“Oh, how could you say such a scandalous thing?”

Lucy clapped her hands to her flaming cheeks. “What could you possibly know about such things?”

“I'm Spanish,” Tamsyn said vaguely. “We're perhaps a little more open about these matters.” She rose to her feet and went to the decanters on the sideboard. She'd have to slide carefully around her cover if she was to help Lucy, but their earlier conversation combined with an evening in the company of Gareth Fortescue had made it very clear to her that young Lucy needed some help.

She poured herself a glass of wine, sympathetically regarding the girl's flushed and bemused indignation. “Do you care for your husband, Lucy?”

“Of course I do!” Tears sparked in the china-blue eyes. “And he cares for me.”

“Yes, of course he does.” Tamsyn sat down again, cradling her wineglass. “But he's older than you, and a deal more experienced. Do you enjoy being in bed with him?”

Lucy stared at her, dumbfounded.

Tamsyn nodded. “You were a virgin, of course. And I don't suppose he thought to discover what pleased you. Men like that often don't.”

“Whatever do you mean?” Lucy was struggling for words, unable to believe she was really hearing this. “I don't want to talk about this… it's horrible… it's not decent.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake, Lucy. If you don't talk about it, how will you ever learn to make love? And if you don't learn, then you won't learn to enjoy it, and neither will your husband. And then you really will be in a pretty pickle.” She drank her wine with a matter-of-fact nod. “Cecile was always telling me about the prudishness of the English and how women weren't expected to know anything about pleasuring… In fact, when she was a girl, it was considered quite shocking for a woman to enjoy coupling.”

“Cecile?” Lucy said faintly.

“My mother. She would have talked to you just as I am, Lucy, so please don't be offended.”

Lucy stared at this extraordinary girl who was regarding her with an air of confident authority that made her feel like a patient with a physician.

Before she could gather her wits, however, Julian and Gareth strolled into the drawing room.

“Lucy has been explaining to me the correct way to pour tea in the drawing room,” Tamsyn said. “May I pour for the gentlemen, Lucy?”

Lucy moved away from the tea tray, aware that Tamsyn had noticed her hands were not quite steady. When Julian suggested she play, she went to the pianoforte reluctantly. Her head was so full of what she'd heard that her fingers were all thumbs, and after two muddled and discordant attempts at a folk song, Gareth said with a degree of brutality, “Oh, for God's sake, Lucy. Spare our ears. It sounds like a tribe of cats on the prowl.”

Lucy dropped the lid of the instrument with a bang.

“I beg your pardon.” She got up and returned to the sofa. “I'm sure you'd prefer to hear Tamsyn play. I'm sure she counts it among her many accomplishments.”

“I don't play the pianoforte, only the guitar,” Tamsyn said readily, ignoring Lucy's petulant tone. She'd shocked the girl and would renew her tutorial in the morning, when Lucy had had a chance to absorb what she'd heard.

“How exotic,” Lucy murmured.

“Not where I come from,” Tamsyn responded. “It's considered a minor accomplishment.”

“Like other things, I imagine.”

“Possibly.”

Julian frowned as Lucy's barbed comments flew and Tamsyn batted them gently back without any sign of hostility. But Lucy was radiating antagonism.

Gareth cleared his throat. “Think I'll take a stroll down to the village before bed. I daresay I'll see you all in the morning.” He bent over Lucy and pecked her cheek. “Good night, my dear. Don't stay up late, now. You've had a long journey.”

Lucy's cheeks paled, and then the pallor was driven away by a crimson tide. Her eyes darted involuntarily toward Tamsyn, who studiously avoided meeting her gaze.

The door closed behind Gareth, and Lucy stood up hastily. “I do find that I'm very tired. If you'll both excuse me, I think I'll go to bed.” Tears were heavy in her voice, and she dashed an arm across her eyes as she went to the door.

“Bastard!” Julian swore as she left. ''I'm damned if I'll permit him to go whoring in the village while my sister lies weeping upstairs.”

“Yes, very insensitive of him,” Tamsyn agreed. “But if you drag him back, he'll sulk. He's that type.”

Julian regarded her with a frown, noticing the wineglass she still held. “Why have you been dipping deep this evening? I thought it didn't agree with you.”

“Oh, it agrees with me, all right,” she said lazily, running a hand through her hair, her eyes narrowing seductively as she drew her knees beneath her in the big armchair. “But it tends to make me rather uninhibited, and it stimulates my imagination. Shall we go upstairs, since your guests have disappeared?”

The prospect of a more than usually uninhibited and imaginative Tamsyn was heady indeed. Her violet eyes were luring him, the slight body curled in the chair radiated sensual invitation. A wicked, exotic invitation. And there would never be another woman like her.

“Forgive me,” he said abruptly. “I've some work to do in my book room.”

The rejection was so unexpected that Tamsyn stared stunned as the door closed behind him. Tears burned behind her eyes and she blinked them away angrily. She'd been offering an overture all evening, and he'd seemed to accept the end of their quarrel. But now to turn from her so coldly…

But she wouldn't be defeated. Her mouth took a stubborn turn.

GARETH STROLLED BACK TO TREGARTHAN UNDER THE moon, dolefully contemplating the lack of entertainment to be found in a small Cornish fishing village. The taverns in Fowey offered a sad dearth of eager young wenches ready to dally with a well-heeled member of the Quality, although the landlady at the Ship had winked at him and allowed him a discreet fondle of her ripe bosom, leaning over his table as she served his tankard of gin and water. Unfortunately, her husband had appeared on the scene, genial enough on the surface but with a pair of massive forearms that rivalled the giant Gabriel's, with whom he'd been drinking in a dark corner of the taproom.

Extraordinary-looking man, the Scotsman. Some kind of bodyguard apparently, all very rum. In fact, Gareth decided with a discreet belch, it was a rum business whichever way you looked at it Julian, far from his beloved battlefields, playing guardian to an unknown Spanish chit. Of course, if the Duke of Wellington had commanded it, that would explain it. A great stickler for his duty, was Julian.

Deciding to take the cross-country route, Gareth swung himself over a stile, catching the toe of his boot in the top rung and almost plummeting headlong. Cursing under his breath, he regained his balance and continued across the field.

The Penhallan twins had been in the tavern, drinking by themselves in a corner. He'd exchanged a nod with them, but they didn't move in his circles in London, so he hadn't felt a need to do more than that. There was something deuced smoky about those two… always had been. There was bad blood in the Penhallans, everyone said.

Gareth lurched through a gap in a bramble hedge and paused. Behind and below him the lights of Fowey were all but extinguished, just a lantern swinging on the quay in case anyone decided to row across the river from Polruan at dead of night. Ahead, there seemed only an expanse of field and cliff top. He could hear the breakers on the shore way below at the base of the cliff. Damnation, surely he wasn't lost? He should have stuck to the lanes. He looked up at the star-filled sky, peered into the distance, caught a glimmer of light through a stand of trees ahead, and decided it must be the gatehouse of Tregarthan.