elix felt exposed.

The strange sensation crept upon him almost as soon as he left the picnic. With every passing hour it intensified, growing stronger and more undismissable. By bedtime he was literally uncomfortable in his own skin.

The nearest parallel in his experience had been as a child, after having offered a carefully prepared present to one or both of his parents, waiting those terrible minutes to see whether his father would pick it up and whether his mother would, this once, after all her theatrical cooing, take it with her to her room or again leave it behind in the tea parlor, to be cleared away the next time the maids came through.

But the comparison was ridiculous. He had not offered Miss Cantwell a gift. His proposition was a monstrosity, an affront to decency, an incendiary missile catapulted inside the very walls of her castle.

How could he, then, the one on the offensive, fall prey to feelings of vulnerability?

Because you have not been so much yourself in a long time. Because you have let her see more of you than anyone else. Because if she were to reject this offer—

He told the voice inside to shut up. If she were to eventually reject his offer, it would have little to do with him, personally. Everything in her upbringing stood in the way. As did their entire social structure, predicated on the purity of the female body.

He would think no more on his secret discomfort. Instead, he would concentrate on those confessions of hers, of being na**d and subject to his will.

For good measure, he took himself to his estate for another week, so as not to seek her out and appear impatient. Even after his return, for several days he chose the masculine refuge of his club over garden parties and soirées musicales.

He did, however, bestir himself to attend Lady Tremaine’s ball, as otherwise the latter would have sent him a scathing note—they had been lovers at one point and had since settled into a solidly comfortable friendship.

At the ball, he danced with a half dozen young ladies, played a few hands of faro at the card tables, and spent some time by Lady Tremaine’s side, inquiring after her doings.

“I can tell you have been to one of your factories today,” he told her.

“Why? Do I still have machine grease on my face?” Lady Tremaine laughed. She was a glamorous and confident woman, entirely unashamed of her delight in manufactory and in the making of money.

“You radiate that sense of satisfaction that comes of either a spectacular lover or a spectacular income statement. And since I know you haven’t taken anyone to bed lately...”

“Perhaps your intelligence is faulty.”

“Never. Did you just find out that you are even richer than you were yesterday?”

She laughed again. “Yes. And by a good margin.”

He scanned the crowd below, looking for a now-familiar head of shining dark hair—even though he knew Miss Cantwell would not be in attendance. “Congratulations. How do you plan to celebrate?”

“A Swedish lover, perhaps,” said Lady Tremaine mischievously, “since I have already scheduled a tour of Scandinavia.”

He returned his attention to her. “When?”

“I leave day after tomorrow.” She shrugged. “I’m bored with London. Bored with the Season.”

“In that case, make the most of your trip. Try a Norwegian lover, too. And is Finland on the itinerary?”

“Not this time, but Denmark is.”

He drew back a little. “Lord Tremaine’s sister is married to a Dane, is she not?”

“Yes. In fact, I plan to call on her when I pass through Copenhagen—I have always kept on very good terms with my in-laws,” she answered, her tone defiant.

“Of course you have,” he said soothingly. “I shall expect a full account of your Scandinavian experience when you return.”

“That you will have.” She sounded relieved to move away from the topic of her in-laws—from any topic that might extrapolate to her husband. “And you, any interesting plans of your own?”

“No, I shall simply have to endure the tedium that is London without you. And then the dreariness of throwing the same old house party.”

“Ha. You are the last person to find Society a bore. You are too busy enjoying having your boots licked from one end of Mayfair to the other.”

“If the world wishes to admire me, who am I to stand in its way?”

He gave her a slight squeeze of the hand, let her tend to her other guests, and took himself to the music room for a little respite from the crowd. He did enjoy the adulation of the masses, but a man needed to breathe, too, and there was nothing like a crush of people at the height of summer to make a house as stuffy as one of the queen’s mourning gowns.

The music room was dominated by a beautiful Érard piano, which Felix had always thought must have some interesting story behind it: Lady Tremaine, not at all musical, was not the sort to invest in such a fine instrument for herself. Nor was it ever used—she had another piano, a much more ordinary one, in the drawing room, for when her friends wished to have a song or two after dinner.

