“I am not a fanciful person.” She turned back and her eyes were very clear. “I don’t entertain ideas that cannot come to pass.”

“Yet ...”

“Yet.” His wife glanced around the chamber, as if concerned any of the guests might be within earshot. Seeing that no one paid too much attention, she continued. “I don’t long to travel. Not so far. However, on the rare occasions I was given pin money, I spent it at print shops on the Strand. On maps.”

He could only regard his wife with genuine surprise. “Maps. Of South America.”

“Or the Colonies, or Africa, or the East Indies. Maps of anywhere. Even England. It isn’t the places so much as the drawing of the maps.”

“I had not pegged you for a lover of cartography.”

She studied him, looking, he believed, for signs of mockery or dismissal. Yet what she saw in his face must have encouraged her, for she admitted, “It is ... an interest of mine.”

“An unusual interest for a young woman.”

“I had not cultivated it on purpose. It just seemed to happen.” She smiled softly, an inward smile at some remembrance. “I recollect the day, I couldn’t have been more than eight, and I was with my father at a print shop. The printer was trying to get my father to buy a map of the Colonies. A special reduced price because the map was no longer accurate. New discoveries had been made, territory west of a great river, and there were new settlements, too. It fascinated me that something as stable and immense as land, as a whole country, could suddenly change. Not because of an earthquake or a flood, but because of human knowledge.”

She caught herself. Her voice had grown stronger, less hesitant, as she had spoken. Her eyes gleamed, and the flush in her cheeks came not from the wine nor the overheated room, but from the fire of her passion.

Leo was enthralled. The quiet beauty of his wife became altogether vibrant. And it wasn’t unnoticed. He glowered at several men who sent her admiring glances, and they averted their gazes quickly.

“Did your father buy the map?”

She shook her head. “Such things were unnecessary, and the expense profligate. In truth,” she confessed, “I never had enough money to buy maps, but I did annoy the shopkeeper by endlessly browsing.”

“Thus your knowledge of far-flung places.”

“The same places from which you buy your coffee, cotton, and spices.” She waited, then glanced at him, a faint crease between her brows. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“This is when you chide me for my decidedly unfeminine interests. My parents certainly did.”

Leo’s sudden, unadulterated laugh drew more curious glances from the assembly’s guests. “Hell, I’m the very last person to lecture anyone on acceptable behavior.”

“Your opinion might change when I tell you something very wicked.”

He said nothing, merely waited.

She lowered her voice. “When I was thirteen, I ...” After a deep breath, she pushed on, so that her words came out in a rush. “I stole a map.”

“How?”

“I was in the print shop, looking at a map of the Moluccas. It was beautiful, but so costly. A customer came in and distracted the proprietor. That’s when I did it. Ran out the door with the map. The proprietor didn’t even notice, he did not cry thief or summon the watch. Even so, I never went back.”

“And you threw away the map. Your ill-gotten gains.”

Her eyes widened. “Lord, no. I kept it under my bed and pored over it every chance I had. Until my younger brother grew spiteful and tore it up.” She stared at Leo. “Are you not ... shocked? Appalled?”

“It would take far more than a single act of theft to appall me. Besides,” he added, smiling, “I like having a secret about you. It’s something private, only for us.” A darker heat stole into his voice, deepening it.

The blush in her cheeks grew brilliant. In her saffron-colored gown, canary diamonds at her throat and hanging from her ears, she held the pure luster of sunshine.

“The way that I know about your coins,” she murmured.

He blinked. A few words from her transported him from the radiance of her allure to the shadows of foreseen disasters. Her luminosity to the darkness of his Devil-given power. And Whit threatened everything—his power, his strengthening relationship with Anne. Yet Leo had no intention of allowing Whit to destroy all that Leo had created for himself.

“Like that, yes.” Talk of his gift sharpened his resolve. He eyed the guests. Many of them had potential for exploitation, either by benefit of their deep coffers or because they had been vocal in their denouncement of social climbers like Leo. Others he didn’t know, but wanted to—for he seldom let an opportunity to make use of someone pass.

Spotting Lord Overbury, Leo turned to Anne. “Excuse me for a moment. I want to speak with someone.” At her murmured agreement, Leo took his leave and made his way to his host for the evening.

The viscount gave a polite but aloof nod at Leo’s approach. Anne’s birth might have gained him entrance to Overbury’s home, yet Leo and the viscount would never be considered friends.

After giving his own restrained bow, Leo said, “My lord, I require your assistance.”

“However may I be of assistance, Mr. Bailey?” Overbury’s eyes scanned the room, his offer of help hardly more than a token.

“I actually possess magical power.”

His interest piqued, the viscount raised his brows. “You do?”

“My wife is of similar disbelief.” Leo addressed Overbury. “The only means I have to demonstrate my power requires a coin.” He patted his pockets, making a pantomime of looking shamefaced. “All my coins are at home. Play the champion and give me one of yours.”

Overbury produced a thruppence from the pocket of his satin waistcoat and handed it to Leo. “Show me this magic of yours.”

“I have the coin here.” He held it up for the viscount’s inspection, then closed his fingers around the coin. “And now, it has disappeared.” His hand opened, revealing that it was, in fact, empty.

The viscount made a sound of astonishment.

“Ah, wait, here it is again.” Leo plucked the coin from beneath the lace of Overbury’s jabot, and his host chortled.

“Clever, Bailey. You must show me how to perform that trick.”

“’Tis no trick, my lord. Magic. Which I now must show my wife.”

With the sounds of Overbury’s chuckle behind him, Leo wended his way back to Anne.

“An ingenious way to get another coin.” She smiled, and when Leo performed the same trick for her as he had for Overbury, her smile turned to a charming laugh. “I did not know you were a conjurer.”

“Sleight of hand, nothing more.” His words were glib, yet a tempest filled his mind. He saw cane fields washed away by a Caribbean storm, and a plantation house half buried beneath a wall of mud as the people within the house fled and palm trees bent double from the hurricane’s wind. The odor of sodden sugar clogged his nostrils—noxiously sweet and damp. Yet he breathed it in deeply, for it was the smell of privilege’s destruction.

“Perhaps you might teach me.” Anne’s voice perforated his vision, and he blinked to clear it from his thoughts.

He was not in Bermuda, watching the future destruction of Overbury’s sugar crop, but at an assembly in the viscount’s Mayfair mansion. He slipped the thruppence into his pocket. “I can. Later. Who’s that nob over there?” He nodded toward a gent in embroidered satin, his coat cut unfashionably full.

Anne smothered a shocked laugh at his language. “The Earl of Toombe. He’s the eldest son of the Marquess of Gough.”

“Rich?”

“Uncommonly so. There’s rumors he has thirty thousand pounds a year. His estate is in Buckinghamshire. I don’t know how he votes in Parliament,” she added, smiling.

“Children?”

“Two married daughters, three sons. His oldest son is the Viscount Berrow.”

A name Leo knew from the Exchange. Leo had encouraged the viscount to invest in new cotton-milling equipment, which had more than tripled the mill’s output. Suitably armed with information, he now eyed Berrow’s father.