Drat and blast. She came to a halt—she’d never outrun him, not in a thousand tides—her hands curling into fists at her sides. For one moment, she allowed herself the indulgence of eyes squeezed shut. But then she dragged in a breath and spun again to face him.

Only Casek, at least. Not Cador. Small blessings. Though they looked enough alike that she couldn’t make herself smile over the difference. “Caz.”

Her greeting, hard as the granite stones of Giant’s Castle, did nothing to wipe the grin from his lips. Ollie had always hated that grin—a smirk, he called it, and he seemed to think Casek only ever donned it to taunt him.

He may have a point, in general. But as Caz strode her way, gaze sweeping over her as if she were half-apparition, she knew the look had nothing to do with Oliver Tremayne. “Mabena Moon,” he said again, this time with disbelief in his tone. “Didn’t expect ever to see you back here.”

She lifted her chin. And fought the sudden urge to pull off her hat and toss it to the waves so she could feel the bolstering strength of the wind in her hair. But she’d just have to settle for righteous anger. “And why, I wonder, is that?”

Casek halted a few feet away, hands raised in truce but that grin still playing at the corners of his mouth. “You can’t blame me for what Cador’s done, can you?”

She folded her arms over her chest. “I don’t see why not. You Wearnes were always the all-for-one sort.”

He snorted a laugh. “As if your own family’s any different?”

A lift of her brows was the only answer she’d give him to that one.

He didn’t seem to require any other. Just chuckled, and it sounded like his always had, a deep rumble of surf on stones. “What are you doing home, Benna?”

She debated half a dozen answers before deciding on the one that would seem to have the least to do with her. With a hand waved in the general direction of the cottages, she said, “My employer’s holidaying here. She’s given me the day to see my family, so I thought I’d find someone to take me to Tresco.”

That steady look of his didn’t shift any, though his eyes danced like the light on the waves. “If you think for a moment I’ll believe that you just let your . . . employer decide to come here without exerting any opinion on the matter, then you don’t give me near enough credit. Mabena Moon lets no one else decide something for her.”

She hoped her blink, long and slow, was as disdainful as she meant it to be. “I’m a lady’s maid, Casek Wearne. I’ve no right to exert my opinion.”