Praise for COURTNEY MILAN and Proof by Seduction

“One of the finest historical romances I’ve read in years.

I am now officially a Courtney Milan fangirl.”

—New York Times bestselling author Julia Quinn

“A brilliant debut … deeply romantic, sexy and smart.

I couldn’t put it down.”

—New York Times bestselling author Eloisa James

“With a tender, passionate romance, a touch of sly humour,

and a gruff and incredibly sexy hero, Courtney Milan’s Proof by Seduction is a delicious read from the first page all the way to the very satisfying ending. If you love historical romance you must read this book!” —Elizabeth Hoyt, USA TODAY bestselling author

“An extraordinary debut. Courtney Milan is a blazing new

talent in the romantic stratosphere. I couldn’t put this sparkling,

heartfelt, sizzling story down and I loved every minute

of it. Warm, witty, wonderful and wise, Proof by Seduction will steal your heart away.” —Anna Campbell, multiple-award-winning author of Tempt the Devil

Dear Reader,

I’ve always loved science. But as much as I love science, “love”—of the romantic variety—and “science” don’t often go together.

Perhaps that’s why, when I wrote a historical romance, I set myself the hardest task I could imagine. I chose as my hero a rigidly logical marquess, a scientist who retreated behind scientific proof, because he couldn’t make a formula out of love.

Gareth Carhart was going to be a hard nut to crack. He needed to learn that some things—squishy, unscientific concepts like “love” and “friendship”—are not susceptible to scientific proof. But how to do this?

Then I imagined my heroine. I knew she was going to shake the foundation of his world. Jenny Keeble needed to teach Gareth how to have fun—and, despite his best efforts, he wasn’t going to be able to resist her.

I hope you’ll have as much fun reading this book as I had writing it.

Courtney Milan

COURTNEY

MILAN

Proof by Seduction

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Tessa and Amy. You believed in me. You pushed me.

You waved off every setback and squealed for joy when good

things happened. And when I most needed you in a dark,

dark time, you held my hand and kept me going.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Every book—especially a debut novel—owes a debt to an enormous number of people.

The is list is lengthy, but not exhaustive:

Tessa and Amy, for everything.

Franzeca Drouin saved me from innumerable errors more times than I can count. David Berry, Rupert Baker and Stephanie Clarke answered strange and nitpicky questions.

Amy Atwell, Jackie Barbosa, Anna Campbell, Lenora Bell, Darcy Burke, Diana Chung, Amanda Collins, Lacey Kaye, Lindsey Faber, Sara Lindsey, Terri Osborn, Elyssa Papa, Janice Rholetter, Erica Ridley, Maggie Robinson and Sherry Thomas all read pages at various points along the way and encouraged me. Kristin Nelson, my extraordinary agent, and Sara Megibow, her awesome assistant, made all my dreams come true, even the ones I was scared to dream.

Finally, thanks to the team at Harlequin Books, particularly my editor, Ann Leslie Tuttle, and Charles Griemsman, for believing in this book and doing such a beautiful job in launching it.

CHAPTER ONE

London, April, 1838

TWELVE YEARS SPENT PLYING HER TRADE had taught Jenny Keeble to leave no part of her carefully manufactured atmosphere to chance. The sandalwood smoke wafting from the brazier added a touch of the occult: not too cloying, yet unquestionably exotic. But it was by rote that she checked the cheap black cotton draped over her rickety table; routine alone compelled her to straighten her garishly colored wall hangings, purchased from Gypsies.

Every detail—the cobwebs she left undisturbed in the corner of the room, the gauze that draped her basement windows and filtered the sunlight into indirect haze—whispered that here magic worked and spirits conveyed sage advice.

It was precisely the effect Jenny should have desired.

So why did she wish she could abandon this costume? True, the virulently red-and-blue-striped skirt, paired with a green blouse, did nothing to flatter her looks. Layer upon heavy layer obscured her waist and puffed her out until she resembled nothing so much as a round, multihued melon. Her skin suffocated under a heavy covering of paint and kohl. But her disquiet ran deeper than the thick lacquers of cream and powder.

A sharp rat-tat-tat sounded at the door.

She’d worked twelve years for this. Twelve years of careful lies and half truths, spent cultivating clients. But there was no room for uncertainty in Jenny’s profession. She took a deep breath, and pushed Jenny Keeble’s doubts aside. In her place, she constructed the imperturbable edifice of Madame Esmerelda. A woman who could see anything. Who predicted everything. And who stopped at nothing.

With her lies firmly in place, Jenny opened the door.

Two men stood on her stoop. Ned, her favorite client, she’d expected. He was awkward and lanky, as only a youth just out of adolescence could be. A shock of light brown hair topped his young features. His lips curled in an open, welcoming smile. She would have greeted him easily, but today, another fellow stood behind Ned. The stranger was extraordinarily tall, even taller than Ned. He stood several feet back, his arms folded in stern disapproval.

“Madame Esmerelda,” Ned said. “I’m sorry I didn’t inform you I was bringing along a guest.”

Jenny peered behind Ned. The man’s coat was carelessly unbuttoned. Some tailor had poured hours into the exquisite fit of that garment. It was cut close enough to the body to show off the form, but loose enough to allow movement. His sandy-brown hair was tousled, his cravat tied in the simplest of knots. The details of his wardrobe bespoke an impatient arrogance, as if his appearance was little more than a bother, his attention reserved for weightier matters.

That attention shifted to Jenny now, and a shiver raced down her spine. With one predatorial sweep of his eyes, he took in Jenny’s costume from head to toe. She swallowed.

“Madame Esmerelda,” Ned said, “this is my cousin.”

A cold glimmer of irritation escaped the other man, and Ned expelled a feeble sigh.

“Yes, Blakely. May I present to you Madame Esmerelda.” The monotone introduction wasn’t even a question. “Madame, this is Blakely. That would be Gareth Carhart, Marquess of Blakely. Et cetera.”

A beat of apprehension pulsed through Jenny as she curtsied. Ned had spoken of his cousin before. Based on Ned’s descriptions, she’d imagined the marquess to be old and perhaps a little decrepit, obsessed with facts and figures. Ned’s cousin was supposed to be coldly distant, frighteningly uncivil, and so focused on his own scientific interests that he was unaware of the people around him.

But this man wasn’t distant; even standing a full yard away, her skin prickled in response to his presence. He wasn’t old; he was lean without being skinny, and his cheeks were shadowed by the stubble of a man in his prime. Most of all, there was nothing unfocused about him. She’d often thought Ned had the eyes of a terrier: warm, liquid and trusting. His cousin had those of a lion: tawny, ferocious and more than a little feral.

Jenny gave silent thanks she wasn’t a gazelle.

She turned and swept her arm in regal welcome. “Come in. Be seated.” The men trooped in, settling on chairs that creaked under their weight. Jenny remained standing.

“Ned, how can I assist you today?”

Ned beamed at her. “Well. Blakely and I have been arguing. He doesn’t think you can predict the future.”

Neither did Jenny. She resented sharing that belief.

“We’ve agreed—he’s going to use science to demonstrate the accuracy of your predictions.”

“Demonstrate? Scientifically?” The words whooshed out of her, as if she’d been prodded in the stomach. Jenny grasped the table in front of her for support. “Well. That would be …” Unlikely? Unfortunate? “That would be unobjectionable. How shall he proceed?”

Ned waved his hand at his cousin. “Well, go ahead, Blakely. Ask her something.”

Lord Blakely leaned back in his chair. Up until this moment, he had not spoken a single word; his eyes had traveled about the room, though. “You want me to ask her something?” He spoke slowly, drawing out each syllable with precision. “I consult logic, not old charlatans.”

Ned and Jenny spoke atop each other. “She’s no charlatan!” protested Ned.

But Jenny’s hands had flown to her hips for another reason entirely. “Thirty,” she protested, “is not old!”

Ned turned to her, his eyebrow lifting. A devastating silence cloaked the room. It was a measure of her own agitation that she’d forsaken Madame Esmerelda’s character already. Instead, she’d spoken as a woman.

And the marquess noticed. That tawny gaze flicked from her kerchiefed head down to the garish skirts obscuring her waist. His vision bored through every one of her layers. The appraisal was thoroughly masculine. A sudden tremulous awareness tickled Jenny’s palms.

And then he looked away. A queer quirk of his lips; the smallest exhalation, and like that, he dismissed her.

Jenny was no lady, no social match for Lord Blakely. She was not the sort who would inspire him to tip his hat if he passed her on the street. She should have been accustomed to such cursory dismissals. But beneath her skirts, she felt suddenly brittle, like a pile of dried-up potato parings, ready to blow away with one strong gust of wind. Her fingernails bit crescent moons into her hands.

Madame Esmerelda wouldn’t care about this man’s interest. Madame Esmerelda never let herself get angry. And so Jenny swallowed the lump in her throat and smiled mysteriously. “I am also not a charlatan.”

Lord Blakely raised an eyebrow. “That remains to be proven. As I have no desire to seek answers for myself, I believe Ned will question you.”

“I already have!” Ned gestured widely. “About everything. About life and death.”

Lord Blakely rolled his eyes. No doubt he’d taken Ned’s dramatic protest as youthful exaggeration. But Jenny knew it for the simple truth it was. Two years earlier, Ned had wandered into this room and asked the question that had changed both their lives: “Is there any reason I shouldn’t kill myself?”

At the time, Jenny had wanted to disclaim all responsibility. Her first impulse had been to distance herself from the boy, to say she wasn’t really able to see the future. But the question was not one a nineteen-year-old posed to a stranger because he was considering his options rationally. She’d known, even then, that the young man had asked because he was at his wits’ end.

So she’d lied. She told him she saw happiness in his future, that he had every reason to live. He’d believed her. And as time passed, he’d gradually moved past despair. Today, he stood in front of her almost confident.

It should have counted as a triumph of some kind, a good deed chalked up to Jenny’s account. But on that first day, she hadn’t just taken his despair. She’d taken his money, too. And since then, she and Ned had been bound together in this tangle of coin and deceit.

