Stephen joined the line at the food table and filled two plates with a variety of savories and sweets in the hope that Lady Paget would like at least some of them.

When he returned to the salon, she was fanning her face, a haughty, contemptuous smile playing about her lips. All the tables around her were occupied. No one was talking to her or even about her – not audibly, at least, but it was obvious to Stephen that everyone was very aware of her. He guessed that some of the people there had chosen the salon deliberately /because/ she was there, so that they could report on her behavior in drawing rooms across London for the next week or so and complain of the outrage of having had to share a supper room with her.

Such was human nature.

He set one plate in front of her and seated himself opposite with the other. Someone had already poured two cups of tea.

"I hope," he said, "I have brought you /something/ that you like."

She glanced down at her plate.

"You have," she said in that low, seductive voice of hers. "You have brought yourself."

He wondered if she always talked so outrageously.

She was probably – no, she was /undoubtedly/ the most sexually attractive woman he had ever set eyes upon. Her heat had seemed to envelop him all the time they waltzed, though she had danced quite properly and had not once tried to close the distance between their bodies.

"Were you afraid I would not return?" he asked her. "Have you been feeling very conspicuous and self-conscious?"

"Because everyone here is expecting me to draw an axe from beneath my skirts and twirl it about my head while letting out a bloodcurdling shriek?" she asked him, her eyebrows raised. "No, I take no notice of such nonsense."

She was very forthright. But perhaps she had discovered that the best defense was often offense.

"Gossip usually /is/ nonsense," he said.

That scornful smile still hovered about her lips as she selected a lobster patty from her plate and lifted it to her mouth.

"Usually," she agreed, raising her eyes to his as she bit into the patty. She chewed the mouthful and swallowed. "But sometimes not, Lord Merton. You must wonder."

He could only follow her lead.

"If you killed your husband?" he said. "It is none of my business, ma'am."

She laughed – and several heads turned openly their way.

"Then you are a fool," she said. "If you are going to allow me to seduce you, you ought perhaps to have a healthy fear of what I might do to you when your guard is down and you are naked in my bed."

She was becoming more outrageous. He hoped he was not flushing.

"But perhaps," he said, "I am not /going/ to allow it, ma'am. Indeed, I do not believe I would ever /allow/ myself to be seduced. If I were to take a mistress or a casual lover, it would be something I /chose/ to do because I wished it and because /she/ wished it. It would not happen because I had fallen a mindless prey to a seductress."

He really did not have any appetite, he realized as he looked down at his own plate. Why had he piled so much food onto it?

And why was he having this conversation? Had he really just spoken those words aloud to a lady – /if I were to take a mistress or a casual lover/…?

Had he completely lost all sense of propriety? Outspoken and notorious as she was, she was still a lady. And he was still a gentleman.

"And I do not fear you," he added.

Perhaps he ought to. Perhaps what he had just said to her was so much hot air. He had never kept a long-term mistress, though he was by no means a virgin. He had often slightly envied Con, who always seemed to find a respectable widow with whom to conduct a discreet affair when he was in town. A few years ago it had been Mrs. Hunter, last year Mrs.

Johnson. Stephen was not sure if there was anyone this year.

If he himself was now considering taking a mistress or a lover – and, Lord help him, he /was/ considering it – was it because he had suddenly chosen to do so quite deliberately and rationally in the middle of a ball or because he had been /seduced/ into doing so by a woman who was quite blatant about her intentions?

She was not at all his type, he reminded himself. Not the type of woman he would ever consider for a /bride/, anyway. But he was not considering her for a bride.

Unbidden, an image of what she would look like naked on a bed flashed into his mind, and he felt an alarming tightening in the area of his groin.

Enough of this!

"Lady Paget," he said firmly, "it is high time we changed the subject.

Tell me something about yourself. Something about your girlhood, if you will. Where did you grow up?"

She selected a small cake from her plate and lifted her head to smile at him.

"Mostly here, in London," she said, "or at one of the spas. My father frequented the gaming tables and went wherever the gambling crowds went and the stakes were highest. We lived in rented rooms and hotels. But lest you think this a pathetic story, Lord Merton, and one designed to draw your pity, may I add that he was as bountiful with his affections toward my brother and me as he was in wagering at the tables. And he had the devil's own luck, to quote him. By that he meant that he always won marginally more than he lost. I cannot even remember my mother, but I had a governess from an early age, and she was as dear to me as any mother could be. We saw a great deal of the world together, Miss Haytor and I – both in reality and through books. Your own upbringing would have been far more privileged than mine, but it cannot have been happier or more entertaining."

For the first time he sensed that she was lying, though it was impossible to know about which details of her story. She just sounded too defensive to be telling the truth. Such a life, if the bare facts of what she had said were the truth, must surely have left a child with anxieties and insecurities. And every child, he believed, needed a fixed home.

"More privileged?" he said. "Perhaps. I grew up at first in a vicarage in a Shropshire village – my father was the vicar – and then in a smaller cottage in the same village after his death. I lived with my sisters.

Meg, now the Countess of Sheringford, was the eldest and, like your Miss Haytor, she was a splendid substitute mother. Nessie, now the Duchess of Moreland, is my middle sister, and Kate, now Baroness Montford, is next above me in age. I was the youngest. I had a happy boyhood until I inherited my title at the age of seventeen. It was a considerable shock since none of us had even known that I was next in line for it. I do not regret that I did not know, though. It can be character-building to grow up expecting to have to work for one's living and the support of one's sisters. At least, I hope it built my character. I understand privilege and all its advantages and disadvantages better perhaps than I would had I grown up with expectations."

"Lady Sheringford is your /sister/?" she said, her eyebrows raised.

"Yes," he said.

"And she married the notorious Earl of Sheringford," she said, "who ran off with another man's wife on his own wedding day not so many years ago and had a child with her."

It always bothered Stephen that he could not tell the truth of what had happened both before and after Sherry took Mrs. Turner away from London the night before he was to marry Turner's sister. But he had promised Sherry that he never would.

"Toby," he said. "He is a cherished member of our family. Meg loves him as dearly as she loves her own two children. So does Sherry – the Earl of Sheringford. He is their son. My nephew."

"I have touched upon a raw nerve," she said, setting an elbow on the table and cupping her chin and one cheek in her hand. "Why did your sister marry him?"

"I suppose," he said, "because he asked. And because she wished to say yes."