He suspected that the piano had something to do with the husband she rarely mentioned, the one who lived an ocean away in New York City and never visited. The perfect marriage, it had been labeled by Society—civility, distance, and freedom, unencumbered by tiresome emotions.

The truth was probably something else altogether. But he had never inquired. Their friendship rested on a firm respect of boundaries: Neither questioned whether the other was truly what he or she seemed.

Lady Tremaine was happy to be thought of as completely satisfied with her marital situation. And he was happy to be thought of as a man without actual flaws, when he was about as perfect—and possibly as empty—as her marriage.

The door opened, and in stepped the woman whose refusal to give in to his salacious demands was the very reason for his moment of introspection.

She wore a massive confection the color of cooked shrimp, indiscriminately garnished with deep lace flounces, garlands of velvet rose leaves, and puffs of crystal-spangled tulle. On anyone else, the gown would have been heinous. But with her seemingly transparent face, she turned it to her advantage—of course a young woman as sweet and unsullied as she should come to a ball in twenty yards of pink silk weighed down with every variety of trimming known to couture.

She leaned back against the door, as if she couldn’t quite withstand the impact of seeing him again.

He had thought often of what she’d said about the telescope she desperately wanted, about the simple fact of carrying on without it. There had been a dignity to her thwarted desire. There never had been any dignity to his once hopeless needs, but only wretchedness.

He became conscious that an entire minute had passed and they’d exchanged not even a word of greeting.

“You are aware, Miss Cantwell, that we have already lost the princess royale’s father-in-law this year and are likely to lose her husband, too, any day now?” he said, his tone more severe than he had intended. “Your frock might be considered inappropriately cheerful in some quarters.”

“I am aware of that. But there is no color like raspberry sherbet for a country girl’s complexion,” she said softly.

And no color like raspberry sherbet for the craving that made her eyes feverishly luminous.

Standing there, the skin of her throat and shoulders gleaming under the bright lights of the music room, her chest rising and falling rapidly, her fingers splayed against the door, as if trying to hold on to something, anything—he would have propositioned her all over again, even knowing how exposed he would feel afterward.

“It’s still a ridiculous dress—but as a piece of costume I will admit it has its merits.” He braced a hand on the piano. “How did you know I was here?”

“We learned while we were at Mrs. Cornish’s ball—guests were leaving to come here and they said you would be in attendance. So Lady Balfour decided to do the same. We didn’t even have invitations, but Lady Balfour told me to hold my head high and simply march in.”

“And you succeeded admirably, of course.”

“I wanted to see you,” she said simply. “And when I came out of the powder room, whom should I spy but you, slipping in here.”

“Have you missed me?”

He didn’t ask such questions. Or at least, he didn’t ask such questions when the answers mattered.

Her left hand closed into a fist. “Of course I have missed you.”

The floor stopped wobbling. He breathed again.

“Every day I wondered whether I hadn’t made the biggest mistake in my life, declining to be your mistress. And every night...” She exhaled shakily. “Let’s just say I had no idea of the range and ferocity of my own imagination.”

“Tell me.”

He wanted to know. He needed to know. That she was fiercely drawn to him was what made his sense of vulnerability bearable.

Her fingers worried a crystal bead at her hip; her gaze was somewhere in the vicinity of his feet. “You said that you would bring me to your estate. Well, Lady Balfour happens to have a guidebook to the great manors of the land, with three pages devoted to describing Huntington’s every aspect. So now I know all about the cloistered garden, the lavender house, and the Greek folly across the lake from the manor.

“I can almost see it—the manor ablaze with light at night, the lake shimmering with reflection. I stand by one of the columns of the folly, and you come up behind me.”

He felt strangely light-headed. “You do know that when I entertain, torches are lit near the folly, so that it is visible from the house at night?”

Her fingers dug into the fabric of her skirts. “Of course, you would do something like that, wouldn’t you? Now I will be awake all night, thinking of how frightened I would be, even if I’m hidden behind a column. And I will wonder why, since it is an imaginary scenario, I don’t simply stop you. Why I don’t ask to be taken someplace less dangerously exposed—but let you continue to do everything you want.”