“Life and death?” Lord Blakely fingered the cheap fabric that loosely draped her chairs. “Then there should be no problem with my more prosaic proposal. I’m sure you are aware Ned must marry. Madame—Esmerelda, is it?—why don’t you tell me the name of the woman he should choose.”

Ned stiffened, and a chill went down Jenny’s spine. Advice hidden behind spiritual maundering was one thing. But she knew that Ned had resisted wedlock, and for good reasons. She had no intention of trapping him.

“The spirits have not chosen to reveal such details,” she responded smoothly.

The marquess pulled an end of lead pencil from his pocket and licked it. He bent over a notebook and scribbled a notation. “Can’t predict future with particularity.” He squinted at her. “This will be a damned short test of your abilities if you can do no better.”

Jenny’s fingers twitched in irritation. “I can say,” she said slowly, “in the cosmic sense of things, he will meet her soon.”

“There!” crowed Ned in triumph. “There’s your specifics.”

“Hmm.” Lord Blakely frowned over the words he’d transcribed. “The ‘cosmic sense’ being something along the lines of, the cosmos is ageless? No matter which girl Ned meets, I suppose you would say he met her ‘soon.’ Come, Ned. Isn’t she supposed to have arcane knowledge?”

Jenny pinched her lips together and turned away, her skirts swishing about her ankles. Blakely’s eyes followed her; but when she cast a glance at him over her shoulder, he looked away. “Of course, it is possible to give more specifics. In ancient days, soothsayers predicted the future by studying the entrails of small animals, such as pigeons or squirrels. I have been trained in those methods.”

A look of doubt crossed Lord Blakely’s face. “You’re going to slash open a bird?”

Jenny’s heart flopped at the prospect. She could no more disembowel a dove than she could earn an honest living. But what she needed now was a good show to distract the marquess.

“I’ll need to fetch the proper tools,” she said.

Jenny turned and ducked through the gauzy black curtains that shielded the details of her mundane living quarters from her clients. A sack, fresh from this morning’s shopping trip, sat on the tiny table in the back room. She picked it up and returned.

The two men watched her as she stepped back through a cloud of black cloth, her hands filled with burlap. She set the bag on the table before Ned.

“Ned,” she said, “it is your future which is at stake. That means your hand must be the instrument of doom. The contents of that bag? You will eviscerate it.”

Ned tilted his head and looked up. His liquid brown eyes pleaded with her.

Lord Blakely gaped. “You kept a small animal in a sack, just sitting about in the event it was needed? What kind of creature are you?”

Jenny raised one merciless eyebrow. “I was expecting the two of you.” And when Ned still hesitated, she sighed. “Ned, have I ever led you astray?”

Jenny’s admonition had the desired effect. Ned drew a deep breath and thrust his arm gingerly into the bag, his mouth puckered in distaste. The expression on his face flickered from queasy horror to confusion. From there, it flew headlong into outright bafflement. Shaking his head, he pulled his fist from the bag and turned his hand palm up.

For a long moment, the two men stared at the offending lump. It was brightly colored. It was round. It was—

“An orange?” Lord Blakely rubbed his forehead. “Not quite what I expected.” He scribbled another notation.

“We live in enlightened times,” Jenny murmured. “Now, you know what to do. Go ahead. Disembowel it.”

Ned turned the fruit in his hand. “I didn’t think oranges had bowels.”

Jenny let that one pass without comment.

Lord Blakely fished in his coat pockets and came up with a polished silver penknife. It was embossed with laurel leaves. Naturally; even his pens were bedecked with proof of his nobility. His lordship had no doubt chosen the design to emphasize how far above mere commoners he stood. The marquess held the weapon out, as formally as if he were passing a sword.

Soberly, Ned accepted it. He placed the sacrificial citrus on the table in front of him, and then with one careful incision, eviscerated it. He speared deep into its heart, his hands steady, and then cut it to pieces. Jenny allotted herself one short moment of wistful sorrow for her after-dinner treat gone awry as the juice ran everywhere.

“Enough.” She reached out and covered his hand mid-stab. “It’s dead now,” she explained gravely.

He pulled his hand away and nodded. Lord Blakely took back his knife and cleaned it with a handkerchief.

Jenny studied the corpse. It was orange. It was pulpy. It was going to be a mess to clean up. Most importantly, it gave her an excuse to sit and think of something mystical to say—the only reason for this exercise, really. Lord Blakely demanded particulars. But in Jenny’s profession, specifics were the enemy.

“What do you see?” asked Ned, his voice hushed.

“I see … I see … an elephant.”

“Elephant,” Lord Blakely repeated, as he transcribed her words. “I hope that isn’t the extent of your prediction. Unless, Ned, you plan to marry into the genus Loxodonta.”

Ned blinked. “Loxo-wha?”

“Comprised, among others, of pachyderms.”

Jenny ignored the byplay. “Ned, I am having difficulties forming the image of the woman you should marry in my mind. Tell me, how do you imagine your ideal woman?”

“Oh,” Ned said without the least hesitation, “she’s exactly like you. Except younger.”

Jenny swallowed uncomfortably. “Whatever do you mean? She’s clever? Witty?”

Ned scratched his chin in puzzlement. “No. I mean she’s dependable and honest.”

The mysterious smile slipped from Jenny’s lips for the barest instant, and she looked at him in appalled and flattered horror. If this was how Ned assessed character, he would end up married to a street thief in no time at all.

Lord Blakely’s hand froze above his paper. No doubt his thoughts mirrored hers.

“What?” Ned demanded. “What are you two staring at?”

“I,” said Lord Blakely, “am dependable. She is—”

“You,” retorted Ned, “are cold and calculating. I’ve known Madame Esmerelda for two full years. And in that time, she’s become more like family than anyone else. So don’t you dare talk about her in that tone of voice.”

Jenny’s vision blurred and her head swam. She had no experience with family; all she remembered was the unforgiving school where an unknown benefactor had paid her tuition. She’d known since she was a very small child that she stood alone against the world. That had brought her to this career—the sure knowledge that nobody would help her, and everyone would lie to her. Lying to them instead had only seemed fair play.

But with Ned’s words, a quiet wistfulness filled her. Family seemed the opposite of this lonely life, where even her friends had been won by falsehoods.

Ned wasn’t finished with his cousin. “You see me as some kind of tool, to be used when convenient. Well, I’m tired of it. Find your own wife. Get your own heirs. I’m not doing anything for you any longer.”

Jenny blinked back tears and looked at Ned again. His familiar, youthful features were granite. Beneath his bravado, she knew he feared his elder cousin. And yet he’d stood up to the man just now. For her.

She wasn’t Ned’s family. She wasn’t really his friend. And no matter what had transpired between them, she was still the fraud who bilked him of a few pounds in exchange for false platitudes. Now he was asking her to repay him with more lies.

Well. Jenny swallowed the lump of regret in her throat. If deceit was all she had, she would use it. But she hadn’t saved Ned’s life for his cousin’s convenience.

Lord Blakely straightened. His outraged glower—that cold and stubborn set of his lip—indicated he thought Ned was a mere utensil. That Lord Blakely was superior in intelligence and birth to everyone else in the room, and he would force their dim intellects to comprehend the fact.

He thought he was superior to his cousin? Well. She was going to make the marquess regret he’d ever asked for specifics.

“Ned, you recently received an invitation to a ball, did you not?”

He puckered his brow. “I did.”

“What sort of a ball?”

“Some damned fool crush of a coming-out, I think. No intention of going.”

The event sounded promising. There were sure to be many young women in attendance. Jenny could already taste her revenge on the tip of her tongue.

“You will go to this ball,” she pronounced. And then she swept her arms wide, encompassing the two men. “You will both go to this ball.”

Lord Blakely looked taken aback.

“I can see nothing of Ned’s wife in the orange. But at precisely ten o’clock and thirty-nine minutes, Lord Blakely, you will see the woman you will marry. And you will marry her, if you approach her in the manner I prescribe.”

The scrape of Lord Blakely’s pencil echoed loudly in the reigning silence. When he finished, he set the utensil down carefully.

“You wanted a scientific test, my lord.” Jenny placed her hands flat on the table in satisfaction. “You have one.”

And if the ball was as crowded as such things usually were, he would see dozens of women in every glance. He’d never be able to track them all. She imagined him trying to scribble all the names in his notebook, being forced by his own scientific methods to visit every lady, in order to fairly eliminate each one. He would be incredibly annoyed. And he’d never be able to prove her wrong, because who could say he had recorded every woman?

Ned’s mouth had fallen open. His hand slowly came up to hide a pleased smile. “There,” he said. “Is that specific enough for you?”

The marquess pursed his lips. “By whose clock?”

One potential excuse slipped from Jenny’s grasp. Not to worry; she had others.

“Your fob watch should do.”

“I have two that I wear from time to time.”

Jenny frowned. “But you inherited one from your father,” she guessed.

Lord Blakely nodded. “I must say, that is incredibly specific. For scientific purposes, can you explain how you got all of this from an elephant?”

Jenny widened her eyes in false innocence. “Why, Lord Blakely. The same way I got an elephant from an orange. The spirits delivered the scene as an image into my mind.”

He grimaced. She could not let her triumph show, and so she kept her expression as unchanging and mysterious as ever.

“So,” Ned said, turning to his cousin, “you agree, then?”

Lord Blakely blinked. “Agree to what?”

“When you find the girl in question and fall in love, you’ll agree Madame Esmerelda is not a charlatan.”

The marquess blinked again. “I’m not going to fall in love.” He spoke of that emotion in tones as wooden and unmoving as a dried-out horse trough.

“But if you did,” Ned insisted.

“If I did,” Lord Blakely said slowly, “I’d admit the question of her duplicity had not been scientifically proven.”

Ned cackled. “For you, that’s as good as an endorsement. That means, you’ll consult Madame Esmerelda yourself and leave me be.”

A longer pause. “Those are high stakes indeed. If this is to be a wager, what do you put up?”

“A thousand guineas,” Ned said immediately.

