, but the earl ambled along beside him as Matthew headed into the corridor.

“Ach, must we be milording so early in the day? If you’re going to flirt with my sister, MacGregor will do, or Ian, since we’ve several MacGregors underfoot.”

The earl wasn’t just tall, he was broad, well muscled, and exuded the fitness of a man of the land. Dark hair made a handsome contrast to mossy green eyes, and his smile would have felled many a debutante in the ballrooms to the south.

“I’m going riding with the lady,” Matthew said, pausing at the foot of the stairway.

The earl paused right along with him. “Riding is always a nice place to start. Can’t get up to too much mischief when you’re on separate horses, can you? You will be on separate horses?”

“For God’s sake, Balfour, your sister is hardly going to content herself riding pillion behind an Englishman.”

“Her husband was English.” Balfour studied his big, blunt fingernails, while Matthew absorbed that Balfour was trying to warn him of something.

“It is not a crime to be English.” And why, come to think of it, did Lady Mary Frances eschew her married name?

“It isn’t any great advantage, either, at least not when a fellow is sniffing around Mary Fran’s skirts.” Balfour’s face creased into a grin that wasn’t exactly merry. “Enjoy your ride.”

With that cryptic comment, the earl spun on his heel and disappeared in the direction of the breakfast parlor.

Matthew repaired to his room, laid out his riding clothes, and tried to determine what Balfour had been telling him. The Scots were deuced canny, of necessity. By virtue of famine, clearances, service on various fighting fronts in Highland regiments, or by operation of prejudicial law, a stupid Scot was historically a dead Scot. This reality had been impressed upon Matthew by the Scottish officers he’d shared campfires with, and by his own family’s Scottish history.

But the typical Scot was also fair-minded to a fault.

Balfour really had been warning him, he decided. Warning him that only a stupid Englishman would do more than flirt with the fair Mary Frances.

“Or perhaps,” Matthew told his reflection in the cheval mirror, “an Englishman who relishes a challenge and recognizes another lonely soul when he sees one.”

Though maybe dallying with Mary Fran was the aspiration of an Englishman who was both lonely and stupid.

***

“I haven’t been up to this lookout since…” Mary Fran paused to take in a great lungful of heather-scented air and tried to think back.

“Then it has been too long. A view like this restores the soul.”

Matthew Daniels sat a horse like a man born to the saddle. His horsemanship was a relaxed, natural thing, not a set of skills he’d honed just to show off, and his boots and breeches weren’t in the first stare of fashion. They looked comfortable, like Mary Fran’s old green velvet riding habit.

He gestured to the west, to the gleaming gray edifice under construction farther up the River Dee. “I take it that’s Balmoral?”

“None other. Albert had it designed for his Queen—and their children, of course. It seems a shame to use such a lovely property only a few months of the year.”

“It seems a shame that you are moldering away here in the countryside the year round, my lady. Doesn’t some part of you long for the society of Edinburgh?”

If he’d been flirting with her the livelong morning, if his efforts to boost her into the saddle had been the least forward, if he’d done anything except appreciate the beauty of her home, Mary Fran might have launched a barbed retort discouraging his suggestion that her life was somehow incomplete.

But he’d been a perfect gentleman. Polite and friendly without a hint of impropriety. His demeanor reminded Mary Fran of the way all the gentlemen had treated her prior to her marriage.

“I might like to see a bit of the South, but then I’d have to leave my Fee, wouldn’t I?”

“I beg your pardon?” He stood in the stirrups then settled back into the saddle, an equestrian at his leisure. “Your fee? I can’t imagine your brothers would begrudge you wages should you take a short holiday.”

Too late, Mary Fran realized that the barrier she vigilantly maintained between her role as hostess and her role as mother had fallen. Oh, the female guests usually got wind of Fiona at some point—the child was outright pestering the spinster cousin, Augusta Merrick—but Mary Fran kept her daughter away from the gentlemen guests.

Far, far away, particularly from the English ones.

“Not that kind of fee, but my Fiona.”

Daniels’s expression didn’t change.

