It would have been easier if they could have taken a moonlit ride, found a clearing that pleased them, and explored in private the intimacy of becoming lovers. But it wasn’t safe to go into the woods after dark. Not with nighthunters around.

Maybe she should take Fiona up on that offer after all.

“I don’t like Jean,” Keely said suddenly, sounding like a girl again. “She’s sneaky.”

Breanna sighed. Jean had become a thorn in all their sides. “What’s she done now?”

“She knows children aren’t supposed to be in the pantry.”

“She’s not a child, Keely.”

Keely ignored that. “She knows we’re supposed to ask if we want something to eat.” She dropped the dipper back into the bucket, then curled her arms around her body as if giving herself a comforting hug. “When Brooke and I saw her and told her she wasn’t supposed to be there, she—” Keely bit her lip.

“She what?” Breanna’s stomach tightened.

“She said she’d make us sorry if we told anyone she’d been in the pantry. She said it was her own business and none of ours. But she’s sneaky, and she’s mean, and I don’t like her. Why can’t she stay with Liam? He’s got a big house.”

That’s precisely what Jean would like to do. Stay in Liam’s house. Be waited on by Liam’s servants. Have Liam in her bed until he felt obliged to do the honorable thing and offer her marriage so that she’d always live in a big house with servants to wait on her. There was no point telling Jean that gentry men didn’t feel obliged to wed a woman they’d bedded, especially if the woman wasn’t from a gentry family. There was no point telling Jean that Liam was more touchy about making a child out of wedlock than any man she knew, so he’d think hard about being a lover to any woman he wouldn’t be willing to marry, and trying to force him with some kind of love charm would kindle hatred rather than love. And there was no point telling Jean that, while the Fae Lords looked at Fiona with cautious interest, she’d seen something ugly slip into their eyes whenever Jean appeared.

When she’d pointed out to Falco that the Fae’s habit of using persuasion magic to seduce a human woman wasn’t really any different than Jean making her love charms, he’d surprised her by not defending the Fae or insisting there was a difference. Instead, he’d pointed out the Clan was too nervous about giving offense to any of the Mother’s Daughters to be able to shrug off getting caught by a love charm’s magic. And he’d added brutally that no man would want to endure Jean any longer than it took to have her.