Objectively, he had heard far better love banter, steamy words accompanied by a great deal of na**dness and no inhibitions at all. Miss Cantwell, with her reluctance and her inability to go into greater details than “let you continue to do everything you want,” should have struck him as awkward and amateurish. But her inexperience, contrasted against her immediate embrace of being made love to in a semipublic place...

He could see it, too, now. Except he saw it even more perversely. His guests would not be in the house, but on the grounds for the bonfire party that always marked the last night of his summertime hospitality. Most would remain near the manor, but some would venture farther afield and almost stumble upon them, hidden in the shadows, still fully clothed, but with her skirts pushed up above her waist, and him hilt-deep inside her.

Her eyes met his. She swallowed: She had understood the direction of his thoughts.

“Would I have to keep a hand over your mouth to keep you quiet?” he asked, surprised to hear a slight hoarseness to his voice.

She swallowed again. “Probably.”

He approached her slowly. “And I’m sure you understand that would only be the beginning of the night. You will need to come back to my apartment and remain there until dawn.”

She gripped the doorjamb. “How many more times do you plan to make love to me that night?”

Her question was barely audible.

Until you beg me to keep you at Huntington all year round.

He stopped only when his lapels brushed the bodice of her gown. Her eyes were nearly black, with their dilated pupils. The heat rising from her skin was palpable. Her lips parted wider, as if she expected all the air in the room to be taken away shortly—as if she expected him to lean in and kiss her.

He leaned in, his lips almost grazing hers. This close, her eyes were all willingness and surrender. It took every ounce of his control to cant his head a few degrees and whisper into her ear, “You have come to say yes, haven’t you?”

She only panted.

“If the thought of exposure arouses you, there is another folly at Huntington, in the style of a Roman temple, with a belvedere on the upper level. The whole structure sits on top of a hill and commands quite a view of the surrounding countryside.”

She breathed even more erratically.

“Do you know what would make it even more exciting than the Greek folly? We will do this one in daylight—perhaps not broad daylight, but at sunrise, let’s say. And because you are a woman of perverse tastes, making love in public might not stimulate you as much as it ought to when the locale is too isolated to present immediate and tangible danger. So I will disrobe you. And for miles around, if anyone should think to point a good field glass toward the belvedere...”

Her hand came up to her throat.

“Say something,” he ordered. “Or I might decide to take your silence as assent.”

She blinked several times—he noticed for the first time that she had the most perfectly arched eyebrows. She pressed her gloved fingers against his lips, soft, warm kidskin that smelled faintly of cedar.

His heart stopped. He could already feel the sensation of her body against his, the paroxysms of pleasure that would rack her, just as the literal fireworks of the bonfire night set off into the sky.

“I’d better go now,” she dropped her hand and mumbled. “Or Lady Balfour will wonder where I’ve been.”

Now he was the one touching her, his gloved hand on her jaw to keep her gaze raised to his, when she would have looked away. “When will you admit you’ve changed your mind?”

Her eyes said she would toss and turn for hours when she reached home, that perhaps she would even be driven to touch herself. But she only replied, “Good night, Lord Wrenworth.”

And escaped from his clutch.

Leaving him to slowly recover from his disorientation.

And to realize, well after she was gone, that the music room was actually quite dimly lit, and that his earlier impression of the brilliance of its illumination was only that: an impression.

• • •

It sounded as if someone on an upper story was dragging a table across the floor.

Louisa looked up at the ceiling of the bookshop for a moment, before she turned her attention back to the books. She always volunteered to pick up Lady Balfour’s book orders. It was rare that she could afford a volume for herself, but she never passed up a chance to walk between walls of groaning shelves, running her gloved fingertips over rows upon rows of clothbound spines. An enjoyment that was more like an ache: an aesthetic appreciation butting up against a perennially unsatisfied craving for ownership.

Why not say yes to Lord Wrenworth? That would keep you knee-deep in books for the rest of your life, if nothing else.

Indeed, why not say yes to Lord Wrenworth?

When he had dropped out of sight for so many days after his initial proposition, she had grown increasingly certain, a sensation like a hole in her stomach, that she had woefully misread the situation. That what she had thought were but opening volleys actually constituted the entire transaction: offer tendered, offer refused, offer nullified.

That what she had thought to be real and sustained interest on his part was but a soap bubble under the sun, gone with the next blink of the eye.

