“Do you often see people down on the beach?” she asked.

He turned to look at her.

“Never,” he said. “In all the times I have been down there, I have never encountered another soul who was not also from this house. Until today.”

There was a suggestion of reproach in his voice.

“Then I suppose,” she said, “it seemed a safe thing to say to your friends, who were teasing you. That you would find a woman to whom to propose marriage down on the beach, I mean.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “It did.”

She smiled at him, and then laughed softly. He looked back, no answering amusement in his face.

“It all really is funny,” she said. “Except that now you will doubtless be teased endlessly. And I am confined here for at least a week with a sprained ankle. And,” she added when he still did not smile, “you and I will probably be horribly embarrassed in each other’s company until I finally leave here.”

“If I could throttle young Darleigh,” he said, “without actually committing murder, I would.”

Gwen laughed again.

And silence descended once more.

“Lord Trentham,” she said, “you really do not need to bear me company here, you know. You came to Penderris to enjoy the companionship of the Duke of Stanbrook and your fellow guests. I daresay your suffering together here for so long established a special bond among you, and I have now intruded upon that intimacy. Everyone has been most kind and courteous to me, but I am quite determined to be as little of a nuisance while I must remain here as I possibly can be. Please feel free to join the others in the dining room.”

He still stood looking down at her, his hands clasped behind his back.

“You would have me thwart the will of my host, then?” he asked her. “I will not do it, ma’am. I will remain here.”

Lord Trentham. He could be anything from a baron on up to a marquess, Gwen thought, though she had never heard of him before today. And if what Viscount Ponsonby had said was correct, he was also extremely wealthy. Yet he did not have the manners of a thick plank.

She inclined her head to him and resolved not to utter another word before he did, though she would thereby be lowering her manners to the level of his. So be it.

But before the silence could become uncomfortable again, the door opened to admit two servants, who proceeded to move a table closer to the sofa and set it for one diner. Before those servants had time to leave the room, two others entered bearing laden trays. One was set across Gwen’s lap while the other was carried to the table, where the various dishes were set out for Lord Trentham’s dinner.

The servants left as silently as they had come. Gwen looked down at her soup and picked up her spoon as Lord Trentham took his place at the table.

“I beg your pardon,” Lord Trentham said, “for the embarrassment a seemingly harmless joke has caused you, Lady Muir. It is one thing to be teased by friends. It is another to be humiliated by strangers.”

She looked at him in surprise.

“I daresay,” she said, “I will survive the ordeal.”

He returned her look, saw that she was smiling, and nodded curtly before addressing himself to his dinner.

The Duke of Stanbrook had an excellent chef, Gwen thought, if the oxtail soup was anything to judge by.

“You are in search of a wife, Lord Trentham?” she said. “Do you have any particular lady in mind?”

“No,” he said. “But I want someone of my own sort. A practical, capable woman.”

She looked up at him. Someone of my own sort.

“I was not born a gentleman,” he explained. “My title was awarded to me during the wars, as a result of something I did. My father was probably one of the wealthiest men in England. He was a very successful businessman. But he was not a gentleman, and he had no desire to be one. He had no social ambitions for his children either. He despised the upper classes as idle wastrels, if the truth were told. He wanted us to fit in where we belonged. I have not always honored his wishes, but in that particular one I concur with him. It would suit me best to find a wife of my own class.”

Much had been explained, Gwen thought.

“What did you do?” she asked as she pushed back her empty soup bowl and drew forward her plate of roast beef and vegetables.

He looked back at her, his eyebrows raised.

“It must have been something extraordinary,” she said, “if the reward was a title.”

He shrugged.

“I led a Forlorn Hope,” he said.

“A Forlorn Hope?” Her knife and fork remained suspended above her plate. “And you survived it?”

“As you see,” he said.

She gazed at him in wonder and admiration. A Forlorn Hope was almost always suicidal and almost always a failure. He could not have failed if he had been so rewarded. And good heavens, he was not even a gentleman. There were not many officers who were not.

“I do not talk about it,” he said, cutting into his meat. “Ever.”

Gwen continued to stare for a few moments before resuming her meal. Were the memories so painful, then, that they were not even tempered by the reward? Was it there that he had been so horribly wounded that he had spent a long time here recovering his health?

But his title, she realized, sat uneasily upon his shoulders.

“How long have you been widowed?” he asked her in what, she guessed, was a determined effort to change the subject.

“Seven years,” she said.

“You have never wished to marry again?” he asked.

“Never,” she said—and thought of that strange, crashing loneliness she had felt down on the beach.

“You loved him, then?” he asked.

“Yes.” It was true. Despite everything, she had loved Vernon. “Yes, I loved him.”

“How did he die?” he asked.

A gentleman would not have asked such a question.

“He fell,” she told him, “over the balustrade of the gallery above the marble hall in our home. He landed on his head and died instantly.”

Too late it occurred to her that she might have answered with some truth, as he had done a short while ago—I do not talk about it. Ever.

He swallowed the food that was in his mouth. But she knew what he was about to ask even before he spoke again.

