In a covered basin on the table lay, she assumed, the fish. Most likely sole or plaice, she imagined. A flat, muddy footprint of a fish that Diana would somehow need to behead. And gut. And scale and fillet and . . .

She swallowed hard.

That part could wait. She’d pare the vegetables first.

The fire, she suddenly realized. Goodness. She couldn’t cook anything without a fire.

By habit, she’d never strayed too near a fireplace or stove—not only because her mother had insisted gentlewomen didn’t dirty their hands with such tasks but also because Diana had feared that inhaling smoke or ash could trigger a breathing crisis.

Those worries were in the past now. She faced a different challenge today.

She cautiously carried the scoop of glowing coals to the kitchen hearth. A nearby box held some straws and dried moss. Crouching on the hearthstones, she heaped the tinder in the grate, then lifted the scoop and gently sifted a few embers atop it.

A fizzling curl of smoke rose up.

And promptly died, taking all her excitement with it.

What was she doing wrong? She thought of Aaron stoking the fire in the smithy, raking and turning the coals . . . pumping the bellows.

The bellows. That was it. A fire needed air.

She scattered another few embers over the tinder, then lowered herself almost to her belly, pursed her lips, and blew. A flurry of sparks resulted. Encouraged, she inhaled slowly, then exhaled again, careful not to overtax her lungs. This time, the little sparks swelled and caught the tinder, resulting in a few lapping tongues of flame.

Diana rose to her knees and cheered—quietly—while brushing the dust from her hands and skirts. A small triumph, perhaps, but a promising start.

Her sense of triumph quickly dampened, however, when the tinder began to flame out and she realized she had no split logs to keep the fire going. She looked around. Nothing, to either side of the hearth. Then she recalled the well-stocked woodpile outside the smithy, under the overhang.

After another slow, loving exhalation to nourish her small flames, she rose and dashed outside, gathering an armful of splits from the pile before hurrying back, all the while praying the fire wouldn’t die in her absence.

She knelt before the hearth—no more care for her skirts this time—and placed the thinnest of the logs atop the burning tinder.

The flames were immediately smothered, dying in a thin plume of white, elegiac smoke.

“No,” she cried. “No, no, no.”

She flattened herself to the hearthstones and huffed desperately, trying to rekindle the flame.

She couldn’t go back to Aaron and ask for more coals. He would know she’d failed before she’d even begun, and that she couldn’t perform the most basic of household tasks. What use could she ever be to him? It wasn’t as though they’d talked about marriage, but she wasn’t ready to foreclose the possibility.

“Please,” she begged. “Please, please. Don’t go out.”

And as if some pagan god of fire heard her petition, a small flame caught a notch on the underside of the wood. The fire began to gnaw at it, dripping morsels of ash.

Hosanna.

She fed the fire carefully, not daring to stray a pace from the hearth until she had a tall, respectable blaze.

When she felt it safe to rise, she gave the basin on the table a wary glance. She wasn’t ready for that fish just yet.

Instead, she found a knife and set about paring vegetables and adding them to a kettle of salted water. She managed three potatoes, two carrots, and an onion with only one slice to her finger. She bound her wound with a strip of linen torn from her handkerchief. The onion made a useful scapegoat for her silly tears.

After hanging the kettle on a hook and swiveling it over the fire to boil, she could no longer postpone the inevitable.

Time to gut the fish.

She went to the table and lifted the cover from the basin.

“Ah!” With a muted shriek, she dropped the cover. It felt back with a bang.

Oh Lord, oh Lord.

Several moments passed before she could bear to lift the cover again and peer inside. She hoped to see something different this time. But no.

There it was.

It wasn’t a fish.

It was an eel.

And it was still alive. Just angrily alive and now agitated, weaving slick, dark-green figure eights in its basin of murky water.

With a shudder, Diana covered it again. Then she drew out a chair and decided to sit and think for a while, about just how much she truly wanted this.

She closed her eyes and thought of Aaron’s kiss. The strength of his arms around her. The heat of his body, and the tender mastery of his tongue coaxing hers. She remembered their driving lesson. The joy of racing down a country lane, as fast as the spring mud would allow, with the top of the curricle down.

Then she pictured that eel, filling the basin with its writhing, slippery will to live.

She just couldn’t. Could she?

Diana opened her eyes and steeled her resolve. Some days, she decided, freedom meant the wind in your hair and the sun on your face and lips swollen with forbidden kisses.

And other days, freedom meant killing an eel.

She found the largest cleaver in the kitchen and gripped it in her right hand. With the left, she lifted the cover from the basin.

“I have nothing against you,” she told the eel. “I’m sure you’re a perfectly fine creature. But Aaron and I have something. And I’m not going to let anything stand . . . or slither . . . in the way of it.”

And just as she reached in to grab the thing . . .

It jumped.

It jumped clear out of the basin and—to Diana’s gasping horror—landed directly on her chest.

CHAPTER 5

Once Diana disappeared into the cottage, Aaron quickly lost himself in his work. He needed to get this piece right. If the jeweler was satisfied, it would mean a tidy sum in Aaron’s pocket—and more commissions in the future.