Lady Balfour hadn’t needed to encourage her to pretend as if she belonged at Lady Tremaine’s ball. Had any servant tried to stop her from getting in, she would have gladly handed over her mother’s pearl brooch as a bribe—so badly did she need to see him.

It was to her credit that she had kept her clothes on—there was something about the man, about the way he looked at her, that made her want to disrobe on the spot. Not languidly, deliberately, but as if her corset and petticoats were on fire and must be yanked off without a second’s delay.

And when he had asked whether she had come to say yes, when he had renewed his offer and her hope, beneath her skirts her legs had trembled.

He would never know how close she had come to giving him the answer he wanted.

Yet for all her shaking relief that he was still interested—still committed to this lunacy of his—she had turned around and left.

Some part of her had recognized that the game was still very much on, and had not wanted to concede it. But how much longer could she play the game, when she had no idea how, or whether it was even possible, to win? Was she just playing to keep from losing, then? And what exactly did losing entail, in this particular instance?

Thunder like a field gun being fired right next to her ear made her jump. Rain unleashed as if a dam had burst in the clouds. She realized that what she had thought of as table legs scraping the floor overhead had actually been the low rumble of thunder, which had been going on for a good while.

She would have to remain in the bookshop until the storm eased, not a terrible hardship. And since she was—or at least represented—a loyal customer of long standing, Mr. Richards, the owner, would not complain about her prolonged browsing.

“I’m looking for the young lady who came to pick up Lady Balfour’s order.”

Louisa blinked. Lord Tenwhestle—what was he doing here?

“My lord Tenwhestle.” She came out from the stacks. “I’m here.”

“Of course you are, my dear cousin.” He nodded at Mr. Richards, came toward her, and instead of walking her to the door, led her deeper into the shop.

When they were out of Mr. Richards’s hearing range, Lord Tenwhestle asked, with a mischievous smile on his face, “Have you ever read Pride and Prejudice, Miss Cantwell?”

His question baffled her. “Yes, years ago.”

Mrs. Cantwell had been disappointed that no modern-day Mr. Darcy or Mr. Bingley had ever whisked one of her beautiful elder daughters into a grand manor. Louisa found it strange that her mother had nursed such hopes at all. Even Miss Austen herself had not found a real-life Mr. Darcy. Why should he materialize almost a century later, after his creator had turned into bone and dust?

“Do you remember the part where Mrs. Bennet dispatches her eldest daughter to Netherfield Park on horseback, knowing it would rain and force Jane to stay overnight?”

Louisa bit the inside of her cheek; she saw where this was going.

“My mother-in-law has contrived something similar,” continued Lord Tenwhestle, confirming Louisa’s suspicions. “She sent me to my club on foot, even though it was certain to pour, with the instruction that I must ensure that you arrived home warm and dry in case of rain.”

What would Lady Balfour think if she only knew that while she planned her innocent tricks, Louisa was playing far more reckless games? “And since it is impossible to locate a hackney in this weather...”

“Precisely.” Lord Tenwhestle winked conspiratorially. “When I groaned about my problem, a very fine gentleman stepped forward to put his carriage at my disposal.”

One with more than one folly on his estate? Louisa almost asked.

They were speaking in low voices, but now she dropped hers to a whisper. “Do you not think, sir, that perhaps Lady Balfour is overly optimistic about my prospects? I’d hate for her to be disappointed, but if the gentleman is who I think it is, I have no reason to believe any offers of marriage will be forthcoming from that quarter.”

Lord Tenwhestle gave her a gentle pat on the elbow. “You needn’t worry, dear cousin. We are all grown-ups here. Besides, I have known the gentleman in question for years, and perfect though he may be, he is also quite wily at dodging scheming mamas and equally scheming misses. I will allow that once could be a coincidence—the time he came to dinner at my house because Mr. Pitt happened to be our missing fourteenth guest—but I do not think Lord Wrenworth accidentally offers his help twice to the same kin of the same debutante.”

No, not accidentally. But whatever Lord Wrenworth did, it was for his own purpose: to have her standing na**d on that belvedere at the break of dawn, while he had his way with her.

She felt a sharp pinch in her chest. Would this scenario only ever exist in her imagination?

“If you say so, sir,” she said weakly.