Jenny nearly choked. She’d thought herself unspeakably wealthy for the four hundred pounds she’d managed to scrimp and save and stash away. A thousand pounds was more money than she could imagine, and Ned tossed it about as if it were an apple core.

Lord Blakely waved an annoyed hand. “Money,” he said with a grimace. “What would either of us do with that paltry amount? No. You must risk something of real value. If you lose, you’ll not consult Madame Esmerelda or any other fortune-teller again.”

“Done,” said Ned with a grin. “She’s always right. I can’t possibly lose.”

Jenny couldn’t bring herself to look at him. Because Ned could do nothing but lose. What if he began to doubt Jenny’s long-ago assurances? What if he discovered that he owed his current happiness to the scant comfort of Jenny’s invention? And Jenny could not help but add one last, desperately selfish caveat: What if Ned learned the truth and disavowed this curious relationship between them? He would leave her, and Jenny would be alone.

Again.

She inhaled slowly, hoping the cool air would help her calm down. The two men would go to the ball. Lord Blakely would look around. For all she knew, he might even decide to marry a girl he saw. And once he rejected all the women whose names he’d recorded, she’d tell him he’d seen a different woman at the appointed time out of the corner of his eye.

The wager would become a nullity, and she wouldn’t have to see the fierce loyalty in Ned’s eyes turn to contempt. Jenny’s pulse slowed and her breath fell into an even rhythm.

Lord Blakely lounged back in his chair. “Something has just occurred to me.”

The devilish gleam in his eye froze Jenny’s blood. Whatever it was the dreadful man was about to say, she doubted he’d thought of it at that minute.

“What will stop her from claiming it was some other chit I was meant for? That I saw two girls at the designated time, and chose the wrong one?”

He’d seen through her. A chill prickled the ends of Jenny’s fingers.

Ned frowned. “I don’t know. I suppose if that happens, we’ll have to call the bet off.”

The marquess shook his head. “I have a better idea. Since Madame Esmerelda’s seen everything in the orange, she’ll be able to verify the girl’s identity immediately.”

He met her eyes and all Jenny’s thoughts—her worries for Ned, the loneliness that clutched her gut—were laid bare in the intensity of his gaze.

His lip quirked sardonically. “We’ll take her with us.”

CHAPTER TWO

GARETH CARHART, Marquess of Blakely, had allocated one hour to this endeavor. Fifteen minutes to travel to the fortune-teller’s lair, fifteen minutes to return home. Half an hour, he had supposed, would suffice to shred her lies like the insubstantial foolscap that they were.

“I can’t go.” Madame Esmerelda’s voice was soft and uncertain.

“Why ever not?” Ned turned to her, a look of genuine befuddlement spreading across his face. Gareth’s young cousin sat with his hands on his knees, his whole body canting toward the woman. And therein lay Gareth’s problem.

When Gareth had left England years before, Ned had been a child, whining and hanging on at every opportunity. Now, he was barely twenty-one—but still damnably vulnerable. And Ned believed every word that this woman spoke.

With Ned’s father dead, Gareth was the closest thing Ned had to a patriarch. Ned was his responsibility—and responsible marquesses did not let their young cousins fall into the clutches of fortune-tellers.

“I’m sure Madame Esmerelda had a perfectly legitimate reason not to come.” Gareth raised an eyebrow at the woman and dangled his bait. “I suspect she had another appointment at the same time.”

Let her agree. When she did, he would ask her to name the date of the ball. She wouldn’t be able to, despite her vaunted powers and he would end this foolish charade before it even began.

But she did not take the easy way he offered. Her nostrils flared, and she pressed her lips together. “You’re attempting to trick me, my lord.”

Gareth barely transformed his jerk of surprise into an arrogant chin-lift. “I assure you,” he said in his coldest tone, “I had no such intention.”

She rolled her eyes. “You want this to be a scientific test? Let it be a scientific test. But don’t set little verbal traps for me. And don’t ever lie to me. You intended precisely such a thing.”

Electricity prickled the hairs on his arms, and Gareth sat back, the silence pressing uncomfortably against his skin. Madame Esmerelda leaned toward him, her hands gripping her skirts. It had been a long while since anyone had spoken to him in that manner. He had lied to her. He had intended to trick her into playing her hand too soon. He just hadn’t expected her to notice.

“You’re trying to change the subject,” he accused her. “Why can you not go to the ball?”

“Because I wasn’t invited,” she snapped. And then she looked down. “And besides, I have nothing to wear.”

Ned gave a high crack of laughter.

And no wonder. It was such an absurdly ladylike thing to say. He glanced at her again. In that moment—a trick of the light, perhaps, or the way her lashes obscured her eyes—Gareth felt a jolt. Madame Esmerelda was not a lady, but she was most definitely a woman. A pretty one at that. She’d hidden her femininity beneath those unflattering layers of dark paint and the kerchief. Lies, those; just ones composed of fabric and powder instead of words. He wondered idly how far down her back that mass of hair would reach if it were not bound up. She lifted her chin and met his eyes.

Gareth didn’t believe in fortune-telling. He was a scientist; he’d devoted years to a naturalist’s expedition in Brazil. He’d only returned to England when his grandfather died, and responsibility required he take on the demands of the title. He had come here because responsibility also demanded that he free his cousin from Madame Esmerelda’s grasp. But he would take it as a matter of personal pride to strike a blow against the illogical superstition that this woman represented.

Her particular choice of lies, however, would take far longer than his allocated hour to disprove. He should have been annoyed. And yet he couldn’t intimidate Madame Esmerelda.

In the year since he’d been back in England, he hadn’t faced anything like a real challenge. Now he did. It was going to be extremely satisfying when he exposed her as the fraud that she was.

He relished the prospect of matching wits with her, of pulling the truth from her.

Gareth snapped his fingers. “The invitation,” he said, “I can fix. The clothing I can fix. I’m willing to do much in the name of science.”

“Oh, no. I couldn’t.” She looked away again. “Besides, I can’t accept—”

Disparate details collided in Gareth’s mind. The proper curtsy she had dropped. The educated precision of her intonation. Her reluctance to accept a gift of clothing from a man. These facts all added to one overwhelming conclusion: Madame Esmerelda had been educated as a gentlewoman. What on earth could have driven her to tell fortunes?

“Of course you can,” he insisted. “Madame Esmerelda, if this is to be a scientific test, I don’t believe you should lie to me, either.”

Some emotion flickered in her eyes. She shook her head—not a denial, but a swift, short shake, as if she were putting everything to rights. And when she met his gaze again, her face was smooth.

She had thought of something, Gareth realized. She saw a way out of the mess he had created for her.

He should have been disappointed.

Instead, he couldn’t wait to foil her plan.

IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for Gareth to regret his eagerness. He hadn’t realized finding Madame Esmerelda appropriate attire would turn into an ordeal. But Ned had thought it necessary to take the woman to the modiste himself. And Gareth knew if Ned had a moment alone with the charlatan, she would find a way to turn his head inside out. Again.

Which is how Gareth found himself in his closed carriage the next afternoon, accompanied by his chattering cousin, a fraud and a growing headache.

“So,” Ned babbled, “we’re going to the ball next Thursday, and then we’ll meet Blakely’s wife. I should like to see him fall in love. I’m rather looking forward to it.”

Madame Esmerelda adjusted the kerchief on her head—red, this time—and slanted a careful look at Gareth. “Identify.”

“Identify?” Ned repeated. “What do you mean, identify?”

“We are going to identify the woman in question. I never said your cousin would meet her that day. In fact, the time for their meeting is not yet here.”

Gareth inhaled in trepidation. “Not yet here? How long will this take?”

The smile touched her eyes, if not her lips. “Oh, I couldn’t say. The time is not measured by years, but by tasks. Three of them.”

“Tasks?” repeated Ned, incredulously.

“Tasks?” Gareth said sharply. “You said nothing of tasks.”

“Oh? What did I say, I wonder?” She looked up at the roof of the carriage, innocently.

Gareth drew out his notebook and fumbled for the page. “At precisely ten o’clock and thirty-nine minutes, you will see the woman you are to marry if only you approach her in …” He faltered, and looked up.

That innocence had faded from her eyes. She’d known what she’d said. Baited him into this, no doubt, to make him look foolish.

“If only I approach her in the manner you prescribe,” he finished dully.

“Ah, yes. The manner I prescribe.” She smiled. “And I prescribe tasks.”

He’d thought himself so clever, trapping her into making an easily disprovable statement. All he had to do, he’d thought, was not marry a girl. He’d succeeded at not marrying women all his life. He’d been too confident, too sure he’d backed her into a corner.

He’d underestimated her. He’d been so intent on winning, on disproving her statement, that he’d not seen the exit she planned for herself.

He could walk away at any moment. But if he did, he’d leave her influence over Ned unabated.

“I never got tasks,” mumbled an aggrieved Ned.

“Of course not,” Madame Esmerelda soothed. “But you must think how monumental an undertaking it will be for your cousin to convince a woman to care for him. If I didn’t set him tasks, he’d use logic instead, and just think how that would work out. You don’t need tasks. Everyone likes you already.”

Gareth clenched his hand in suppressed fury and pushed his knuckles into the leather squabs. “And what,” he snapped, “is the first task? Mucking out stables? Killing lions? Or must I chop down an entire orchard of citrus trees?”

She tapped a finger against her lips. “It is a trifle premature to tell you. But I suppose it can’t hurt. You must carve an elephant out of a piece of ebony.”

“An elephant?” Gareth looked up at the roof. “Why is it always elephants?”

The coach slowed to a halt. The footman opened the door, and dust motes danced in the rays of sunshine in front of Madame Esmerelda. They made her look … well, mystical. Drat her.

“I am,” Madame Esmerelda said, “just a poor conduit for the spirits. As you will be a mere conduit for the elephant. You will give your future wife the elephant when first you meet.”

Her eyes danced, and she exited the conveyance. Gareth bit back a pained yelp.

No doubt he could find a way to present such a gift in a dignified manner. If she thought to make a fool of Lord Blakely, she was vastly mistaken. But maybe she intended to fight him to an impasse. If she made those tasks onerous enough, she doubtless thought he would walk away. And with her conditions unfulfilled, he would have no proof she was a fraud—and that meant his cousin would continue to see her. Unacceptable.