He did this finer work because he enjoyed it; the profit had always been secondary. He lived simply, and village smithing gave him more than sufficient income to meet his needs. But he was thinking about the future now.

Thinking hard.

He didn’t even realize how much time had passed until he looked up from the finished bracelet and saw it was midafternoon. Damn it. He’d left her waiting for hours.

He banked the fire, removed his apron, put away his tools, and locked the finished bracelet in his strongbox. Then he took a few minutes to wash at the pump before going inside. Wouldn’t do to go in all sweaty and covered in soot.

As he worked a soapy lather over his hands and forearms, his anticipation grew. This was like a dream come true. A day’s honest work at the forge, a well-made result, and Diana Highwood waiting for him at home, ready with a warm smile and a hot meal.

He ran his hands through his dampened hair to tame it, then entered the cottage through the kitchen door.

He found the place in shambles.

The room was cold. Every dish, pot, and spoon he owned had been turned out of the cupboards, it seemed. Peelings littered the floor. The acrid stench of burned potatoes hung in the air.

And Diana sat at his table, sobbing noisily, her head buried in her stacked arms.

“My God, what’s happened?” He crossed to her at once and knelt at her side. “What is it? Tell me.”

“It’s ruined,” she cried.

“What’s ruined?”

“Everything. Your meal. My life. Our chances.” She hiccupped. “The eel.”

“The eel?” He made attempts to soothe her, stroking her hair and back. “What happened to the eel?”

“It . . .” She squeaked out a little sob. “It got away.” A fresh burst of tears muffled the remainder of her reply.

“It got away?” He struggled manfully to contain his laughter.

“I had the knife . . . and it . . . it jumped. I didn’t know they could jump. Do you know they can jump?” She gestured wildly about her neck and head. “On my chest . . . in my hair . . . I couldn’t . . .” She coughed out an indelicate sob. “I flung it off me. It landed out the window, and then it got away.”

He glanced out the window she’d indicated. The weather had left the ground sufficiently wet and muddy that he could imagine an eel finding its way into a wheel rut and traveling a fair distance. It wouldn’t likely get far, but it could get away.

He laughed again. “I’d say that eel earned its pardon, then.”

“And then the vegetables boiled over, and the overflowed water put out the fire, and I . . . when I went to stoke it, a cinder caught me on the cheek. I’m sure it left a mark.” She lowered her head to her arms again. “Everything’s ruined. The meal is ruined, I am ruined. I’m too useless to be a working man’s wife, and”—her shoulders quaked with another sob—“and now I’m disfigured, so no gentleman will want me. I’m going to die an old maid.”

As she spoke, her voice tweaked higher and higher. Until her last word was no more than a plaintive squeak.

“An old maid?” he echoed. “Because of one meal that went awry? Diana, I don’t know what to say. Other than to offer my congratulations.”

“Congratulations?”

He patted her shoulder, chuckling. “I grew up with a mother and two sisters, and all of them like to talk. And that is, undoubtedly, the most feminine progression of thought I’ve ever heard voiced aloud. One escaped eel, make you a spinster?”

She sniffled.

He pulled up a chair next to hers and reached to touch her cheek. “Let me see the burn.”

With reluctance, she offered her face for his view. “Is it very hideous?”

What a question. As if she could—ever—be anything less than beautiful in his eyes.

“This?” He pressed his thumb to the tiny red scorch mark on the gentle sweep of her cheekbone. “This is nothing. Barely noticeable, and it will fade in no time. I’ve had countless such burns myself.”

“And you’re still exceedingly handsome. So that’s some comfort.” She wiped her eyes with a shredded handkerchief. “You must think me ridiculous. I am ridiculous.”

“No, you’re not ridiculous. I understand.”

“How? Do you worry about being an old maid, too?”

He smiled. “I know we come from different backgrounds. But we’ve more in common than you’d think. I was the oldest child, too. And when my father died, I had a mother and two younger sisters to look after.”

“How old were you when he passed away?” she asked.

“Seventeen.”

“I’m sorry. That’s very young to be the man of the family.”

“I was old enough to take his place at the forge, thankfully. I threw myself into the trade, because I knew it was how I could keep my family safe. Spent so much time at that anvil, when I went to bed I pounded iron in my sleep. Then one day, I was shoeing a horse and put my hand in the wrong place at the wrong time. The horse caught my thumb and bit it, hard.” He lifted his hand to demonstrate. “My thumb was all black and swollen. I spent a week not knowing if the bone was crushed, too. Next to losing my father, it was the worst time of my life. I thought I wouldn’t be able to work. The family would starve . . .”

“Everything would be ruined.”

“Exactly.”

She nodded. “I see what you’re saying. You’re right, we are much the same. It’s not my vanity that’s pained, it’s just . . . I was always raised to believe the family depended on me. That my prospects—and to put it bluntly, my face—were our security.”

“So when your mind leaps from a scorched cheek to permanent spinsterhood, it’s understandable. But that doesn’t make it reasonable. You must realize you’re not responsible for your family anymore. Not since your sister married Lord Payne.”