A pair of footmen waited outside the bookshop, holding umbrellas. Lord Wrenworth stood by his sleek, splendid town coach under one such umbrella, looking as if he had stepped out from a fairy tale, the beautiful trickster prince—a fairy tale that must be bowdlerized before it could be safely read to children.

He greeted her with utmost propriety. His hold on her hand, as he helped her into the carriage, was light and decorous. And when he came into the carriage, his trousers did not even remotely brush the edge of her skirts.

All the same, it took only one swift, unsmiling look from him for heat to sweep over her. She clutched Lady Balfour’s packet of books in her lap.

Lord Tenwhestle climbed in. The door closed behind him. Smoothly, the coach rolled away from the curb.

“I was just telling Miss Cantwell how grateful I was that you came to my rescue,” said Lord Tenwhestle to the man who had proposed to Louisa, except not marriage. “And how thrilled I was not to have to seek a hackney in this downpour.”

Louisa’s lover—the appellation shocked her, but how else was she to refer to him?—inclined his head graciously. “My privilege to be of assistance.”

My lover, she repeated the words to herself. They had not made love, but that was an insignificant detail, given that he had probed her mind, both erotically and otherwise. And she, though she had yet to be unclothed before him, had certainly laid bare a great many of her na**d desires.

Traffic moved slowly. Lord Tenwhestle shouldered most of the small talk, some amusing incident of being lost in a similar downpour in the middle of Rome, while he was on his Grand Tour with his brother.

All of a sudden he exclaimed, “Goodness, I very nearly forgot! I am to meet my brother at his house in ten minutes—some business with the solicitor about a useless plot of land we’ve been trying to get rid of for ages.”

“If I’m not mistaken, Mr. Northmount lives on the next street?” asked Lord Wrenworth.

“That is correct. If I wasn’t just telling a story about us, I wouldn’t have remembered.”

Lord Wrenworth relayed new directions to his coachman. Minutes later, Lord Tenwhestle was inside his brother’s house and Lord Wrenworth and Louisa were headed toward Lady Balfour’s.

Louisa felt strangely self-conscious, not because she was alone with her unconsummated lover, but because the ploy on the part of her kin had been so ludicrously transparent. She was both immensely grateful for Lord Tenwhestle’s and Lady Balfour’s sincere and kindhearted efforts—and immensely embarrassed.

Especially since she had more or less confirmed to Lord Wrenworth that she was nothing of the sweet, innocent girl that a self-respecting man would take for a bride; she was in fact a nymphomaniac who did not mind being taken in public, if only he would take her at all.

She removed the books from her lap, set them beside her, and traced her thumb along the twine that had been used to wrap the package.

“Tell me about the telescope,” he said.

She looked up. “I thought I’d made it clear that is not something I will discuss.”

“Not something you will discuss unless you are already in bed with me,” he corrected her. “But that was for the reason you wanted the telescope. What I request is a description of the telescope itself.”

“Why?”

“Because it interests me.”

All at once she understood why she had not said yes two nights before. Why she continued to play this dangerous game.

She was afraid of losing him.

Once she became his mistress, once he was free to satisfy himself on her, it would be the beginning of the end. But as long as she resisted, as long as his lust simmered unfulfilled, there was a chance he would remain part of her life.

Perhaps he would write her risqué letters on a typewriter, unsigned so that they could not be traced back to him. Perhaps he would find a reason to buy a property near where she lived—and call on her once every two years or so, when he came by to inspect the property in person. Perhaps he would—

“What is the size of the aperture?” he asked.

She hesitated. Her carnal infatuation she could not hide, but could she bear to expose more of herself, to be even more na**d before him?

“Six inches?” he continued his questioning.

“Nine and a half,” she heard herself responding.

“Focal length?”

“Twelve feet, four inches.”

He tented his hands. “No wonder you were unable to afford it. Earlier I thought you wanted one of those five-guinea telescopes. But you, Miss Cantwell, are ambitious.”

“For some things,” she admitted.

“When you fancy a telescope, you want one that can show you each party of a double star. When you fancy a man, you want The Ideal Gentleman.” With one finger atop his walking stick, he tipped it from side to side. “What else do you fancy?”