By the triumphant spring in her steps as she approached the shop, she thought so, too.

Gareth’s thoughts boiled as he entered the little shop. He paid little mind to Ned bothering Madame Esmerelda, whining about some irrelevant trifle. Bolts of colorful fabric decorated the front waiting room; they faded to dim gray in his mind. He didn’t even notice he was pacing the floor, scarcely saw when Madame Esmerelda was whisked away to the back room. He wanted to rip the fashion plates off the walls and shred the sample cards laid demurely out on the tables.

Gareth did not like losing. He would not be outdone by some fraud. He’d looked forward to the challenge when he thought he would vanquish her. The situation became far less entrancing when her victory was possible.

Tasks. He couldn’t let this continue.

He turned to Ned, who was fidgeting on the edge of his seat. “Ned,” he said.

The boy looked up attentively.

“Do you think Madame Esmerelda will need a shawl?”

“I suppose—”

“Go buy her one.” Gareth fumbled for a bank note and held it out.

Ned frowned, his fingers closing on the paper. “Why can’t the modiste just choose one? What I know about ladies’ shawls, I could fit—”

Gareth fixed Ned with his coldest look. “I think it would mean more to her if you chose it yourself. Don’t you?”

Ned offered a few more halfhearted protests. Easy enough to dismantle those; soon his cousin scurried out the front door.

The workroom door swung open, and one of the seamstresses popped out, her arms flowing with colored silks.

Gareth took a deep breath. This charade had gone on long enough. “Is Madame in a condition to receive me?”

She sniffed primly. “My lord. As you wish, my lord.”

But as soon as he ducked through the doorway the servant indicated, he halted. A half-mirror stood on the otherwise empty wall, and Gareth’s lungs contracted at the profile reflected in it. Rounded hip, and a swell of breast.

Madame Esmerelda wasn’t wearing a fashionable dress. She wasn’t wearing much of anything at all—nothing but a thin, worn chemise. The seamstress must have assumed he was the fortune-teller’s lover, or she’d never have sent him back here. His body moved of its own accord, turning toward her, like a plant tracking the path of the sun.

Christ. Underneath the colorful skirts, now lying in a discarded heap, Madame Esmerelda had a waist. She had a bosom. She had a damned remarkable bosom. From five yards away, he could see the hazy outline of her legs through worn muslin. He could even make out the dark nubs of her nipples. The curling ends of her hair fell all the way to the small of her back.

She wasn’t anything like the slender sylphs society favored. She was a Grecian fertility goddess, round and soft all over. And with her rosy lips frozen, half-open, she looked almost inviting.

Not that her invitation extended to him.

Gareth’s brain tumbled to a halt. What remained in his head was no rational thought, but simple greed. His mouth dried, and every muscle contracted in anticipation of the feast on display before him.

She stood, rooted in place, her eyes wide in horror. If she were a lady, he would have apologized profusely and left the room. Not that he could help his own reaction. It was more than just the sight of a beautiful, nearly naked woman that set his heart hammering. It was the way she’d challenged him, the way she’d undermined him. It had been years since anyone had out-thought him. And so what he felt was a sharp desire to possess her. To obtain her surrender in every way a woman could surrender to a man. It was lust, pure and simple.

But this woman was trying to make an idiot of Gareth and a dupe of his cousin. There was nothing pure or simple about her. And so he stuffed his physical response as best he could behind the safety of a cold, businesslike demeanor.

“Madame Esmerelda,” Gareth said, “you win. There will be no tasks. No elephants.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Get out.”

“One hundred guineas, if you tell Ned you’re a fraud and disappear from our lives.”

She inhaled and her chest expanded. She pointed to the door. “Get out now.”

“Think it through. I doubt you’ll be able to milk that much from him in your entire acquaintance. He’ll outgrow your advice soon enough. And you could live for years on the money.”

She took a deep breath, and those remarkable breasts shivered underneath the thin chemise. “I wouldn’t do it for a hundred—” she began.

Gareth covered his rising lust with a nonchalant shrug. “Two hundred.”

Her lip curled, and she shook her head in outrage. “Not for two thousand. Not for ten.”

“Oh?” He flicked an insultingly familiar glance down her chemise. “You’d do it for ten. But you’ll do it for two hundred.”

She started toward him, her fingers curved like claws. He deserved to be slapped, and more, for the insult his look had implied. If he was right, and the woman was gently bred, she’d not appreciate the aspersions he’d just cast on her character. But he couldn’t let her near him. He feared his own response if she came within arm’s length.

“Really, Madame. Once you dispose of your fabricated outrage, you’ll realize this is the best solution for everyone.”

Gareth inclined his head, all sardonic politesse, and stepped back through the opening. He eased the door into place behind him, and let the insolent sneer slide off his face.

He leaned against the wall, his breath ragged. The challenge between them had become more than a territorial war over Ned’s future. Now it was sensual.

Madame Esmerelda was extremely intelligent. She was devious. And if she had any idea how she affected him, she’d take advantage, unscrupulous creature that she was. And how idiotic that he wanted her to take that advantage. He wanted her to befuddle his wits until he lost all control and took her.

Gareth gripped his hands into fists. In his time in the jungles of Brazil, he’d cataloged close to a thousand insects. Now he let them march through his mind. Cockroaches. Poisonous, furry caterpillars. Maggots. He thought of every creeping thing ever to mar the face of the planet. He imagined them crawling about on his skin. And he didn’t stop until his ardor subsided and the memory of her body dissolved from his mind.

It took a lot of millipedes.

JENNY HADN’T REGAINED HER COMPOSURE by the time she fastened, with shaking hands, the final layer of Madame Esmerelda’s outrageous costume. Bad enough that this whole experiment had extended the lie of Madame Esmerelda far outside Jenny’s usual sphere of business. Worse still, she’d been made to endure the pricks and pokes of the contemptuous seamstress who’d assumed the worst of Jenny’s relationship with Lord Blakely.

But the crowning glory had been when the marquess had marched in on her as if he owned her body. He hadn’t even bothered to avert his eyes. She wasn’t sure which had been more insulting—the look he gave her, or his assumption that she’d be willing to abandon Ned if only he offered a high enough price.

Not since that first day, that first hour, had she been tempted by Ned’s money. She wouldn’t leave the poor boy to suffer under his cousin’s unemotional auspices.

Jenny stormed out into the front room, her loose hair tangled around her shoulders.

Lord Blakely leaned against a wall next to an unclothed dress form. His eyes snapped open as she slammed the door behind her. But she didn’t let him move. She jammed a finger into his chest and glared up at him.

“Just because you ignore everything around you except facts does not mean everyone else can be reduced to a number.”

He looked down at her, astonishment in his eyes. “What the devil?”

She poked his chest again. “There are some things in life for which there are no figures. You don’t comprehend what your cousin really needs or why he finds it necessary to speak with me. No matter what number you choose, you will never, ever be able to describe him. Not with a hundred guineas. Not with a thousand.”

“Very well.” He swallowed, focused on some spot on the ceiling. He didn’t even bother to meet her gaze. “I shan’t offer you bribes again.”

“That’s not enough. If it’s not money you enumerate, you’ll latch on to some other figure. The number of times I make an accurate prediction. The degree to which I specify what is to happen. Attach as many numbers as you like to my relationship with Ned, but they will not help you understand.”

She was Ned’s confidante. She’d be damned if she sold that role for mere money. She wouldn’t let Lord Blakely reduce her to that level.

The man drew himself up. “You can disparage figures all day long, but that’s what proof means. It means one has a factual basis for one’s assertions.”

“You call what you’re doing proof,” Jenny snapped. “But you prod and poke and pick. You have no interest in proving anything.”

“What do you know of scientific proof?”

“Oh, you’re the sort to pin insects to cards in order to study them. After several months spent perusing their desiccated carcasses, you’ll announce your triumphant discovery: all insects are dead! And you’ll delight in the ascendancy of scientific thought over human emotion.”

Lord Blakely cocked his head and looked at her, as if searching for some hidden meaning in her face. “I study animal behavior. It’s imperative I not kill the subjects of my inquiry. Dead macaws rarely flock.”

“There’s no need to murder the analogy by overextending it, atop your other crimes.”

His gaze slid down her body. “The only question in my mind was whether you believed your own lies or were actively attempting to defraud Ned. I suppose it is a compliment to you that I have decided you are too clever for the former.”

“Naturally. You don’t believe anything you cannot taste or touch.”

“I believe in Pythagoras’s theorem, and I can’t taste that. I believe there may be some truth to Lamarck’s theories on inheritance of traits. But no, I do not believe in fate or fortune-tellers.”

“Fate, fortune-telling—or feelings.” Jenny snapped her fingers in his face. “The important things in life cannot be bound like so much paper to form a monograph.”

The insouciant look on his face faded into cold steel. “A monograph?”

She inhaled, sharply. “Listen to yourself. You cite Lamarck instead of talking of your cousin’s future. I have never seen you laugh. I’ve never even seen you smile. No wonder Ned would rather listen to me. You’re a cold, unemotional automaton.”

“An automaton?” His shoulders jerked and he stiffened.

Jenny wasn’t done with him. “Just because you’re as dispassionate as sawdust and as brittle as old bone doesn’t mean everyone around you must ossify.”

“Ossify.” His nose flared and his chin lifted, as if parroting her syllables constituted some kind of brilliant argument. He looked down at his right hand, clenched into a fist in front of him. The muscles in his neck tensed. Jenny took a step back and wondered if she’d gone too far. Madame Esmerelda would never have let anger carry her away.

Then he looked up, and her doubts froze like so much lake water in winter. His eyes reflected some boreal wasteland, inhabited only by wind and a cold sweep of snow. Jenny felt the chill through every layer of Madame Esmerelda’s costume, and she shivered.

When he spoke, there was no emotion in his voice at all. “You should have taken the two hundred guineas. After that outburst, I shall enjoy proving you a fraud.”

