Standing before the closed door, he felt remarkably silly. She was not Selim. It was nearly eleven. There seemed to be no light inside. The door to his daughter's chamber stood open, the room dark.

Perhaps she had gone back down to keep his mother company in the saloon. Perhaps she had gone to bed. His body responded to the thought with a strong stir of carnal interest. It made him feel even more awkward, standing there with a fork and plum pudding like some lovestruck puppy.

Gently, he tapped the door with the fork. For a moment there was no answer. He felt relief-she was asleep, or not there. Then she said, in a wary voice, "Who is it?"

He put his hand on the knob and opened the door.

She was sitting up at the desk, muffled in a gown and woolen robe. "You cannot come in," she said in a sharp whisper. "I've had your things put in the next room. Elizabeth always sleeps with me."

She appeared to have been writing a letter, and made no move to lay down the pen. The fire hissed softly. A small snoring lump in the bedclothes was undoubtedly Beth.

A wave of emotions passed over him: warmth- and exclusion, and a sudden strange homesickness-another of his burrows, this room, a safe den for the touchy, brooding boy he had been. But he was unmistakably turfed out by the new owner. She glared at him with a hostile, proprietary look.

"Eat," he said in Arabic, setting the plate and fork down on the nearest surface, the dictionary podium beside the door.

"I have told you that I will not speak Arabic-"

He closed the door.

It felt damnably like retreat. Or eviction.

As he stood in the hallway, a maid came swiftly up the back stairs. She was carrying a loaded tray. She hesitated when she saw him.

Arden stepped back. The maid ducked a little curtsy and knocked on the door.

"Who is it?" came the uncertain demand, from closer to the door this time.

"Your bedtime tray and tea, ma'am," the maid whispered, glancing again at Arden and turning down her eyes.

"Come," said the voice behind the door.

As it opened, he could see beyond the girl. Zenia stood beside the dictionary. Her eyes widened a little as she saw him still there.

She had not needed his offering-the tray was loaded with food. She did not require any service from him at all. She had made a cozy place for herself; she had respectability and comfort; she had his father's approval; she'd appropriated Arden's room and his name-and at the pull of a bell rope, he thought with savage mockery, she could get all the plum pudding she could possibly desire. Arden felt an unutterable fool.

He turned, striding down the hall to the stairs. It was easy enough to leave Swanmere after the doors were locked. He knew all the ways.

Zenia signed the letter to her father. Her hand was still unsteady, and she broke the pen and had to mend it before she could finish. She had been expecting Lord Winter, though she had hoped that he would see the open door of the next room and draw his own conclusions.

Now he had come and upset all her decisions. She had torn up the first letter to her father, the one that said she must return to him directly, that she did not dare remain where this man, this stranger, menaced her and Elizabeth with his threats of taking her daughter away.

Then he had brought her food-he had looked at her with his intense blue eyes and said eat, the same way he had said it in the desert. She wanted to forget the desert. She wanted to forget how it felt to be hungry. But she had been hungry, even here, because she felt uncouth and greedy sitting at a table loaded with so much food. She always wanted to stuff as much of it into her as she could, as fast as she could. She wanted to eat like a famished beggar, and so she ate nothing. She was determined to be an English lady.

She had food brought to her in private. No one had ever said anything about it. She didn't think the earl or countess knew.

But Lord Winter had guessed that she was hungry. He had brought her plum pudding and commanded her to eat. Underneath the diamonds and the silk, he knew she was still a wretched, starving, dirty, barefoot creature.

She gave a small miserable laugh, wrinkling her nose at the plate sitting on the dictionary. He might have asked what she liked, at least.

Oh, but he had remembered how she had longed to taste it. And he had pushed her atop a camel, and she had seen his blood all over the saddle. If he had not delayed his own mounting to lift her and shove her into the Egyptian's hold, perhaps he would not have been left behind.

Perhaps it was she who would still be there. Or stoned to death long ago. Elizabeth would never have been born. And he would be here. Safe in England, in his home, even married to one of the English girls that Lady Belmaine had selected for him.

Zenia knew she was at Swanmere for a single reason: because they had thought him dead, and Elizabeth was his daughter, to be protected and coveted as the only blood heir to Swanmere. Zenia had understood. And it had not troubled her-at first she had been lonely and intimidated, but after Elizabeth had come, Zenia had felt that it was right for his daughter to have what her father could give her. She had felt that he would have wanted it; that she owed it to him and to Elizabeth. On the nights she had sat in this room and remembered her first English Christmas and longed to be enveloped in laughter and affection with her own father and Marianne in Bentinck Street, she had made the best of it for Elizabeth. The only celebration of Christmas at Swanmere had been a large public dinner for the tenants, which Zenia had not attended. There had been no decorations or popping crackers. Lady Belmaine had said that Zenia would not wish to go out of mourning, and neither had the household done so.

