HE AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING TO THE SOUND OF HOOFbeats. Not on the gravel drive circling the house, but farther away, not nearing but retreating.

He’d left the French doors to his balcony open, a very un-English act, but in Toulouse he’d grown accustomed to open windows at night.

Fortuitous. Rolling from the bed, he stretched and strolled across the room. Naked, he stood in the balcony doorway watching Penny, garbed in a gold riding habit, steadily canter away. If the doors hadn’t been open, he’d never have heard her; she’d left from the stables, a good distance from the house. Sidesaddle on a roan, she was unhurriedly heading south.

To Fowey? Or her home? Or somewhere else?

Five minutes later, he strode into the kitchen.

“My lord!” Mrs. Slattery was shocked to see him. “We’re just starting your breakfast-I had no idea-”

“My fault entirely.” He smiled charmingly. “I forgot I wanted to ride early this morning. If there’s any coffee? And perhaps a pastry or two?”

In between muttering dire warnings over what was sure to befall gentlemen who didn’t start their day by sitting down to a proper breakfast, contemptuously dismissing his proffered excuse that he’d grown accustomed to French ways-“Well, you’re a proper English earl now, so you’ll need to forget such heathenish habits”-Mrs. Slattery provided him with a mug of strong coffee and three pastries.

He demolished one pastry, gulped down the coffee, scooped up the remaining pastries, planted a quick kiss on Mrs. Slattery’s cheek, eliciting a squawk and a “Get along with you, young master-m’lord, I mean,” and was out of the back door striding toward the stables ten minutes behind Penny.

Fifteen minutes by the time he swung Domino, his gray hunter, out of the stable yard and set out in her wake.