BY THE TIME the carriage rumbled back to the Blakely home in the heart of Mayfair divested of all inhabitants but Gareth, it had begun to rain. It wasn’t the warm tropical downpour he’d enjoyed in Brazil; instead, it was the frigid, anemic drizzle that typically plagued London. Drop after sullen drop sank to the earth.

So he was a cold, emotionless automaton? Strange, then, that he felt so damned furious. Gareth gritted his teeth as he stepped outside the carriage. Servants swarmed around him, attempting to rush him inside, out of the wet.

He brushed away their hands. “Leave me. I’m going for a walk,” he snapped. They exchanged glances—his servants often exchanged glances—but they let him go.

Walking was an eccentricity he had developed in Brazil. It was, after all, the only way to make his daily rounds of observations. He’d brought the activity home with him. In London, the habit was inconvenient at best. The streets were all muck, and there was no overhead cover—neither wide-leafed jungle trees nor thick canopies—to speak of. But at a time like this—with his thoughts disordered, his mind awhirl and his body as ready to ignite as tinder—he needed this solitary exercise more than ever.

He set off into the dark. Cold rain ran down Gareth’s spine in rivulets, but it did nothing to dampen the fury raging inside him. Dispassionate as sawdust?

Madame Esmerelda was wrong. It wasn’t science that killed emotion. It was this place. These people. This title. He’d spent years in the rain forest, where life and color flourished anywhere it had the smallest chance of surviving. Here, geometric brick building followed geometric brick building, separated only by growing torrents of mud. Drawn shades clotted pallid windows; leaves like faded clay clung to half-dead grass. London was sterile. The rain had washed away all but the most persistent of the city’s fabricated smells—the stink of coal and the scent of cold, wet stone.

If the city was desolate, its inhabitants were worse. He’d left London eleven years ago because polite society nearly suffocated him. It was the rigor of scientific thought, the clarity of observation, the control he gained over the universe as his understanding bloomed, that kept some vital part of himself in motion since his return. He had realized long ago that he would never really fit in. During these last months, the mornings he spent sorting through the naturalist’s journal he’d kept in Brazil were all that helped him hold tight to some notion of who Gareth was. Without it, he would have drowned everything real about himself in Lord Blakely’s unending responsibilities.

Gareth shook the rain from his shoulders and, sighing, looked up. He’d been trudging through muddy puddles for nearly half an hour. He was soaked to the bone; were it not for the furious whirl in his mind and the fast pace he’d been keeping, he’d have been chilled.

Unconsciously, his feet had traced the steps to the neighborhood where Madame Esmerelda lived. The streets were decidedly dingier than Gareth’s own address, brown rivulets of running water skirting slushy horse dung strewn about the cobblestones. But the area was by no means dangerous. Families here hovered below respectability, but somewhat above poverty.

He found her windows. Tucked in the basement, down a flight of stairs. They glowed with an orange light that put him in mind of hot tea and a hearth. Anger, hot and irrational, welled up as he thought of her ensconced in a warm, comfortable room, while he prowled outside in the rain like some kind of bedraggled panther.

His whole response to her was as irrational as the idea of a fortune-teller consulting the spirits about the future. It was as stupid as the concept of wooing women with ebony elephants. It was, he admitted, as incomprehensible as a fraud refusing an offer of several hundred guineas in exchange for doing nothing. Perhaps that was why he drifted toward her door, his boots clomping heavily against the cold, wet stairs leading down.

He had a sudden image of confronting her, of explaining scientific thought and rigor. He wanted to knock the wind out of her with his words, as she had from him. He wanted her to feel as off balance as he did now. He wanted to win, to prove to her she was wrong and he was right. How idiotic of him. How unthinking. And yet—

He knocked.

And he waited.

Madame Esmerelda opened the door. She was carrying a tallow candle. It smoked and illuminated her face; he could see her pupils dilate in shock when she saw who stood on her doorstep. She didn’t say a word—didn’t invite him in, just blocked the opening and looked up at him in openmouthed surprise.

She hadn’t donned that ridiculous costume again. Instead, a simple robe of thick, dark wool covered her. The thin white line of her chemise peeked over the neckline. That hint of muslin forcibly reminded Gareth of the afternoon. Of the expanse of soft flesh separated from his hands by two cloth layers and so much dampened air. A fist-size lump lodged itself in his throat and a dark mist formed in his mind, blanketing his carefully planned diatribe.

She curled one arm around herself, as if it were somehow she who needed protection from him.

“Do you know how I can tell you’re a fraud?” he croaked.

She gazed up at him.

“Because you’re wrong. You’re completely wrong.”

He fumbled in his mind for his prepared speech. Science is about answers. It raises us above those who do not question.

But before he could start, Gareth made a colossal mistake: He looked into Madame Esmerelda’s eyes. He’d thought she was black-eyed as a Ggypsy. But from eighteen inches away, with the candle so close to her face, he realized her eyes were in fact a very dark blue.

With that simple observation, the blood drained from his brain. Gareth’s structured defense of scientific thinking washed from his head. Instead, he took a step toward her. He let the veil drop from his eyes, let her see the inferno raging inside him.

She sucked in air. “Why do you say I’m wrong?” Her voice quavered on the last word.

“I’m not an automaton.” The words came from some vital place deep inside him—his solar plexus, perhaps, rather than his uncooperative brain.

Gareth took another step closer. She continued to hold his gaze, as incapable of looking away as he. The white vapor of her breath swirled in the cold night air. Its cadence kept time with the rise and fall of her chest. He could taste every one of her exhalations, sweetness coalescing against his mouth.

It was an act of self-preservation to reach out and pinch the candle flame. To stop the flow of sensual images before they seared themselves permanently into his flesh. The wick sizzled and the light died between his wet fingers. Her eyes disappeared into the navy darkness of nighttime.

It didn’t help. He could still smell her. He could taste the honey of her breath on the tip of his tongue. And the distant streetlamp cast enough illumination for him to see when she licked her lips. Heat seared him.

“I’m not made of wood.” Gareth reached out again. This time, his hand grazed the warm flesh of her cheek. And still the silly woman didn’t jerk away. She didn’t even flinch when he tilted her chin up. Instead, her lips parted in soft, subtle invitation.

The thought of her mouth against his snuffed what little guttering intellect remained to him. Her flesh seemed to sizzle beneath his fingertips. He lowered his head until her lips were a tantalizing inch from his.

“Most of all,” Gareth said, his voice husky, “I’ll be damned if I let you call me dispassionate.”

CHAPTER THREE

JENNY EXPERIENCED ONE SECOND of blinding clarity before Lord Blakely’s lips touched hers. Madame Esmerelda would have stepped away the moment he extinguished her candle. Madame Esmerelda would never let herself be rooted in one spot with hunger.

With five minutes to think it through, she’d have pushed him away. Her disguise depended on it. But she had one second, and so her reasoning took on an entirely different cast. The heat of his breath against her lip. The spark that shot through her when his hand, ungloved and still wet from the rain, grazed her cheek.

Mostly, though, something vitally feminine deep inside her chest insisted she stay, a bud yearning to unfold after years of lies and denial. Madame Esmerelda wouldn’t have cared. But the pretense of Madame Esmerelda had eroded every bit of real human contact from Jenny’s life for years. Jenny was tired of not caring.

Jenny stayed.

She did more than stay. She stepped into Lord Blakely’s rough embrace and lifted on tiptoes. He didn’t evince the least surprise at her brazenness. Instead, his hands settled on her hips and he pulled her up into his kiss.

For all the carefully controlled power in the strong arms holding her, his mouth descended on hers with surprising gentleness. His lips brushed hers, sweet and lingering. A soft, sensual nip, and then another. Beguiling. As if there were nothing he’d rather do than sample her breath, taste her lips.

He was slow but not hesitant. He coaxed her to give up her every secret, and Jenny was beyond artifice. Every sensation—the sweep of his tongue against her bottom lip, the light brush of her nipples against his chest, the clamp of his hands around her waist—reverberated through her aching body.

She opened her mouth. He entered, as confident as an advancing army. His tongue captured hers, and everything warm and womanly in Jenny welled up in response.

Without breaking the kiss, he pushed forward inside her rooms. Three steps, and her back met the rough surface of her entry wall, his lips and tongue teasing her. His hands tightened, each finger branding her hips through her dressinggown.

Jenny wanted everything she had denied herself these last long years. She wanted every last scrap of femininity she had hidden behind the voluminous yards of her garish Gypsy costume. She wanted to touch him, experience flesh pressed against flesh. If only for this moment, she wanted to believe herself safe and secure. It was idiotic beyond all comprehension for her to indulge that fantasy with any person, let alone this man.

But she did.

Lord Blakely pulled away. He swiveled briefly, casually flicking her door shut with one hand. The sharp click of its closing awoke Jenny from her dream.

The marquess turned back to her.

One tentative glance at his face and Jenny understood exactly how foolish she’d allowed herself to be.

The set of his lips was no longer grim, but it was still devoid of warmth. He considered her, his eyes alert and observant, darting from her mouth to the hand she held up to halt his advance. For all the passion she’d imagined in his kiss, the look he gave her was considering. Intellectual. And he wasn’t even breathing hard.

Jenny smiled tentatively at him, her heart slamming painfully against her chest.

His expression didn’t lighten one iota.

She swallowed and looked at the floor. She’d just told him everything, and she hadn’t even spoken a word. Life was brutally unfair, sometimes. But she’d had years to become accustomed.

“I think you’ve proven your point.” She could taste her own bitter shame in every word. It had taken him seconds to breach her defenses. Moments to prove he could command her female response. Mere hours to expose her lies.

For a heartbeat, he didn’t react.

Then he reached out an arm. “Not in the slightest. Give me your hand.”

The nonchalance in his demand stiffened her spine. She took another step back. “You’ve touched me enough for one evening, I should think.”

His gaze skittered down her robe. Her nipples were already peaked. He could not miss those tips poking against the fabric. Nor could he fail to note the pale rose heat that suffused her face and hands.

