Nicholas was taller than Fred and broader of shoulder, but he was lanky and thin whereas Fred was as stocky and muscular as a bulldog. Nicholas liked to think that in a fair fight he could best his lifelong rival; however, the fights between him and Fred had never been fair, and as Fred was the heir to a baronetcy and Nicholas was a servant, he knew that they never would be.

“Master Fred’s your better, Nick,” Jenny said whenever he appeared with a bloody lip or a newly blackened eye. “You’d best stop provoking him.”

But this time, Fred hadn’t been provoked.

He simply pokered up, and in a fair imitation of his father, Sir Roderick, scolded Maggie for consorting with servants and conducting herself in a manner unbecoming to a young lady. “I shall inform your Aunt Daphne of your behavior,” he told her sternly. “And when your father returns from London, I’ve a mind to speak to him as well.”

And then he turned on his booted heel and strode away, pausing at the edge of the clearing only long enough to lock eyes with Nicholas.

There was murder in his gaze.

“How dared he threaten me?” Maggie seethed an hour later as the two of them lay stretched out on the grassy banks of the stream that ran through Beasley Park. “The jealous arse. Tell my father, indeed. As if Papa would ever hear a word against me.”

“Your aunt would,” Nicholas replied grimly.

Daphne Honeywell, the squire’s widowed sister-in-law, had come to live at Beasley Park only two years before for the sole purpose of turning Maggie into a lady. Nicholas despised the woman. Because of her, Maggie’s days were taken up with needlework and dancing lessons, and her head had been filled with thoughts of balls, routs, and assemblies. Because of her, Maggie no longer wore breeches and rode astride or stripped down to her underclothes to go swimming with him in the lake.

Now she dressed in pretty gowns, made of fabric so fragile and fine that Nicholas feared to touch it, and her thick mink-colored hair, which had once cascaded in a luxurious tumble down her back, was bound up in soft curls and silken ribbons. Even her complexion had changed. Carefully shielded from the sun with parasols and hats, it no longer glowed with a golden tan but had reverted to its natural hue: a flawless, creamy porcelain.

Two years was hardly any time at all, and yet the difference between a fourteen-year-old Margaret Honeywell and a sixteen-year-old Margaret Honeywell was as vast as the ocean.

More and more often, Nicholas found himself staring at his lifelong friend with a peculiar ache of longing in his chest. He’d never liked to be away from her, but now, whenever they were apart, he brooded over her to the point of melancholy.

And that wasn’t the worst of it.