Zenia's time with her father and family had been so short. As his visits to Swanmere were short. As the one night she had lain with a man's arms tight about her had been short.

Elizabeth made up for it. Elizabeth made up for everything. Zenia could hold her daughter close, make her laugh and comfort her when she cried. Choose her clothes, her toys. Take her for walks, though she very seldom left these rooms, for Zenia dreaded that she might become ill. Elizabeth was not a sickly child-she was rumbustiously healthy, because Zenia took the greatest caution to keep her safe from chills, infection and dirt. Zenia couldn't understand how Lord Winter could even jest about taking Elizabeth to Siberia. Besides that, she was just a baby still, not old enough to know what to be afraid of. Once she had escaped a nurse and crawled all the way down the stairs to the next floor. Zenia had found her tottering at the top of the grand staircase, ready to fall. Her heart still contracted at the bare memory of it.

That nurse had been dismissed. The new woman was more vigilant, but Zenia still disliked to abandon Elizabeth with her for long. The new nurse had even been ready to shut the door, leaving Elizabeth alone with Lord Winter when she knew nothing about him, merely taking his word for who he was.

Zenia gazed at her daughter. It was overly severe, she supposed, to blame the nurse for letting in Elizabeth's father when everyone in the house had known he was coming and it wasn't very likely that some dangerous escaped convict would be freely roaming the halls of Swanmere in elegant male dress. But the small body curled in the bed seemed so vulnerable, so painfully defenseless, and the world was so huge and full of hazard and pain and loneliness.

Lord Winter brought it with him, the world. All of the memories Zenia had tried to erase. The blue-charged light of his eyes as he turned from defying a ghrazzu all alone; his easy grin among the Bedu; he was a madman, and he loved the desert and the danger in the world.

Her tea was cooling in the pot. Under the silver covers, she knew there would be lamb and rice and buttered bread, with Queen cakes and macaroons for dessert, all of which she liked far better than plum pudding.

He had brought it for her, knowing she would be hungry. She rose, picked up the plate and carried it to the desk.

With a grimace for every bite, she ate the pudding. When she had done, she carried it to the door between their rooms.

Her heart was pumping madly as she knocked. There was no answer. After a second knock, she slowly opened the door and saw the room was dark.

Quietly she set the empty plate on the floor so he would find it and pulled the door closed.

Grace was the one who recognized him. Arden walked into the taproom of the Black Swan and sat down. The place was unchanged; smoked windows and beams and a pair of half-sotted carters who stared at him from their place by the fire. Harvey pulled the tap, his big bulk taking up most of the space behind the counter, while Grace sassed him good-naturedly as she shoved one of the carters aside to stoke the coals.

She turned from her task, wiping her hands on her apron, and saw him. An odd change came over her: she lifted her chin, tossing her chestnut head back with a gesture that he recalled very well.

"Is your mother here?" he asked.

"My-" She started to frown.

"You aren't Grace Herring's daughter?" He allowed the corner of his mouth to smile.

"Oh!" she said. And then, "Oh!" She untied the apron and started toward him, flinging it aside. "If you ain't the blackest liar in the county. My mother. Oh, lordy- just look at you, then!"

Arden stood up. Grace caught his hands, pressing them in her own. Harvey had turned; he was rumbling, "God bless us, my lord! We heard you was come home, and bedamned to them heathens supposed to murder you!"

Arden shook hands across the bar, his fingers enveloped in Harvey's great red paw. "I survived."

"Ay, but the good Lord give you as many lives as a cat, I reckon, my lord. What will you take sir?"

"A pint of the homebrewed, if you will." Grace still had hold of his other hand. Her husband, as always, was oblivious. Arden had never been perfectly sure if this was intentional blindness. "Oh, Harvey don't mind," Grace had said to Arden once, "long as I don't make him bring up another man's brats."

Her eyes were pretty yet, with deeper smile lines about them, and her chestnut hair still tumbled a stray curl down beside a cheek that, in the dim light, was softly seductive. Arden's sexual initiation had been sudden and electrifying. He'd climbed the wall and been wandering through the woods outside Swanmere, prowling with an adolescent's ferocious aimlessness amid the greenery of high summer, when he had heard her laugh. He had seen her and Harvey through the undergrowth.

She was a few years older than he-perhaps seventeen then. And Harvey was huge; had always been huge, a widower newly remarried to his teasing kitchen maid. He had taken her dress down to her stays, and in the dappled sunlight Grace's breasts had seemed like dotted cream, her nipples large and brown.

Arden had been riveted. He had stood there, forgetting to breathe, while Harvey put his big palms over them and pulled Grace down on her knees. She was smiling, with a little look of concentration and expectation on her face, her hands braced in a green patch of grass. While Arden stared, Harvey pushed up her dress, holding one hand on her white buttock while he released his breeches.