He shook his head slowly. “I suppose you should think so. But you don’t. You’re as ravenous for me as I am for you.”

A gasp escaped Jenny’s unwilling lungs. “I—I’m not—”

“Don’t bother lying to me.” His voice was dark and deep, scraping like gravel against her senses. “You’ve already told me what I need to know. You’re no fortune-teller.”

Lord Blakely lounged with his back against the door. She glanced down—but the damnable loose cut of his trousers gave no hint as to his physical state, and he exhibited frightening composure for a supposedly ravenous man. Jenny was the one who ached all over. And he was right. She wanted his touch again; she hungered for it.

He crooked one finger. “Now come. Give me your hand. I promise I shan’t bite.”

She swallowed. “Really? Then why ever do you want it?”

A flicker of appreciation flared in his eyes. “I am going to read your palm.”

Confusion sparked in Jenny’s mind. “But you don’t believe in fortune-telling.”

He pushed off from the door and wandered from the tiny entryway into her front room. He paused before her table and lifted the cheap black cotton off the wood with his thumb and forefinger.

“I don’t believe in this.”

He dropped the material to the floor. It landed in a whispering sigh.

He turned to the brass tray where she burned her incense. She’d cleaned it of ash and filled it with fresh sandalwood shavings in preparation for the next client. He picked up a handful of fat curls. “I don’t believe in these, either.”

He clenched his fist, and short stubs of sandalwood rained down on the black cloth.

Lord Blakely turned to face her. His features were still hard and unmoving and his gaze roved around the room, avoiding her. “Let me tell you what I do believe. I believe in intelligence. I believe in clever tricks. And I believe you have no shortage of the two.”

Two steps forward, and he was once again within touching distance. He held out his hand once again. “Give me your hand, and I’ll show you how your trick is performed.”

Jenny shook her head.

He gave her no chance to move away. Instead, his fingers clamped about her wrist and he drew her toward him. Jenny’s skin prickled with the heat wafting off him. But he didn’t take advantage of her proximity. Instead, he flipped her hand palm up and examined it with logical detachment.

“There is no real difference between your palmistry and mine. Except I eschew cosmic references. I’ll explain where I get my oranges and elephants, scientifically speaking.” The pads of his fingers traced a molten line down her palm. “The first thing I see in your hand is that you have been well-educated, almost certainly at one of the small schools that trains gentlewomen in the outlying areas of the country.”

Jenny inhaled. “I—What makes you say—”

He ticked items off on each of her fingers. “You are familiar with bugs pinned to cards. You know the precise degree of deference owed a marquess. When you become angry, you use words like desiccate and ossify. You sit as if you were trained with a book on your head. You speak like a young lady drilled in her aitches, which you enunciate quite precisely.” He paused, tapping his thumb against her smallest finger. “I am out of fingers, and not yet out of observations.”

Jenny pulled against his grip. He didn’t loosen his hold.

Instead, he trailed his fingers along her palm. Years of doing her own cleaning had left her hands rough. She had no doubt that frightening brain of his was calculating the precise amount of laundering she had performed.

“I doubt there was much money in your family—perhaps it was charity that paid for the education?”

Jenny swallowed, and her fingers curled into a ball.

He straightened them out between the palms of his hands. “Or a bequest. A patron. You should have been a governess. I suppose that was the point of all that education?”

Jenny had felt less naked that afternoon, wearing nothing but a chemise.

“Either you chose not to, or you were ruined beyond any hope of governessing.”

Don’t, oh, don’t let him see the truth. It would give him far too much power over her. If he knew she were ruined—if he knew that she’d once tried to be a mistress—he would no doubt think she was open to the possibility again.

He looked up from her hand and stared at the wall behind her. “Both, I should think. I have difficulty imagining your acceding to anyone’s demands. If you had wanted to be a governess, you’d have found a way to be one. But you kiss like a temptress.”

Heat flooded her. She’d kissed like a fool. Coldhearted demon that he was, he knew it.

“In any event, I wager you were not a favorite among the other girls at school.”

Her breath hissed in, and she jerked away from him. Once again, he refused to relinquish her wrist, his grasp as tight as an iron manacle.

“If you had been,” he said reasonably, as if his fingers weren’t pressing against her hammering pulse, “you’d have options far more appealing than fraud. And more fundamentally, to even think of this profession, you must have discovered at a very young age that everyone lies. It’s hard to learn that when you’re a well-loved child. How old were you?”

“I was nine.” The words escaped her lips, unbidden. It was the first time she’d verified his suspicions aloud. And now he knew. He knew everything. Jenny shut her eyes, unwilling to see the triumph of his response.

His fingers tightened about her wrist. His other hand trailed against her jawbone. Reluctantly, she let her lids flutter open. His eyes had focused on her lips again. He ought to have been crowing with delight. But there was no victory in his gaze.

“Precocious,” he finally said, looking away. “I was twenty- one. Ned’s age.”

She could identify no hint of self-pity in his voice. He sounded as scientific as ever, reciting evidence to a lecture hall. And yet the tightness around his mouth suggested the memory was more substantial than mere data. Jenny had a sudden urge to kiss the fingers that encircled her wrist.

“I suppose I should read your future, as well as your past.” He ducked his head, examining her palm again. “You will tell me your real name. It’s not Esmerelda, that’s for certain.”

“It’s not? Why not?”

He shrugged. “An impoverished English family would never name their daughter anything so fanciful. And then there’s all that sandalwood and the ridiculous costume. ‘Esmerelda’ is too convenient. It is just another trapping in your particular subterfuge. Tell me your name.”

Jenny pressed her lips together and shook her head.

“Margaret,” he guessed. “Meg for short.”

“Esmerelda,” Jenny insisted.

That sardonic quirk of his lips again. “It won’t do, Meg. You’ll tell me your name eventually.”

“If Esmerelda were not my name, why would I admit it to you?”

His thumb caressed hers. “Because I can’t let you call me Gareth until you do.”

He spoke so casually. “Why—” Jenny stopped, and squared her shoulders. “My lord, why would I want to call you by your Christian name?”

“I can see that future here—” he traced a line down her palm “—and here—” he touched her cheek near her eyes “—and here.”

His thumb brushed her lips, and her mouth parted in anticipation. And still his expression lost not one whit of its scientific cast.

“I’m not going to marry whatever poor girl you pick out,” he said softly. “I pit your prediction against mine. I predict you’ll call me Gareth. When I bed you, Meg, I’ll be damned if you scream anything else.”

“If you’re trying to prove you’re not an automaton,” Jenny said, “you really ought to consider varying your tone. You might as well be talking about the price of potatoes, for all the—”

He cut her off with a swift kiss. Heaven help her trembling body, she let him do it. And when he pulled back, it was her lips that clung to his.

“You see?” he murmured. “You’ll scream.”

“But we’ve already established that I am not dispassionate. I want to know—what will you do?”

For just one instant, he met her eyes. Those golden orbs glimmered with a fierce light. It was the second hint of emotion she’d detected from him that evening. When he looked sharply away from her, she could almost believe she’d imagined it.

He let go of her wrist, breaking the connection between them. Then he shook his head, and Jenny realized they had been standing in the chilled entry for minutes. She hadn’t even felt the cold.

She did now.

He set his hand on the handle of her door. “You want to know what I’ll do when I bed you? I’ll win.” He turned away and opened her door. The rain had stopped and a light, swirling mist blanketed the street. Seconds later, he strode into the night. The fog muffled the sound of his steps and swallowed his disappearing figure.

Jenny shut the door and turned and sagged against it. Her hands covered her face. But no matter how tightly she closed her eyes, she couldn’t erase the feel of his lips from her flesh or the taste of his mouth from her mind.

What a disaster. He had already won.

He’d seen everything, from the harsh order of the school where she’d been raised to the depths of her unfortunate attraction to him. She hadn’t spoken what she felt in words, but his one kiss had teased out her admission of fraud.

In the scant space of a few hours, he’d unearthed her deepest secrets. Including, it seemed, a few she’d kept from herself. The desire to be touched. The desire to be desired.

One kiss, and she’d verified every dismissive thought Lord Blakely had ever had of his cousin. Because Lord Blakely’s prediction was not just that he’d bed Jenny, but that he’d prove Ned’s valiant defense false.

Once, her profession had seemed a game. It had made no difference what lies she told her clients. After all, few of them truly believed her. They saw her as nothing more than a distraction, an entertainment to be scheduled between boxing matches and the opera.

But Ned had been different. What had it hurt to foretell that he would become a strong and confident man, trustworthy and capable?

When Ned discovered she’d lied, Lord Blakely would never let him forget his foolishness. He’d store it in that brain of his, next to his theories of goose behavior, or whatever it was he studied. And he’d trot out the evidence any time Ned showed a hint of independence.

For all Lord Blakely’s talk of ravenous hunger, he’d been the one to step away. Of course he would willingly take Jenny to his bed. After all, he was a man. That’s what men did. And given the expertise he’d shown with his lips and tongue, she had no doubt he could make her scream if he got her there.

If? It had become a matter of when.

He’d held her close. He’d kissed her. He’d promised to make her scream in bed, and shamefully, she still longed for him to do it. But there was one thing Lord Blakely had not done—not once, in the hours she’d observed him.

He hadn’t smiled.

Jenny took a deep breath. Silently, she made another prediction. Before he took her to bed, she’d break Lord Blakely. She’d make him realize Ned needed more than intellect and insult to sustain him. She’d make him respect Ned.

Damn it, she’d make him respect her.

Jenny had already lost. But that didn’t mean the marquess had to win.

THERE WAS NO WAY TO WIN, Gareth thought helplessly, as he surveyed the tray that his sister, Laura Edmonton, had laid out in anticipation of this visit. Shortbread. Cucumber sandwiches with the crust removed. Once, many years ago, he’d enjoyed both. Now they lay, marshaled in grim rows, testament to an ongoing war. Gareth could at most hope to achieve a scrambling, ignominious retreat.

His sister—his much younger half sister, if Gareth was going to be precise about the matter—smiled at him. But the expression her eyes reflected wasn’t hope or happiness; it was fear.