“My daughter Fiona.” Mary Fran pretended to study Balmoral, a brand-new building intended to resemble something medieval, at least from a distance. She knew the place well—Her Majesty was a good neighbor, and His Highness an avid sportsman—but she did not know why she kept talking.

“Fiona is my heart. I love her dearly, but she’s impossible sometimes. She says the most confounding things, and she has no sense except at the oddest moments. Her uncles dote on her, and I worry that isn’t a good thing, then I worry that I ought to be doting on her.”

She fell silent, wishing not that she’d kept her mouth shut, but that her companion would say something.

“You sound like my commanding officers, fretting over the troops. Doubting yourself for coddling them, doubting yourself for enforcing the discipline an army needs to function, despairing over the best soldiers when they do the most idiot things on leave.” He offered her a smile, a slow tipping up of his lips, the same smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. “It’s the very devil when one can’t help but care, isn’t it?”

She realized something about him then. He was not only a former military man at loose ends in the civilian world, not only an Englishman, not only a paying guest whose sister might well be the next Countess of Balfour.

He was a man, a human being, a fellow creature. A man who had refused Mary Fran’s invitation to sin simply because he was decent.

She basked in his smile, in the understanding of it, and offered him her own smile in return. “The very devil, indeed. I want to brain my brothers most days. They must wear their muddy boots in the house, swear in front of Fiona, and tell lewd jokes when they think I’m not listening.”

“Sounds like life in the military—though you might also have alluded delicately to the noisome bodily functions one doesn’t speak of in Polite Society.”

He was pretending to study Balmoral now too, but Mary Fran couldn’t help it. She laughed, a chuckle at first, then a great big belly laugh that had the horse shifting beneath her.

“Tell me more about military life, Matthew Daniels. I might have some useful suggestions for its improvement.”

They let their horses amble down the hillside while Matthew told one tale after another of pranks and skirmishes, though gradually, his tone became more serious.

“You did not want to leave,” Mary Fran guessed. “You hated it, and you loved it.”

He stroked a gloved hand down his horse’s crest. “I think most career military have mixed feelings, but no, I didn’t love it. I felt useful, though, and it grates upon me daily that I must idle about, my father’s much-vaunted heir, when I could be of real service in a part of the world that’s quickly heading for war.”

Useful. She knew what a cold comfort that was. Useful became an acceptable way to go on only when the alternative was to be useless.

“Could you go back?”

Mary Fran might have missed the expression on his face, but she liked watching the way emotion would flicker through his blue eyes. The happy emotions—humor, joy, pleasure in the scenery—were fleeting, while the other emotions faded more gradually.

“I cannot go back. Not ever, and I do not want to.”

Despair—profound despair—but also resignation crossed his features.

“I wish we’d brought a picnic.” The observation was as close as she could come to admitting she did not want to go back either—to the housework, the squabbling maids, her swearing brothers, and sometimes even to her own confounding, exhausting, endlessly dear daughter.

“A picnic sounds like a lovely idea for another day, my lady. Tell me, how do you think your brother is faring with his courting of my sister?”

The change in topic was welcome, and it was a relief to think that if Ian married Eugenia, then Matthew Daniels might become a relation of some sort to Mary Fran—and to Fiona.

“Ian must be studying the terrain before advancing his troops,” Mary Fran replied. “I can’t say as I’d be very impressed with his efforts thus far, though you English do delight in your mincing about. He can hardly pounce on the lady and carry her off to his castle.”

“Mincing about. I take it mincing about would not meet with your approval were a man to court you?”

They were back to his version of flirting. It made the prospect of her duties at Balfour a little more bearable and suggested that Matthew had had enough of shadows and regrets for one morning. “Mincing about would not impress me one bit. Shall I race you back to the stables?”

He didn’t let her win, but Mary Fran’s mount was carrying considerably less weight, and Mary Fran knew the terrain. They called it a draw, and as Matthew escorted her up to the house, Mary Fran let herself wonder: If mincing about as a courting strategy would not impress her, then what would?