In his fifteen-year-old innocence, Arden had been awed by Harvey's immense size. He had watched in hot, desperate fascination as the tapster mounted Grace from behind. She hung her head, her breasts swaying with the quick short thrusts as he entered, her palms digging into the grass. Arden had put his arm about a tree trunk and pressed his fingernails into the bark. The marks were probably there still.

Harvey was a quiet man, in speech and in sex: There had been nothing but the heavy sound of his breath and the slap of his brawny thighs against her. Arden had thought the man was going to burst, he turned so red, but instead he shoved himself forward and curled all about Grace as if he could devour her with his big body, the muscles in his arms standing out as he gripped her about the shoulders. He jerked and quivered, groaning softly, and Arden held onto the tree to keep his knees from

buckling under him.He had stepped quickly behind it as Harvey showed signs of life again. Arden staredat a moth on the bark, hardly even knowing what it was, while the bushes rustled andGrace said, "Let's stay a bit."

"Got work," Harvey said. There was the sound of a slap. "Lazy Grade.""Harvey," she'd said, in a coaxing voice."Work," he said. "New mouth be along to feed soon enough."Grace had audibly sighed. Then rustling, and the sound of them going through the brush.For a while Arden had not been able to move. He looked blankly at the moth, hisnostrils flaring, since he had finally remembered to breathe. He was in a pitch of acute and untutored lust. He hurt with it. He had put his head down against the treetrunk and pressed it until his ears rang."I know you're there." Grace's voice had seemed like something imaginary through the bells in his head. He held still, swallowing."From the big house," she said. "You're the young lord."Arden had been far beyond speaking. He closed his eyes, holding onto the tree."You want to do it with me?"It was a whisper, a little shy. If it had not been shy, he would have turned and run.He heard her moving, coming closer. When she spoke again, she was so close that he jumped.

"I've seen you. Coin' about quiet-like." She paused, and then said wistfully, "I thinkyou're beautiful."Arden had turned his head slightly, barely daring to look at her. Her face was flushed, her hair falling down. She held her dress up with her arms crossed andpressed against her, but it gaped in front, and he could see her breasts pushedtogether. His heart was beating so hard that he was afraid he was going to pass out."Beautiful eyes. Too beautiful for a girl like me," she had said, with a touch of regret.She had turned away then. And to this day, he did not know if he had been deliberately lured by that strategic retreat or not, but as she started to go, he turnedskittishly and said, "I've never-"That was all that came out of his paralyzed throat. She looked back, and a knowing smile, age-old, had given her face a subtle glow. He had thought she was the mostsplendid female in the known universe.

'"Tisn't hard. I'll show you. But I think you peeked already!"She came back, and took his hand, and leaned forward, placing a little kiss at thecorner of his mouth.

"You're married," he said desperately, through the feel of her and the scent of her and the soft, soft touch of her fingers as she carried his hand up to cup her breast.

"Mmm. And I'm going to have a baby." She touched his lips with her tongue. "My ma says that makes a girl get peculiar. I always want it, you know? And Harvey's working. I wouldn't do it with nobody else, but you're the young lord. Real quality. Are you afraid of Harvey?"

He was terrified of Harvey. All he could see was the size of Harvey's hand on her breast; all he could feel was her nipple swelling between his forefinger and his middle one. He pressed them together, and she made a sound deep in her throat, her breast rising beneath his hand.

She reached down for his trousers. He grabbed her hand, mortified beyond speech, hysterically sure he was going to go off if she touched him.

"You afraid of Harvey?" she had asked again.

"No," he croaked.

She had pulled him toward her, taking him with her to the grassy, sunny patch. He was trembling all over. And he had fumbled and gone to his knees behind her and slid his hands up beneath her skirt when she knelt, and done what Harvey had done, and in his adolescent excitement and degradation he had gone all odd and ill and strange, unable to move or breathe without being sick.

He could still remember the way she had wiggled against him and said, "Go on."

He hadn't; he'd said nothing, only pulled away and buttoned himself up and sat down with his face in his arms. And to his eternal shame he had shed tears of frustration.

"It's all right," she said, patting his foot. "It happens that way sometimes, Harvey says. That a man can't."

He could hear the disappointment in her voice. "I'm sorry," he said to his arms.

"Oh, well," she'd said.

He had thought she would get up and leave. He still didn't know why she hadn't. He'd waited, his head in his arms, desperate for her to go away and leave him to his mortification; still desperate to feel her again.

Finally, he had looked. She was lying in the grass, only having moved as far as rolling over onto her back. Her eyes were closed in the dappled summer sun. The dress was fallen down from her breasts and hiked up above her waist, showing everything. Her stays were loose-he vividly, vividly remembered the small bulge of her early pregnancy, emphasized by the way she lay flat on the ground.