“Tea?”

The battle was always joined with tea. “Please,” he answered.

He could direct the products of his estates without blinking. He had braved the rain forests of Brazil for months. But this quiet room, draped in pink silks, with the pleasant burbling of the fountain coming through the window … Well, it vanquished him every time.

Not so much the room as Laura. Her lips were compressed in concentration as she added a careful dollop of cream to Gareth’s tea—precisely the quantity that Gareth preferred.

Every month, Laura tried desperately to please him. Today, she wore the finest morning dress she owned, made of some thin, pink flimsy cotton, the sleeves large and heavy and festooned with ribbons. Her sandy brown hair was pinned up with ruthless exactitude.

Laura handed over a delicate china cup and saucer, as if tea would magically heal the damage between them. It couldn’t. After Laura had been born, Gareth had been too busy learning to be a marquess to become a brother. Now that they were both adults, they’d frozen into this awkward pattern.

Awkward?

Every month, she invited him over for tea. Every month, he accepted. And every month … To call these unfortunate tête–à–têtes awkward would understate the matter by an order of magnitude.

Their afternoons always started this way. Gareth struggled for conversation, and Laura attempted to make up for his taciturn nature by speaking for them both.

“Do you like my reticule?” She set her saucer on the table with a clink and retrieved a puddle of pink silk that lay nearby. She held it out for inspection.

The object in question was embroidered with pink roses, which in turn sported pink leaves and pink thorns. It was of a size to fit a calling card—a pink calling card. Dyed pink feathers were sewed to the bottom. The handbag was not merely pink. It was fatally pink.

Gareth searched for an appropriately supportive response. “It seems … serviceable?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Oh. Because I took it with me when Alex took me driving, and he said it would spook the horses. He made me sit on it the whole way, and then he only took me in a single circuit around the park.” Laura looked up at Gareth.

That look in her eyes—that damnable look that said that even after all his missteps, Gareth’s opinion still mattered—made him hunch his shoulders. It made him wish he’d done one thing to deserve it. Madame Esmerelda had accused him of being an automaton. Around his sister, he felt like a clumsy marionette, poorly jointed, unable to manage even the simplest tasks. How she would laugh if she could see him now.

“Do you think,” Laura asked in a small voice, “that my fiancé hates my reticule?”

Questions like these were more perilous than a company of marauding Turks. There were no right answers to give, not ever. Gareth tried anyway. “I rather suspect he likes your reticule. It’s just that he’s a man. He’s not going to waste his time poring over needlepoint flowers, even if he is marrying you.”

As soon as his sister winced, Gareth realized waste had been the wrong word. That his clipped delivery had struck the wrong tone. Because it had never been the tea or the cucumber sandwiches, with or without crusts, that rendered this endeavor futile. It was Gareth. He had no notion of pink silk and embroidery. And damn him, he had no notion of this woman before him. For all that she was his sister and the closest flesh and blood that he had on this planet, she was still a mystery to him.

They’d been playing out this scene ever since Laura was four and Gareth twenty, when in one of his short visits to his stepfather’s estate, she’d invited him to a tea party with all her dolls. At the time, he’d thought that if only she were a bit older, if only the minute chairs in her chambers were a tad larger, perhaps he’d be able to converse with her.

But now she was nineteen. She was too much a lady to pelt him with shortbread and shriek that he was ruining her party.

Laura had turned her head, as if to contemplate the elms outside the wide windows. Her hands twisted the silk of her reticule round and round until the embroidered petals distorted into harsh lines. “And what do I do,” she said quietly, “if he stops liking me?”

If that’s what you fear, then you shouldn’t marry him.

But saying that would be stupid and utterly selfish. Because Gareth couldn’t shake the fear in his own mind that once she married, she would have no further need of her inept brother. She would figure out that these afternoons were a waste, and Gareth would be utterly displaced. Her invitations would slow from monthly to bimonthly events. They would eventually turn into salutations exchanged in passing at the opera. If Laura were at all rational, she’d have stopped inviting him years ago.

A real older brother would know precisely how to reassure his sister at a moment like this. He’d be able to alleviate the agitation that had her wringing the neck of her reticule. He would tell jokes and solve all her problems. But Laura had an ungainly lump of a brother, all marquess, and Gareth hadn’t the faintest idea how to comfort anyone.

Just as she always invited him, Gareth always tried. “If you’re really worried your fiancé won’t like you, I’ll double your settlement.”

Her eyes widened, and her mouth crumpled.

“What?” he asked. “What did I say this time?”

“Is that what you think of me, Blakely?” Laura choked on the words. “You think you have to bribe Alex to care for me? That nobody will love me unless you pay him?”

No.

Gareth had hoped to buy Laura’s love for himself. How could he make her see? He’d tried to bail himself out of these situations before, but all he ever managed was to reduce her to tears. Once a conversation started sinking, there was little choice but to abandon ship. Long experience had taught him that the way not to respond in situations like this was to enumerate the ways in which she was wrong. Somehow, every time he tried to explain that he hadn’t meant what she heard, it came out sounding like “you are an irrational goose.”

Instead of allaying her fears, he sat in his chair and gripped his plate until the delicate edge of the china cut into his hands.

Then he’d been silent too long, an entire species of error in its own right.

“Very well.” Laura’s voice trembled. “Double it. I don’t care.”

Nothing had changed since she was four except the chairs. He was still ruining everything.

Madness, a physician had once told Gareth, was repeating the same events over and over while hoping for a different result. That was why Gareth had no fear he would fall in love, no matter what Madame Esmerelda predicted for him. Love was watching his sister choke back tears. Love hoped that month after month, she would continue to issue invitations. And love believed, against all evidence, that one day, he would get it right, that he would learn to talk to her as a brother instead of the cold, unfeeling man she must have believed him to be.

In short, love was madness.

CHAPTER FOUR

HE’D EMBARKED on a new species of madness, Gareth thought as he shifted on the soft squabs of the closed carriage. It was the night of the coming-out ball that he and Ned were to attend. It had been almost a week since he left Madame Esmerelda’s quarters, and the visceral pull she had on him should have waned. Tonight he would take the first step in breaking her power over Ned.

And yet …

He had thought he’d figured out Madame Esmerelda. Classified her, genus and species. One fraud, first class; motivated by greed. That ambition on her part was no doubt intensified by an early childhood where she’d not fit a predefined role. And, luckily for him, she was as susceptible as he to the powerful lust that burned between them.

Having identified the problem, the solution seemed obvious: Execute her tasks with maximum alacrity and minimum embarrassment, thus exposing her perfidy to Ned. Take her to bed, enjoy her thoroughly and dispel his unfortunate attraction to her in the most pleasurable manner possible.

He chanced a glance across the seat. She sat properly, her feet crossed and put to the side to avoid his own limbs. She had very carefully avoided his gaze all evening. Without saying a word to him, though, she’d destroyed the mental identification he’d made. She’d become an anomaly. Gareth’s ordered mind abhorred anomalies.

Correction: Gareth loved anomalies. An anomaly meant there was a scientific mystery to explore. It meant some mysterious unknown cause had come into play, and if he could just examine the problem from the right angle, he could be the first person in the world to solve the puzzle. No; the scientist in Gareth adored conundrums. It was the marquess in him, the responsible Lord Blakely, who feared the consequences.

Because under the circumstances, it was dreadfully inconvenient to adore anything about her.

The first burning question in his mind was—why that gown? Oh, he’d sunk to new lows, contemplating a woman’s wardrobe. Gareth was hardly an arbiter of fashion, but even he knew that these days the waist was fashionably pulled in by means of some corsetted contraption. Necklines skimmed the breasts. And sleeves were supposed to balloon like enraged puffer-fish.

He’d looked forward to seeing that remarkable bosom framed by a fashionably low neckline. He’d have engaged in some chance ogling or a brush of his hands against a creamy collarbone. In the dress he had envisioned, such accidents would have been delightfully inevitable.

But instead Madame Esmerelda’s dress was brown—almost black, in the dimness of the carriage. The neck was unmodishly high, and the sleeves had only a hint of a puff to them. No lace, no ribbons and no fancy gold trim. No shaping of the figure.

Her choice of attire was as baffling as it was disappointing. After she’d raged at him the other day, he’d pulled out his notebook and disappeared into his scientific work. When the modiste had come to him in outrage, he’d brushed her away. He had assumed Madame Esmerelda would take advantage of his lack of focus. After all, she could have lived for a week on the price of a single gilt ribbon. Instead, she must have waged war with the modiste to obtain such an unflattering gown. And Gareth wanted to know why.

A first-class fraud, motivated by greed, would have ordered gold netting and badgered Gareth to provide sapphires to highlight the remarkable color of her eyes. It made no sense to do anything else.

He’d been staring openly at her since she’d entered his carriage. She’d gifted him with short glances that smoldered beneath his skin even after she turned her head. Kissing the woman should have given her the upper hand, should have revealed his weakness to her. A first-class fraud would have taken every seductive advantage. She would have kept his gaze and added burning promises with every lift of her brow. She would have taken advantage of the cover of darkness to rest her foot against his. After all, how better to reap the rewards, and potentially cloud Gareth’s judgment?

He’d manfully prepared himself to resist her blandishments—for now.

But Madame Esmerelda was ignoring him as best she could from two feet away, and talking with Ned. And he didn’t know which annoyed him more—that he wished she would try to cloud his judgment, or that it was clouding without any effort on her behalf at all.

Her behavior didn’t fit. Nothing about her fit.

“Ned,” she was saying, “don’t lose sight of what you must do this evening.”

Ned clasped his hands in front of him in barely contained excitement. “We’re going to meet Blakely’s future wife. How should I greet her?”

Gareth winced. From time to time, his cousin was prone to overexuberance. He could imagine the disruption the youth might cause.

Apparently, Madame Esmerelda could, too. She shook her head. “Oh, Ned. Be respectful and mannerly. And remember that Lord Blakely won’t greet her until he’s ready to present the elephant.”

“Oh, very well.” Ned slouched against the seat and folded his arms. “But only because you say so.”

