“Very well,” he said. He took off his hat. “It is not the appropriate setting,” he added, noting the puzzled frown on her face, “but it appears that we will be here a while.”

He tucked the hat under his arm and met her eyes, just as he would have in the formal and sane surroundings of his study. “Miss Archer, I apologize for handling our last encounter in an overly highhanded manner. Please do me the honor of staying at Claremont until the party concludes tomorrow.”

The immediate sense of a burden lifting from his chest confirmed that this had been the right thing to do.

Miss Archer, however, was quiet. Her face had gone still, too, the expression in her eyes so blank, it would take a lifetime to decipher.

For a beat, he wondered if he had said it wrong. He did apologize when required, but it rarely happened. In fact, as he stared into the beautiful, unreadable face before him, with the soft howl of the winter breeze in his ears, he could not recall with certainty the last time he had said “I apologize.”

7

But in this case, he had known that he had wronged her even before he had realized her true identity.

He had known in the library by way of his instincts stirring, the subtle flutter in his gut, but he had let his head and what had seemed obvious facts overrule the warning. Her words had lacked all decorum, but her posture had been straight and open, and righteous outrage had burnt at the back of her eyes during their little exchange. She had displayed the kind of reckless courage that sprung from deeply wounded dignity, and it had made some of the things he had said sound petty to his own ears. There had never been a question that he would apologize. He just hadn’t expected the humbling twist of having to do it entirely on her terms, on a hill, with his face freezing off.

Miss Archer remained as silent and enigmatic as a sphinx. He raised a brow, a question rather than a prompt.

She shifted on her feet. “Why?” she asked softly, avoiding his eyes. “Why would you invite a woman like me into your home?”

A woman such as yourself. Well yes, he had been a highhanded prig. He’d stop short at saying that out loud, though.

“I won’t have any woman come to harm on my estate,” he said. “And our earlier conversation was based on a misunderstanding. It is clear that my brother is quite safe from you.”

Her gaze jerked to meet his, then dropped to the ground; it seemed it was her turn to cringe, and he immediately recognized his mistake. She must have jumped to the wrong conclusion, that he had shared the deeply embarrassing incident with his brother. Behold, one of the queen’s greatest negotiators, and he cannot stop himself from digging this enormous hole.

“No one told me,” he said.

“That’s reassuring,” she murmured, not sounding assured at all. The apology had done something to her, it had in fact taken the wind from her sails so entirely that her usually proud posture looked a little deflated. This did not sit right with him, either, so he smiled reassuringly, at least he hoped he was, aware that his intended expressions always felt much more pronounced on the inside compared to how they actually appeared on his face.

“It was plain deductive reasoning,” he said, “logic, if you will.”

“That’s a sound method,” Miss Archer acknowledged. Her stance had relaxed a little, and her eyes were… neither hostile nor mortified. Such progress.

He pounced. “You made it perfectly clear that you weren’t in the market for a duke,” he said. “It follows that my younger brother would be rather out of the question for you.”

She blinked. A look of tentative intrigue came over her, and he might have held his breath. And, finally, very carefully, she said: “But wouldn’t that be inductive reasoning, Your Grace?”

Their gazes locked, and a sense of recognition went through his body warm like a sunray after a stormy day.

He wondered why on earth he had approached the matter so disastrously wrong. She wasn’t an opponent. She didn’t want to be out here in the cold, she didn’t want to be up against someone who by any natural order should never be up against her, and she probably preferred being with her friends at Claremont to being out of pocket, alone, in an inn. They wanted the same things, and still he had approached the situation like an amateur. It was as though his negotiating instincts were broken when it came to her. He supposed a wholly different strategy could be applied, and if he’d rather not call that approach flirting, he could easily call it scholarly banter.

8

“Deductive, I’m sure,” he said smoothly.

It was oddly satisfying to watch her piece it together in a blink. Deductive, I’m sure. Implying that he viewed the premise that a woman would always prefer a duke over any other man as a natural law.

Miss Archer pursed her lips at his arrogance. “Of course,” she muttered.

This time, his smile came from the depths of him, catching him off guard.

She seemed surprised, too.

Her attention moved to his mouth. And lingered.

A hot sensation washed over his nape, as if she had brazenly touched her fingertip to his lips. He was aware how he pushed out his chest and stood a little taller. He couldn’t have stopped himself from doing it if he tried, it was the natural response of a man when he felt himself inspected by a woman he found beautiful. The question of whether she appealed was thus answered with the boom of a thunderclap – she appealed.

The realization was over in a second. The dazed feeling remained. He had preened, for her.

“I can’t return with you,” Miss Archer said; sobering words, but her firm voice was plainly at odds with the heated confusion in her eyes. She had felt it, too. “I don’t know how to ride,” she added.

Oh. “Not at all?” he asked.

“Not on a side-saddle.” A blush turned her windburn scarlet.

“I see.” That problem, he could solve. He sprang into action; turned and clicked his tongue, and his stallion stopped nosing at the snow and trotted over with the spare mount trailing along. “You will ride with me,” he said, reaching for the reins again.

Her finely arched brows pulled together. “Is that another jest, Your Grace?”

What? “I don’t jest,” he said, sounding faintly appalled. Preening was bad enough.

Miss Archer had moved out of his reach, resistance plain on her face. Unfortunately for her, he never went back to square one.

She nervously brushed a curl back behind her ear. “It seems unsafe,” she said.

Didn’t it just.

“I’m a good horseman,“ he said. He wedged the crop beneath the stirrup. It was unusual to have her on the horse with him, impossible by his standards, actually, but it was the fastest way to bring this unusual episode to its conclusion and he felt a restless urgency to return to regular protocol.

Miss Archer, too, was looking ready to run. The other way. Again.

He shot her a dark look. “Come here.”

Incredibly, she moved toward him then, as if he had tugged at her bodily, and he didn’t miss a beat—

he took her elbow and turned her, unintentionally crowding her back against his horse.

A mistake. She was so close. They were almost chest to chest. It would take a deep breath, an inch of leaning in, to touch. His body heated as though he had stepped too close to a fire. But when a sweet, floral scent teased his nose, he breathed her in.

9

“Near instant compliance, Miss Archer?” he murmured, his body humming from the tension of toeing Rubicon lines. “You must be feeling the cold after all.”

Silence, except for the soft, rushed sound of her breath passing her lips. He must not think of her lips, or how she had looked at his. But she held him in his gaze and was watching him as though he was entirely new to her, and it was impossible to look away from her upturned face. It did not help that she kept staring back into his eyes, as if she meant for his gaze to sink into the green depths without caution and to explore all that lay beyond.