“How long was this,” he asked, “after you fell off your horse and lost your unborn child?”

Well, she was committed now.

“A year,” she said. “A little less.”

“You had a marriage unusually punctuated with violence,” he said.

Her answer had not needed comment. Or, rather, not such a comment. She set her knife and fork down across her half-empty plate with a little clatter.

“You are impertinent, Lord Trentham,” she said.

Oh, but this was her own fault. His very first question had been impertinent. She ought to have told him so then.

“I am,” he said. “It is not how a gentleman behaves, is it? Or a man who is not a gentleman when he is talking to a lady. I have never freed myself of the habit, when I wish to know something, of simply asking. It is not always the polite thing to do, I have learned.”

She finished the food on her plate, moved the plate to the back of the tray, and drew forward her pudding dish. She picked up her wineglass and sipped from it. She set it down and sighed.

“My closest family members,” she said, “have always chosen to believe quite steadfastly that Vernon and I had a blissful love relationship that was blighted by accident and tragedy. Other people are notably silent upon the subject of my marriage and my husband’s death, but I can often almost hear them thinking and assuming that it was a marriage filled with violence and abuse.”

“And was it?” he asked.

She closed her eyes briefly.

“Sometimes,” she said, “life is too complicated for there to be a simple answer to a simple question. I did indeed love him, and he loved me. Often our love was blissful. But … Well, sometimes it seemed to me that Vernon was two different people. Often—most of the time, in fact—he was cheerful and charming and witty and intelligent and affectionate and a whole host of other things that made him very dear to me. But occasionally, although he remained in many ways much the same, there was something almost … oh, desperate about his high spirits. And I always felt at such times that there was the finest of fine lines between happiness and despair, and he trod that line. The trouble was that he never came out of it on the side of happiness. He always tumbled the other way. And then for days, occasionally even for a few weeks, he was plunged into the blackest of black moods and nothing I could say or do would pull him free—until one day, without any warning at all, he would be back to his usual self. I learned to recognize the moment when his mood was turning to the overe-xuberant. I learned to dread such moments because there was no coaxing him back from the brink. Though for the last year his moods hovered most of the time between black and blacker. And you are the only person, Lord Trentham, to whom I have spoken of such things. I have no idea why I have broken my silence with a near stranger.”

She was partly horrified, partly relieved that she had revealed so much to a man she did not even particularly like. Though there was much, of course, that she had not said.

“It is this place,” he said. “It has been the scene of much unburdening over the years, some of it all but unspeakable and all but unthinkable. There is trust in this house. We all trust one another here, and no one has ever betrayed that trust. Did you go on that mad ride when Lord Muir was in one of his excitable moods?”

“At that time in my marriage,” she said, “I still clung to the belief that I could avert his black moods by humoring his wild whims. He wanted me to ride with him that day and brushed aside all my protests. And so I went, and I followed wherever he led. I was terrified that he would hurt himself. What I thought I could do to keep him from harm just by being with him I do not know.”

“But it was not he who was hurt,” he said.

Except that in many ways he had been hurt as badly as she. And neither of them had been hurt as badly as their child.

“No.” Her eyes were shut tight again. Her spoon was clutched, forgotten, in one hand.

“But it was he who got hurt on the night he died,” he said.

She opened her eyes and turned her head to look coldly at him. What was he? Her inquisitor?

“That is enough,” she said. “He did not abuse me, Lord Trentham. He never raised a hand or voice to me or belittled me or lashed out at me with words. I believe he was ill, even if there is no name for his illness. He was not mad. He did not belong in an asylum. Neither did he belong on a sickbed. But he was ill nevertheless. That is hard for anyone to comprehend who did not live with him constantly, day and night, as I did. But it is true. I loved him. I had promised to love him in sickness and in health until death parted us, and I did love him to the end. But it was not easy, for all that. After his death I grieved deeply for him. I was also weary of marriage to the marrow of my bones. That one marriage brought me great joy, but it also brought almost more misery than I could bear. I wanted peace afterward. I wanted it for the rest of my life. I have had it now for seven years and am perfectly content to remain as I am.”

“No man could change your mind?” he asked.

Even just yesterday she would have said no without any hesitation at all. Even this morning she had been in denial of the essential emptiness and loneliness of her life. Or perhaps that brief moment on the beach had been instigated by nothing more serious than her quarrel with Vera and the bleakness of her surroundings.

“He would have to be the perfect man,” she said, “and there is really no such thing as perfection, is there? He would have to be an even-tempered, cheerful, comfortable companion who has known no great trouble in his life. He would have to offer a relationship that promised peace and stability and … Oh, and simplicity with no excessive highs and lows.”

Yes, she thought, surprised, such a marriage would be pleasant. But she doubted there was a man perfect for her needs. And even if there was one who seemed perfect and who wished to marry her, how would she know for sure what he was like until after she had married him and lived with him and it was too late to change her mind?

And how could she ever be worthy of happiness?

“No passion?” he asked her. “He would not have to be good in bed?”