She should not tell him anything else. She should never have mentioned the telescope in the first place, never given him a glimpse into her private self.

“All I ever wanted was to be an independent spinster.”

She winced inside. What possessed her to keep laying herself bare before him? Granted, it was terribly lonely to be in love, and granted, his continued interest was—

Her thought process halted abruptly, as if it were a ship encountering a hidden sandbar. She stopped fiddling with the twine bow. What had just happened?

She had been so careful. Infatuation, besottment, madness—she’d used every word in the thesaurus to describe her state of mind.

Every word except love.

Because love wasn’t a state of mind liable to change from hour to hour, day to day. Love was like smallpox: Even the survivors did not escape unscathed.

She looked at him as if seeing him for the first time, the beauty, the poise, the wickedness. She was in love with a man no woman in her right mind would approach, let alone want.

He tapped his tented fingertips against one another. “I can give you that, an independent spinsterhood. And a bigger telescope than the one you hungered after.”

“You are as persuasive as the serpent in the Garden of Eden.”

“And you are far cleverer and warier than poor Eve ever was.”

He lifted his straight rod of a walking stick and, holding it near the base, set its handle on her lap, a frightfully intimate, invasive gesture that made flame leap through her.

The terrible thing was, the more he revealed himself to be dangerous and warped, the more she fell under his spell. And the more she fell under his spell, the freer he felt to reveal even more of his true nature.

His eyes met hers again. “Let me give you everything you’ve ever dreamed of.”

But he couldn’t. Or at least, he wouldn’t.

For she could no longer be satisfied with an expensive telescope, an exemplary spinsterhood, or his sure-to-be-magnificent body—or even all three together.

She was a woman in love and she wanted nothing less than his unscrupulous and very possibly unprincipled heart, proffered to her in slavish devotion.

She set her fingers on the handle of the walking stick, still warm with the heat of his hand. At first she thought it was but a knob made of heavy, smooth-grained ebony, but as she traced its curve with her hand, she looked down and realized that the handle was actually in the shape of the head of a black jaguar.

“Very fine specimen you have here,” she said, a little shocked at both her words and her action.

She was caressing the part of him that he had chosen to extend to her person, her fingertips exploring every nook and cranny of the handle. His gaze, intense and heavy lidded, traveled from her face to her uninhibited hand and back again.

“You like it?”

He was as deliberate and self-mastered a man as she had ever met. Whenever she thought of him with access to her body, she’d always imagined a manipulative lover with infinite patience and control, making her pant and writhe, and then perhaps tormenting her a little—or a great deal—by withholding what she desperately needed.

But there was an undercurrent to this particular question that made her think of him pushing her up against a wall, or perhaps the column of a Greek folly, and taking her hard, all his patience and control gone.

Her voice shook slightly. “Yes.”

“I have far better specimens I can show you.”

“I’m sure you do. But this will always be my first.”

The town coach seemed to have been built of glass, with large windows on every side. None of the shades were drawn, and they were hardly the only vehicle on the road.

Nonetheless, she raised the handle of his walking stick, leaned forward, and kissed it on the tip.

“You make me do such unspeakable things,” she murmured, looking at the jaguar’s head.

Slowly, he pulled the walking stick from her grasp. He examined the handle closely, then glanced back at her, his gaze heated yet inscrutable.

Rain drummed against the top of the coach. Thunder cracked. The wheels of the carriage splashed through the small river running down the street. Yet all she heard was the arrhythmic thumping of her heart, a staccato of hot, unfulfilled yearning.

The silence made her squirm. She was not someone who must speak to fill a silence, yet his silence seemed to turn a spigot in her, and words spilled from her into the space between them.

“Why don’t you let me touch it again, the head of the jaguar? I quite like its heft in my hand.”

He cast a look down and played, rather absently—or so it seemed—with the ebony knob. Except whatever he did made her breath catch and her face grow even hotter.

“Are you sure it is I who make you do unspeakable things?” he asked softly, his gaze pinning her against the back of the seat. “Or are you just naturally fond of gentlemen’s... walking sticks?”

• • •

She shifted on the seat.

Felix would like to do the same: adjust certain parts so he was slightly more comfortable. But he also knew it would be no use: Nothing would take off the edge of his arousal—nothing except the possession of her.

