"You always said you didn't care for Almack's," Chloe said at the luncheon table when Hugo announced his intention of accompanying her to the Subscription Ball that evening.

"Oh, I don't mind," he said, carving a wafer-thin slice of ham. "Curiously, my memories of insipidity strike me as false. Perhaps my advanced years have softened me." He smiled down the table at her. Chloe lowered her eyes to her plate and toyed with a morsel of chicken.

"Well, I own I'm grateful, Hugo," Lady Smallwood declared, taking several mushroom tartlets from the basket in front of her. "It's been such a week of engagements, I'm quite fatigued. A quiet evening at home will be wonderful. I shall ask Alphonse to prepare me some of his crab patties and a Rhenish cream for dinner." She nodded with a contented little smile.

"I'm perfectly happy to chaperone Chloe, ma'am, so don't give it another thought."

He was perfectly happy to chaperone her, Chloe thought disconsolately, because he was perfectly happy to flirt and dance with half a dozen women all of whom seemed to light up when he walked into the room. They weren't all married women either. Lady Harley was a widow in her early thirties whom Hugo seemed to find very good company. And then there was Miss Anselm, who had never been married and was pronounced a bluestocking, but she and Hugo could talk for hours about music and he said she had the purest pitch. He would accompany her singing at the slightest opportunity and, even from her jaundiced perspective, Chloe had to admit that they complemented each other very well. Indeed, only the other day someone had commented in jocular fashion that it seemed as if her guardian was heading for the altar.

And to make matters worse, while he was always welcoming when she came to his room at night, he often seemed to be thinking of something else. Or someone else, she thought miserably.

"What are your plans for the afternoon, lass?" He interrupted her dismal musing.

"I don't have any."

"That's unusual." Hugo gave her a teasing smile. "No young men beating down the door for once?"

Chioe didn't respond to the smile or the comment, both of which she found supremely irritating.

"Perhaps you'd like a singing lesson," Hugo suggested. "We could practice the Irish melody by Moore that you liked so much."

"If you wish," she said.

"No, lass, if you wish."

It was one of Miss Anselm's favorite songs. Chloe decided she wasn't going to compete. She was trying to find an excuse that wouldn't sound childishly petulant, when Samuel came into the dining room.

"Peg's times 'ere," he said without preamble. "Thought you'd like t' know."

Chloe leapt up, all thoughts of Hugo and his possible brides vanquished. "I'll go to her at once. We'll need hot water, Samuel, lots of it."

"Aye, I know," he said. "Mrs. 'Erridge is seein' to it."

"Oh, dear, shouldn't we summon the doctor?" Lady Smallwood said. "It's not something Chloe should be doing, Hugo. It's most indelicate for a young girl to be involved in such things… and with such a creature!" Peg had not found favor with Hugo's cousin.

"That's nonsense," Chloe said, her eyes flashing dangerously. "It's not Peg's fault she is who she is. And it isn't her fault she's pregnant. You should be grateful, ma'am, that God didn't choose that you should have been born into Peg's world." On which note she whisked herself out of the dining room.

Hugo grimaced as his cousin's color deepened, all her sensibilities outraged. "She'll apologize later, ma'am," he said. "But she does become very passionate about such matters."

"You encourage her," Dolly said.

"I don't discourage her, I agree. When someone has such a single-minded mission and such exceptional skills, it would be criminal… not to mention futile." He stood up. "But she will apologize for her incivility as soon as she thinks about it. And if she doesn't think about it, I will remind her," he added. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I'd better see if there's anything I can do." He paused at the door. "Peg's only a child herself, Dolly."

The house shivered throughout the long afternoon with the screams of the laboring child. Dolly retired to her bedroom with her smelling salts, trying to block out the sounds. Samuel, grim-faced, toiled up and down stairs with brass jugs of hot water and whatever else Chloe demanded. Hugo tried to find peace in his music, and when that failed paced the library as if he were the expectant father.

At four o'clock, unable to bear inaction any longer, he went up to the back bedroom Peg had been given and stood irresolute outside the door, listening to the shrieks. The housekeeper suddenly opened the door and rushed out. Hugo could see the bed and he could see Chloe bending over.

He stepped into the room. "Chloe?"

"Hold her hand," Chloe said matter-of-factly. "I can see the head, but she's so frightened, poor mite, she's not helping to push the baby out. Perhaps you can comfort her."

Obediently, Hugo took the small, clawlike hand of the waif on the bed. Peg's screams had become a low, monotonous wail, as much through exhaustion as anything, Hugo thought, gazing with pity at the waxen countenance on the white pillow, the lines of suffering about her mouth and the drenched, terrified eyes.

"Oh, my goodness, Sir Hugo, this is no place…" Mrs. Herridge came back with a bowl and a pile of linen.

"I've seen worse," he said shortly. The decks of a battleship, slippery with blood, littered with the dead, the dying, the hideously wounded… the foul, fetid hell of the hospital between decks, where surgeons cut, chopped, amputated desperately under swaying lanterns. "Much worse," he said. "Pass me something to wipe her forehead."

The housekeeper did so without a word just as Peg screamed once more, her body convulsing.

"Here we go," Chloe said softly, her hands moving with deft competence. "Ah, Peg, it's a little girl." She looked up, her face radiant, and Hugo's heart turned over.

He struggled so hard to distance himself from her, to focus on his responsibility for her as his ward, to see her only as an eager, impulsive girl with her whole life ahead of her. And then she looked at him in that way, and his efforts were for nothing. If he'd been able to banish her from his bed, he would have done so, but his desire for her was beyond reason. He told himself that when she was no longer woven into the intimate fabric of his life he would be able to put it behind him, but for as long as she was there, opening his door at night, sliding into his bed with that wonderful uninhibited passion, he couldn't resist. Indeed, he couldn't imagine what superhuman strength a man would need to resist such a gift.

So, he tried to make a game of their lovemaking, to keep their relationship on an easy footing, one where his authority was the focus, not their loving. But now, as he looked at her face, glowing with joy in her accomplishment and in the miracle of birth, he was rocked anew by wonder at the depths of his feelings for her. It was desire bordering on obsession, but it was also love… not the love he had felt for her mother, but a real, solid thing he could describe, could almost shape in his mind. And it wasn't going to go away.

Chloe, far too busy to be aware of Hugo's arrested expression, expertly cut the cord and brought the baby to her mother. "See, Peg, your daughter." She laid the baby on the exhausted child's breast.

Peg gazed indifferently at the scrap of humanity to which she'd given life. Then she turned her head aside and closed her eyes.

Chloe picked up the baby, her eyes troubled as she looked at Hugo. "I suppose it would be too much to expect her to love it immediately. It's funny that humans aren't like animals."

"Give her time, lass," he said. "She's exhausted and she's suffered a lot. Let her sleep awhile."