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Rees was sitting at the harpsichord. He got up as soon as she entered. “The carriage is waiting and I’ve told Cook to pack a hamper, as you haven’t yet eaten.”

“I couldn’t,” Helene said faintly.

“Then I’ll eat it,” he said with a shrug.

“I had no idea that this part of Hyde Park existed,” Helene said with fascination, a short time later. The grasses to either side of the little winding path had grown so tall that they touched the slouching limbs of the huge oaks. Daisies poked their heads above the seas of grasses like intrepid soldiers, fighting off nettles and thistles growing breast high.

“I’ve never met another soul here,” Rees said. “All the polite sort prefer raked gravel paths.”

Sometimes the oak trees bent down as if they’d been humbled, brushing their branches to the ground, and then suddenly they would fall back, leaving a patch of emerald grass, or a cascade of daisies. Twenty minutes later, Helene could no longer hear any din from the city at all, no sound of carriages, bells, or shouts. “It’s like being in the country,” she said, awed.

They rounded the bend and the trees trailed off again, forming another clearing. “How lovely,” she said, walking into the middle of a lake of frothy white flowers shaped like stars and stooping to pick herself a flower or two.

When she glanced back, Rees was still standing on the path, his face unreadable. The sun fell relentlessly on his harsh face, on the lines around his eyes, the scowling eyebrows, the generous lower lip, those two dimples…

And Helene realized with a great thump of her heart that she’d never gotten over that first infatuation with him, that first blinding passion that had driven her out her bedchamber window and into his carriage, the better to make their way to Gretna Green.

She almost dropped the flowers she held, the realization was so blinding.

When Rees appeared at her side, hamper in hand and plopped himself onto the grass, squashing a hundred starflowers as he did so, Helene couldn’t even bring herself to speak. She’d spent nine years telling herself that the brief infatuation that led to their elopement was a dream, a moment’s blindness.

But it wasn’t. Oh, it wasn’t.

Numbly she helped Rees pull a tablecloth from the basket and load it with pieces of chicken, pie, fruit, and a bottle of wine.

She refused a glass of wine. “Hair of the dog,” Rees said, “and very nice hair it is.” He grinned at her. He had a chicken leg in his hand and was eating it like a savage. And he had that wicked look about him again, the one that made her think about the muscles hidden by his white shirt.

To her surprise, Helene found that she was hungry. She put a plate of chicken on her knee and began struggling to cut it properly.

“Don’t bother,” Rees said lazily. He was lying on his side, looking twice as comfortable in a bed of flowers as he did in a drawing room. “Just eat it, Helene.”

She looked at him with disdain. “I don’t eat with my fingers. I discarded that habit in the nursery.”

“Who’s to see? There’s only you and I, and we’re nothing more than an old married couple.”

Old married couple implied comfort and ease, and she didn’t feel any of that with Rees, particularly with the secret prickling awareness she had of his body. He had removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves and one bronzed arm lay all too close to her. “It seems to me that you are always removing your clothing,” she told him, eyeing him with distinct hostility. How dare he be so comfortable, while she was both overheated and hungry? Her beautiful little blue jacket felt altogether winterish with the sun shining on her back.

In answer, he sat up. Helene edged back. Rees was overpowering at close quarters. “Here,” he said simply, holding the chicken leg to her lips.

“I couldn’t!” But she hadn’t eaten all day. Her stomach gave a little gurgle.

Rees laughed. “Go ahead. There’s no one to see.”

“You’re here,” she said mulishly.

“I don’t count,” he said, giving her an oddly intent look. “That’s one of the nicer things about being married, I always thought.”

She took a bite. The chicken was delicious, faintly reminiscent of lemon. “It’s exquisite,” she admitted, taking another bite.

“I pay my cook extremely well,” Rees said, ripping off a little strip of chicken and bringing it to her lips.

There was a dark, velvety something in his voice that made the little coil in Helene’s stomach grow tighter.

But he drew back. “My idea is that I’ll stage the second act not in the Puritan village, but in the court,” he said. “You see, the Princess has left her beloved, Captain Charteris, behind. I’m thinking of adding a subplot in which the captain is being wooed by another lady.”

“So the captain would be the focus of the act?”

Rees nodded. “I had an idea for a tenor solo. I took the words from the solo Fen wrote for the little Quaker girl who’s in love with the Prince.”