He thought of her constantly: on her back, on her knees, on her feet, sometimes na**d, sometimes not, but always with him inside her, and always with her eyes wide open, looking at him with that expression particular to her: lust, apprehension, covetousness, suspicion, and just a sprinkle of worship.

Even now he thought of it: using the handle of his walking stick to lift her skirts and push her knees apart, so that she would be exposed before him.

“I will find out, won’t I, when I marry the butcher?” she answered at last.

His fingers clenched over the handle of his walking stick. He hadn’t meant to react so obviously, but he hadn’t been able to help himself. What did she mean, the butcher? “Does he have a walking stick you have been admiring?”

She twisted her fingers. “I’m sure I don’t know about his walking stick—I have only seen him in his shop. He is a good man and not unpleasant in appearance. Rumor is that he fancies me, but Mother has let it be known, though perhaps not in so many words, that she would never allow any of her daughters to stoop to marrying butchers, greengrocers, and the like.

“But that’s because her father was a gentleman. My father was a fortune hunter, and I am far less fastidious about which sort of man is good enough to be my husband. A butcher’s money is just as good as a lord’s. If he will take Matilda in, then I will marry him.”

He did not want to believe her. But this was what truth felt like: a tight, hard knot somewhere in his chest. “Will he take in Miss Matilda?”

She shrugged. “That might depend on how well I convince him of my fondness for his walking stick.”

The handle of the walking stick was suddenly pressed into her chest, between her breasts. He had no idea how it happened. He had no idea he was capable of such recklessness—or volatility.

She looked at him with astonishment—and made no move to touch the walking stick again.

“Sleep with me and I will provide you access to the best private telescope in England, something your butcher would never be able to do.”

Her heart beat violently—each throb transmitting across the length of the walking stick to reverberate against his palm. “I thought I had made it very clear that I am not that sort of woman.”

The thought of another man touching her... of her, with that agreeableness she did so well, encouraging this man... of himself, with only his memories for consolation...

His fortune privileged him over most other men in London, but how did he compete with all the “butchers, greengrocers, and the like”?

Slowly he retracted the walking stick. “You will certainly eat well, if nothing else.”

He’d meant to project a certain levity, but he sounded caustic.

“One must look to the silver linings,” she said quietly.

“I am sure you will manage very well.”

“Yes,” she said, with a grave solemnity. “I will always manage, somehow.”

The carriage door opening startled them both. He had not realized that they had arrived before Lady Balfour’s house. Suddenly Miss Cantwell was smiling sweetly and thanking him for his kindness in seeing her home. He, too, became all courtesy and gallantry, assuring her that he would have moved far greater mountains to ensure her ease and comfort.

As his coach pulled away once more from the curb, however, it was not their naughtier interaction that dominated his thoughts, but the determination—and melancholy—with which she assured him that she would survive marriage to just about any able-bodied man.

His entire plan had depended upon her failure to secure a man of her social station. But he had not counted on her willingness to marry beneath her. A butcher was an upstanding member of any community, but by becoming the wife of one, she could count on never again calling on Lady Balfour or the Tenwhestles.

Or friends she had made during her time in London. Or just about anyone else she knew from home. It was cruel, but until the world changed, the gentry would always hold themselves apart from butchers, greengrocers, and the like.

He imagined her in this new life, always making sure she appeared extra cheerful, because she never wanted her husband, her epileptic sister, or her new friends and in-laws to think her less than content. He imagined her coming occasionally across an old acquaintance and the awkward conversation that would ensue, especially if she happened to be accompanied by her husband. He imagined her reaching for a sheet of stationery, the beginning of a letter on her mind, and then hesitating, and finally giving up the idea altogether—she would not want to agonize the recipient with the decision whether to respond; nor would she want to anticipate a reply and then finally have to admit to herself one was never coming.

Not to mention the stars. The girl who wanted a telescope of that particular description wasn’t content merely to view the craters of the moon or the rings of Saturn. She wanted to see the mountains of Mars. The very outer reaches of the solar system.

Why would she deprive herself of everything that mattered to her, when she could easily—

He stopped his thoughts from going any further in that direction.

Instead, he hurled his walking stick onto the seat she had vacated and cursed her obduracy and stupidity.