“Is he a wastrel?” She walked past him. “When I was a girl, he seemed a perfect gentleman. I thought myself in love with him. Had he proposed marriage, I would have accepted him without hesitation.”

“When you were a girl,” Alex repeated. “In your salad days.”

She shot him a glare over her shoulder. “Oh, do go away! I don’t know why you came here if you’re only going to tease and devil me.”

“I’m not entirely certain myself.” He followed after her. His horse was tethered ahead.

“You’d do better to avoid me completely,” she said. “Indeed, I wish you would.”

His smile faded. “Do you mean that?”

She turned back to him. There was nothing sardonic about his expression now. If she was disposed to girlish daydreams, she might almost fancy that he cared for her. “I don’t know. Meeting as we did…it’s given us a false sense of familiarity. But we aren’t friends, are we? We aren’t really anything to each other at all.”

“I should like to be a friend to you,” he said.

Her gaze briefly fell from his. It took an effort to keep her countenance. “I don’t think we can be friends.”

His voice lowered to match hers. “Don’t say that.”

“Why not, if it’s true? Friends should be honest with each other. They should show each other who they really are. How is such a thing even possible with a man like you?”

“A man like me.” His large frame loomed over her, as motionless as if her words had turned him to stone. “And just what sort of man is that?”

“A chameleon,” she replied without hesitation. “You change yourself to suit your company. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. One moment you’re one way, the next another. As if you’re a completely different man. I can’t even be certain that half of the things you say aren’t elaborate fictions created to aid your deception.”

“You think I’ve lied to you?”

“Haven’t you?” Her gaze drifted over his face. He was so ruthlessly handsome. So pleasing in physical form and outward manner. But there was always something else there—something lurking behind his eyes. A secret self, hidden from the world.

It was as if he wore a very lifelike mask.

She’d only seen him without it on two occasions. The first day they’d met when he’d pulled her from Talbot’s Pond. That had been the real Alex Archer. That man, wet and shaken, standing over her on the bank.

And then again, today, when he’d confessed to being an orphan.

There had been a rawness to his countenance. A heartbreaking vulnerability.

“That story you told us at dinner,” she said, “about the sharper you traveled with as a boy. Was there really such a man?”