"Well, Meg," Lord Montford said, "it is a good thing no one came to your ball. I dread to think how pushed and pulled and crushed we would all be feeling now if anyone /had/."

The countess laughed.

"It did go rather well," she said. And then, with a sudden look of anxiety, "It /did/, did it not?"

"It was the grandest squeeze of the Season so far, Margaret," Lady Carling assured her. "Every other hostess for what remains of the spring will be desperately trying to match it and failing miserably. I overheard Mrs. Bessmer tell Lady Spearing that she must discover who your cook is and lure her away with the offer of a higher salary."

The countess protested with a mock shriek.

"You have nothing to fear, Margaret," the duke said. "Mrs. Bessmer's main claim to fame is that she is a notorious pinch-penny. Her idea of more pay is doubtless to offer your cook one-fifth of what you are paying her."

"I could challenge Ferdie Bessmer to pistols at dawn if you wish, Maggie," the Earl of Sheringford offered.

The countess shook her head, smiling.

"Actually," she said, "it would be one-fifth of what /Grandpapa/ is paying her, and if I were Mrs. Bessmer, I would not wish to annoy him."

She looked apologetically at Cassandra.

"Lady Paget," she said, "we are keeping you from your bed. Do forgive us. Stephen is going to take you home, I understand. Please allow me to send for a maid to accompany you."

"That will be quite unnecessary," Cassandra said. "I trust Lord Merton to be the perfect gentleman."

The countess smiled again.

"I am delighted that you came this evening," she said. "Will I see you at my mother-in-law's at-home tomorrow? I do hope so. I hear she has invited you."

"I will try," Cassandra said.

And perhaps she would. She had come here tonight to find a wealthy protector, not to force her way back into society. She had assumed that that was impossible, that she would always be an outcast. But perhaps she need not be after all. If the Earl of Sheringford could do it, then perhaps so could she.

It was a long, long time since she had had friends – except for Alice, of course. And Mary.

And then, at last, Lord Merton's carriage drew up to the steps outside and he led her out and handed her inside before climbing in to sit beside her. He turned after a footman had folded up the steps and shut the door, to wave a hand to his family.

"The perfect gentleman," he said quietly without turning his head back into the carriage as it pulled out of the square. "It is what I have always striven to be. Allow me to be a gentleman tonight, Lady Paget.

Allow me to see you safely home and then continue on my way to my own house."

Her stomach lurched with alarm. Had she wasted this whole ghastly evening? Had it all been for nothing? Was she going to have to start all over again tomorrow? She hated him suddenly, /this perfect gentleman/.

"Alas," she said, speaking low and injecting humor into her voice, "I am being rejected. Spurned. I am unwanted, unattractive, ugly. I shall go home and cry hot tears into my cold, unfeeling pillow."

She stretched out one hand as she spoke and set it on his leg, her fingers spread. It was warm through the silk of his breeches. She could feel the solidity of his thigh muscles.

He turned to her, and even in the darkness she could see that he was smiling.

"You know very well," he said, "that not a single one of those things has even a grain of truth in it."

"Except, alas," she said, "for the hot tears. And the unfeeling pillow."

She slid her hand farther to the inside of his thigh, and his smile faded. His eyes held hers.

"You are probably," he said, "the most beautiful woman I have ever seen."

"Beauty can be a cold, undesirable thing, Lord Merton," she said.

"And you are without any doubt," he said, "the most attractive."

"Attractive." She half smiled at him. "In what way, pray?"

"/Sexually/ attractive," he said, "if you will forgive me for such explicit speaking."

"When you are about to bed me, Lord Merton," she said, "you may be as explicit as you wish. /Are/ you about to bed me?"

"Yes." He slid his fingers beneath her hand, lifted it away from his thigh, and carried it to his lips. "But when we are in your bedchamber, the door closed behind us. Not in my carriage."

She was content, though her next move was to have been to lean forward and kiss him.

He set their clasped hands on the seat between them as the carriage rocked through the darkened streets of London, and kept his head turned toward her.

"Do you live quite alone?" he asked.

"I have a housekeeper," she said, "who is also my cook."

"And the lady with whom you walked in the park yesterday?" he asked.

"Alice Haytor?" she said. "Yes, she lives with me too as my companion."

"Your former governess?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Will she not be shocked when you arrive home with a – a /lover/?" he asked her.

"She has been warned," she told him, "not to come out of her room when I arrive home, Lord Merton, and she will not."

"You knew, then," he asked her, looking very directly into her eyes despite the darkness, "that you would be bringing a lover home with you?"

He was a tiresome man. He did not know how to play the game. Did he imagine that like a lightning bolt out of a blue sky she had been smitten with love as soon as her eyes alit upon him in his sister's ballroom? That everything had been spontaneous, unplanned? She had /told/ him it had all been very much planned.

"I am twenty-eight years old, Lord Merton," she said. "My husband has been dead for more than a year. Women have needs, appetites, just as surely as men do. I am not in search of another husband – not now, not ever. But it is time for a lover. I knew it when I came to London. And when I saw you in Hyde Park, looking like an angel – but a very human and very virile angel – I knew it with even greater certainty."

"You came to Meg's ball, then," he asked her, "specifically to meet /me/?"

"/And/ to seduce you," she said.

"But how did you know I would /be/ there?" he asked her.

He sat back in his seat. But almost at the same moment, the carriage rocked to a halt outside her shabby-genteel house, and he moved his head closer to the window and looked out at it. She did not answer his question.

"Tell me, Lord Merton," she said, her voice almost a whisper, "that you are here not only because I set out to seduce you. Tell me that you looked across the ballroom at me earlier this evening and wanted me."

He turned back to face her, and she could just make out his eyes in the prevailing darkness. There was an intensity in their gaze.

"Oh, I wanted you, Lady Paget," he said, his voice as low as hers. "And that is not just past tense. I /want/ you. I told you earlier that when I go to bed with a lady it is because I choose to do so, not because I am unable to resist seduction."

Yet he would not have spared a thought to bedding her tonight if she had not deliberately collided with him – or /almost/ collided, just before the waltz began. He might not have even spoken with her or danced with her, unless he had done so for his sister's sake. /No, Lord Merton/, she told him without speaking aloud, /you have been seduced/.

His coachman opened the door and set down the steps. The Earl of Merton descended, handed her down, and dismissed the carriage.

There was a certain feeling of unease, Stephen found, mingled with the pleasant anticipation of sensual pleasures. He could not quite understand the discomfort, except perhaps that they were in her home, where her servant and her companion were sleeping. It did not feel quite right.

Sometimes he despised his conscience. While he had lived an active, even adventurous life since he was a boy, he never had sown very wild oats, though everyone – including himself – had expected that he would.