He had stood up, looking down at her. His blood rose, a deeper, more powerful surge, as if it came from somewhere inside himself that he had never known existed.

He lowered himself onto the grass beside her, touching her, kissing her, his body leaning over hers. She'd opened her mouth to him, arching upward; he had no memory of how he had discovered her place, only that they had moved together, and he was on top of her, and she was panting and gasping, making sounds of surprise and delight and demand. She had clutched frantically at him. And it had gone on and on, until he had thought he was going to die if he could not reach the culmination of it; he was going to die of agonizing, blinding sensation-until at last, at last, her peak had released his, his muscles and his breath and his mind exploding, and then they had lain there winded, witless, both of them shocked by the power of it.

"Oh, my," Grace had whispered. "Harvey never done it that way!"

Long afterward, when Arden was considerably more enlightened about women, he deduced that it had been her first climax. Perhaps she had taught Harvey "that way." Or perhaps she had preferred after all not to be crushed under eighteen stone, and left things the way Harvey liked them in his own bed. At any rate, she had always shown a particular warmth for her shy and fervent young lord.

For several sensational years, until Arden's father took him up to London on his eighteenth birthday, he had lived in a haze of lust for Grace and a sweat of fear over Harvey. He could count on his hands the number of his sexual encounters in the affair. Precisely eight, though he had probably fantasized eight thousand, and he knew the place and context of every one of them. Grace had been an honest strumpet. She was always safely with child before Arden was allowed to touch her, much to his burning frustration. Harvey's children were authentic little Herrings.

Even so, Arden still was not entirely sure that he cared to have Grace cooing over him quite so openly in the Swan. But the big man leaned on the bar, smiling benignly at his silly and cheerful wife: an entirely innocuous cuckold.

An apple-cheeked girl bounced down the stairs, calling, "Ma-Jenny won't leave my ribbons-" She stopped and cast a wide glance at Arden.

"Make your curtsy," Grace said, standing up suddenly and wiping at her skirts with a quick embarrassment. 'This is Martha, my lord-our oldest-you won't remember her but as no more than a scrap of a baby girl."

Arden rose, making a bow that brought deeper roses to Martha's cheeks. She was sixteen or so-and he smiled, remembering that charming belly dappled in the summer sun. He took her hand. "Miss Herring."

"La!" Martha said. "You're Lord Winter! Ma told me all about you!"

She was every bit the natural flirt that her mother had been, lifting her lashes at him speculatively. Arden leaned back against a heavy post and took a deep swallow of ale. As he lowered the mug, he caught Harvey's eye.

The tapster's genial expression had vanished. He looked at Arden with a cold, steady warning.

Arden bowed his head slightly, acknowledging the caution. Harvey watched him bleakly for another moment, and then turned to draw a glass. Miss Martha was babbling comments and questions about His Lordship getting himself killed in Ethiopia, a naive monologue that suggested her mother had not told her quite all about Lord Winter. Arden let her babble on. Grace gave him the trademark look under the lashes that had once consumed his reason and made him toss and dream and strangle his pillow at night.

She seemed older beside her breathless daughter, but not nearly so old that the village siren she had been was vanished. Remembering their first time had roused the heat in him to a sharp burn. But with a deep sense of dislocation and stress, he realized that it was not Grace that he wanted now. Or even pink-cheeked and rather willing-looking Miss Martha-eighteen-stone father or no.

Shortly after Arden had finished his mug, he bade the Herrings a good night, much to Miss Martha's disappointment, as he did not stay to see the retrimmed bonnet that she was about to model. Grace followed him onto the step. Their breaths mingled in the cold air.

"I was that glad, m'lord, to hear you was still among the livin'," she said, with the unexpected wistfulness that sometimes hushed her voice. "That glad."

He shrugged. "I'm quite all right."

She put her hand on his arm and said suddenly, softly, "You know that I can't anymore. Not with the girls all grown up. It wouldn't be-right. Do you think?" She glanced up at him anxiously.

He smiled. "No." He touched her cheek. "Besides, I think Harvey has my number."

"Harvey!" she snorted. Then she said, "He's been awful, awful good to me."

"And I prefer to avoid having all my bones broken." He smiled crookedly. "I've got a family now myself."

She looked a little brighter. "So you do, m'lord. So you do!" She patted his arm. "I feel better then." When he raised his eyebrows at that, she said, "You looked so dreadful lonesome when you come in. But you got a wife, and up at the big house they say that she's pretty enough to keep the cows in milk."

"Is that what they say?" he asked, bemused.

"A beauty," she said solemnly. "Not a candle to me, o'course."

"Of course not."