“How do you define a good one?”

“Are you asking what kind of woman I would want to marry?” His smile lingered much longer than usual, causing the fine hairs to prickle on the nape of Daisy’s neck. “I suppose I would know when I met her.”

Striving to seem unconcerned, Daisy wandered to the stained-glass windows. She held a hand up, watching the mosaic of colored light on the paleness of her skin. “I can predict what she would be like.” She kept her back to Swift. “Taller than me, for one thing.”

“Most women are,” he pointed out.

“And accomplished and useful,” Daisy continued. “Not a dreamer. She would keep her mind on practical matters, and manage the servants perfectly, and she would never be tricked by the fishmonger into buying scrod after it’s turned.”

“If I did have any thoughts about marriage,” Swift said, “you’ve just driven them completely out of my mind.”

“You’ll have no difficulty finding her,” Daisy continued, sounding more glum than she would have wished. “There are hundreds of them in Manhattanville. Maybe thousands.”

“What makes you certain I would want a conventional wife?”

Her nerves tingled as she felt him approaching her from behind.

“Because you’re like my father,” she said.

“Not entirely.”

“And if you married someone different from the woman I just described, you would eventually come to think of her as a…parasite.”

The light pressure of Swift’s hands closed over her shoulders. He turned Daisy to face him. His blue eyes were warm as he searched hers, and she had the discomforting suspicion that he was reading her thoughts far too accurately. “I prefer to think,” he said slowly, “that I would never be that cruel. Or idiotic.” His gaze felt to the exposed skin of her chest. With utter gentleness, he traced his thumbs across the winged shape of her collarbones, until gooseflesh rose on her arms beneath her puffed sleeves. “All I would ever ask of a wife,” he murmured, “is that she would bear me some affection. That she might be happy to see me at the end of the day.”

Her breath quickened beneath the touch of his fingers. “That’s not very much to ask.”

“Isn’t it?”

His fingertips had reached the base of her throat, which rippled from her hard swallow. He blinked and removed his hands promptly, seeming not to know what to do with them until he buried them in his coat pockets.

And yet he didn’t move away. Daisy wondered if he felt the same irresistible pull that she did, a perplexing need that could only be appeased by more closeness.

Clearing her throat in a businesslike manner, Daisy straightened her spine and drew up to her full height of five feet and one debatable inch.

“Mr. Swift?”

“Yes, Miss Bowman?”

“I have a favor to ask.”

His gaze sharpened. “What is it?”

“As soon as you tell my father definitively that you’re not going to marry me, he will be…disappointed. You know how he is.”

“Yes, I know,” Swift said dryly. Anyone acquainted with Thomas Bowman was well aware that for him, disappointment was but a quick stop on the way to high dudgeon.

“I’m afraid it will result in some unpleasant repercussions for me. Father is already unhappy that I haven’t brought someone up to scratch. If he assumes I’ve deliberately done something to foil his plans about you and I…well, it will make my situation…difficult.”

“I understand.” Swift knew her father perhaps better than Daisy herself did. “I won’t say anything to him,” he said quietly. “And I’ll do what I can to make things easier for you. I’m leaving for Bristol in two days, three at the most. Llandrindon and the other men…none of them are idiots, they have a fair idea of why they were invited here, and they wouldn’t have come if they weren’t interested. So it shouldn’t take long for you to get a proposal out of one of them.”

Daisy supposed she should appreciate his eagerness to shove her into the arms of another man. Instead, his enthusiasm made her feel sour and waspish.

And when one felt like a wasp, one’s main inclination was to sting.

“I appreciate that,” she said. “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful, Mr. Swift. Especially by providing me with some much-needed experience. The next time I kiss a man—Lord Llandrindon, for example—I’ll know much more about what to do.”

It filled Daisy with vengeful satisfaction to see the way his mouth tightened.

“You’re welcome,” he said in a growl.

Perceiving that his hands were half-raised as if he were on the brink of throttling or shaking her, Daisy gave him her sunniest smile and scooted out of his reach.

As the day progressed the early morning sunshine was smothered in clouds that unrolled in a great gray carpet across the sky. Rain began to fall steadily, turning unpaved roads to mud, replenishing the wet meadows and bogs, sending people and animals scurrying to their respective shelters.

This was Hampshire in spring, sly and mercurial, playing pranks on the unsuspecting. If one ventured out with an umbrella on a wet morning, Hampshire would produce sunlight with a magician’s flourish. If one went walking without the umbrella, the sky was sure to dump buckets of rain on one’s head.

Guests clustered in various ever-changing groups…some in the music room, some in the billiards room, some in the parlor for games or tea or amateur theatrics. Many ladies attended to their embroidery or lace work while gentlemen read, talked, and drank in the library. No conversation escaped without at least a nominal discussion of when the storm might end.