Walls, obligations, responsibilities disappeared. All that was left was water and wind. Time wasn’t important here. She could push it aside, as perhaps she’d done before. As she now knew she’d do again. The sun was as it should be on a holiday. Bright, full, warm—gold in the sky, white on the sea. Holding the tiller steady with her knee, Brie slipped out of the oversized cotton shirt. Her brief bikini made a shrug at modesty. She wanted the sun on her skin, the wind on it. Skillfully she navigated so that she avoided any other boats. Privacy she wouldn’t sacrifice.

For a few hours she’d be selfish. For a few hours she didn’t have to be a princess, but only a woman, stroked by the wind, soothed by the sun. With another laugh she shook back her hair, only to have the wind swirl through it again.

“I’ve done this before.”

Reeve relaxed; the wind was doing the work for the moment. “It’s your boat,” he said easily. “According to your father, Bennett can outride anyone, Alexander can outfence the masters, but you’re the best sailor in the family.”

Thoughtful, Brie ran a hand along the glossy mahogany rail. “Liberié,” she mused, thinking of the name on the stern. “It would seem that like the little farm, I use this for an escape.”

Reeve turned to look at her. Through his amber-tinted glasses she looked gold and lush. Primitive, desirable, but still somehow lost. Whatever his inclinations, it wouldn’t do to be too kind. “I’d say you were entitled. Wouldn’t you?”

She made a little sound, noncommittal, unsure. “It only makes me wonder if I was happy before. I find myself thinking sometimes that when I remember, I’ll wish I’d let things stand as they are now. Everything’s new, you understand?”

“A fresh start?” He thought of his own farm, his own fresh start. But, then, he’d known where he’d ended, where he’d begun.

“I’m not saying I don’t want to remember.” She watched Reeve pull his T-shirt over his head and discard it. He looked so natural, she thought, so at ease with himself. His trunks were brief, but she felt no self-consciousness. She’d been held against that body. Brie let herself remember it. He was lean, hard. Little drops of spray glistened on his skin. A dangerous man. But wasn’t danger something she’d have to face sooner or later?

Yes, she remembered his embrace. Should she be ashamed to discover she wanted to be held against him, by him, again? She wasn’t ashamed, she realized, whether she should be or not. But she was cautious. “I know so little,” she murmured. “Of myself. Of you.”

Reeve took a cigarette from the shirt he’d tossed on the bench. He cupped his hands, flicked his lighter, the movements economical. As he blew out smoke, he looked at her again. “What do you want to know?”

She didn’t answer for a moment, but studied him. This was a man who could take care of himself, and others when he chose. This was a man, she was all but certain, who made his own rules. And yet … unless she was very mistaken, he was a man who’d lived by rules already set for most of his life. Which was he doing now? “My father trusts you.”