Gareth was not used to being ignored. Most especially not by women he kissed. He was already weary of it. “Madame Esmerelda.”

She looked over, unwillingly.

“After I finish the third task, how soon do you predict I will fall in love and propose marriage?”

“Within a month.” Her voice quavered uncertainly at the end of the sentence.

“And that’s all I have to do—perform the three tasks, wait a month, and if I don’t marry the girl, Ned will know you’re a fraud?” He held his breath. If she agreed, this would give him precisely what he wanted. Verifiable performances. Measurable outcomes. And most importantly, a finite, achievable end that would justify whatever humiliation he felt because of her tasks.

“Another possibility is that you might follow the spirits’ guidance and marry her.”

Gareth snorted.

Ned kicked Gareth’s leather half boot in the darkness. “Hurry up, then, and get carving.”

There was a third anomaly to consider. Ned did everything Madame Esmerelda told him. If she had told him to hand over ten thousand pounds and leap off London Bridge wearing lead footgear, Ned would be fish food at the bottom of the Thames. For a first-class fraud, she was doing a miserable job extracting money.

“Never you mind about that, Ned,” Gareth said. “There’s no need for me to start carving.”

“But the task—!” Ned almost choked on his indignation.

“There’s no need to start, as I’ve already finished. I thought it best to get this over with as soon as possible.” Gareth reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an ebony lump. Light from a passing lamp glinted off the surface.

Madame Esmerelda motioned, and he handed it over. She took it in her hands, and then brought it close to her face, squinting, turning the misshapen chunk of wood over. The piece of ebony was as round as it was wide, scored and gouged with his pocketknife. Her mouth puckered as if she’d bitten a lemon.

Some explanation seemed necessary. Gareth pointed to the lump. “Elephant.”

“Goodness.” She rotated the figurine about its axis. “Could you perhaps have made it more … more elephantine?”

Gareth rather disliked being found wanting in any area. The fact that he couldn’t carve should not have unnerved him. After all, he shouldn’t care what she thought of his abilities on that score. It wasn’t as if her opinion mattered. And it wasn’t as if the skill was of any importance to a marquess. He folded his arms and mustered his coolest expression. “The assigned task did not precisely play to my strengths.”

She sniffed. “What did you expect? To seduce a lady with a geometrical proof?”

“Seduction?” Gareth’s gaze flitted down her bosom. “I had thought we were talking of marriage.”

Madame Esmerelda colored and thrust the ebony back into his hands.

“Wait,” protested Ned. “Let me see it.”

Gareth handed over the lump. He made eye contact with his cousin, and silently promised dire retribution should Ned start laughing.

Ned saved his own life by merely frowning in puzzlement. “Where, ah, where is its trunk?”

Gareth fished about in his pocket and pulled out a thick splinter of wood. “It came off. During the carving.”

Madame Esmerelda stared at it, and shook her head. “Well. This evening, I think you ought to engage in multiple activities that do not, as you say, play to your strengths.”

“Yes,” Gareth said with a noisy sigh. “I’ll have to give away the elephant to whichever horrific debutante you point out.”

Madame Esmerelda shook her head. “And.”

“There’s an and?”

“Lord Blakely, if there isn’t an ‘and’ there’s a ‘but.’ Give away the elephant. Please, try to do one other thing. Smile.”

“Smile?” He glowered at her. “Is that the next task? To grin like a loon?”

“It’s not a task,” Madame Esmerelda said. “It’s a suggestion.”

“Why would I smile?”

Ned handed back Gareth’s pitiful attempt at carving. “Smiling is that thing most people do with their lips to indicate amusement or enjoyment.” He turned to Madame Esmerelda. “You ask the impossible. You’re a cruel woman.”

The carriage came to a careful halt, and a footman opened the door. Cool night air rushed in, and the conversation halted momentarily while the party exited the carriage.

Gareth carefully placed the ebony in his pocket. “I’m not going to feign amusement. Or enjoyment.”

“Like I said,” Ned replied airily. “Impossible.”

Madame Esmerelda patted her skirts into place. “Have you considered actually enjoying yourself?”

“In this venue? In this company?” Gareth glanced toward the brightly lit entry. “Ned’s quite right. It’s impossible.” He stalked away, leaving Ned and Madame Esmerelda in his wake.

“Whew.” Behind him, Ned whistled between his teeth. “Cold fish.”

If only he knew.

“LORD BLAKELY. Mrs. Margaret Barnard. Mr. Edward Carhart.” The majordomo’s announcement hardly cut through the din of conversation that filled the glittering room that opened up before Jenny.

She frowned at Lord Blakely—it was he, after all, who’d directed the majordomo—just before he leaned in and whispered to her.

“Congratulations, Meg. You have become a widow. Also a very distant cousin of mine. Do try not to tell fortunes here.” He tucked her gloved hand in the crook of his elbow and led her forward.

He acted as if she were nothing but a liar, as if she’d chosen her profession because she could not help but speak mistruths every time she opened her mouth. It had taken her years to perfect Madame Esmerelda’s character, and almost a decade to bring her profession to this height, where word of mouth had replaced the need to advertise. She could not just adopt a persona on a whim.

But before she could think of a way to castigate him, she entered the ballroom, and all other thoughts were driven from her mind. The room seemed on fire, so bright was the illumination.

She had seen gas lamps on the street, dull globes of orange casting dim shadows about them. She’d even tangled with oil lamps herself on occasion—messy to fill, burning with a faint fishy odor. But she’d only walked outside houses illuminated as this one. The night fled from these bright chandeliers, shining with unspeakable wealth.

She’d never seen the like. The entire room was lit by what seemed a thousand golden suns. It was noon-bright, and twice as hot. No corner of the room stood in shadow. The only difference between this light and day was that the heavy yellow tinge of the lighting rendered the brown of her dress as mud.

Mud was what she felt like next to Lord Blakely.

His finery had been calculated to take advantage of the brilliance. The dark red embroidery in his black waistcoat subtly caught the light. Jet buttons, exquisitely cut, sparkled. In this light, she could make out the subtle, rich texture woven in the fabric of his dark jacket. All that black brought out the golden flecks in his eyes.

She had never felt so intensely shabby before. Her gown was plain and untrimmed. Simple lines; easy to put on and take off. The kind of dress that a woman, living alone, could don without assistance. And because only a woman living one step above genteel poverty would purchase a gown built on those lines, she’d chosen a sensible and serviceable brown. Anything else would have seemed out of place. But “out of place” was precisely where she stood now.

When she lifted her eyes to the scene in front of her, that feeling of unworthiness only intensified. She’d thought herself quite clever, putting up her hair in ribbons, with curls carefully crafted in papers the night before. Around her, she saw perfect, fat sausage curls dangling from exquisite coiffures, decorated with flowers real and silk, ribbons dyed with colors far richer and more exotic than the pink and faded beetroot she’d employed.

When the other ladies moved, their every step swayed with grace. They all seemed clean and crisp at the edges. Even from several feet away, she smelled ambergris and rich food.

And then there was the room itself. It fit as many people as the most crowded London street. She’d never seen so large a space indoors. Jenny followed the lines of the high Ionic columns ringing the room up, and up, and up, to a gilt-decorated ceiling towering five times her height in the air. It made her feet sweat. There was no reason for vertigo to afflict her when she was safely on the ground, looking up.

But it did.

Her fingers tightened on Lord Blakely’s elbow.

“Don’t fear, Mrs. Barnard,” he said coldly. “We’ll get you married off in no time.”

It took Jenny a heartbeat to remember she was supposed to be Mrs. Barnard. “What?”

“Isn’t that why we’ve brought you here? What think you, Ned? Are we bringing our distant cousin here in search of a new husband? We must agree on some fiction before we are set upon and introductions are demanded.”

“Nonsense,” Jenny said. “My husband died only a year ago. I’m uninterested in remarriage, but you’ve kindly decided to cheer me up.”

“Kind?” said Ned. “Blakely? At least pick a tale the ton will believe.”

Jenny smiled at Ned and transferred her hand to his elbow. “It must have been your idea, my dear.”

Lord Blakely scrubbed at the crook of his arm, as if to erase her touch. “Notice, Ned, how easily she lies.”

Jenny took a deep breath. Just because she felt like a cow wallowing among swans didn’t mean she had to let Lord Blakely intimidate her.

“Oh, Lord Blakely,” Jenny said. “You’re not smiling. Whatever can we do to increase your enjoyment of this event?”

He opened his mouth, but Jenny cut off whatever he’d planned to say with a delighted clap of her hands. “I know!” she said. “Just the thing to lift your spirits. Shall we check the time?”

Lord Blakely glanced at the clock on the wall, but she shook her head.

“Your fob watch.”

After a pause, he pulled a heavy gold watch from his pocket. He flicked it open and contemplated its face. “Well, Mrs. Barnard. Do your worst. It’s thirty-eight minutes after ten.”

HEADY ANTICIPATION WASHED THROUGH Ned as his cousin looked up from his watch. Only one minute left? Finally, Ned was going to watch his cousin fall in love. Then Blakely would get married and produce heirs. He’d have other people to treat as his inferiors, to inflict with his cold ways and perfect demeanor. Most importantly, Madame Esmerelda—and Ned himself—would be vindicated.

Had a minute passed yet? Ned checked his impulse to reach for his own timepiece. Madame Esmerelda had said to go by Blakely’s watch—and so Blakely’s it must be.

But the blasted man had started to flick it back in his pocket. In one swift movement, Ned reached out and tugged the gold disc from Blakely’s fingers. It resisted his pull.

Blakely grimaced in annoyance. “Ned, the chain is attached, as you may recall.”

How could the man be so bloody calm?

Ned set his jaw. “Apologies,” he muttered, giving the chain an unapologetic jerk. When Blakely made no move to relinquish control of his watch, Ned added, “Can you unhook that thing? We need it over here.”

“My pleasure,” Blakely said sarcastically. He made a tremendous fuss and bother of undoing the hook from his buttonhole and lifting the gold chain from his pocket. But all that dithering didn’t matter, because the time was—

Still thirty-eight minutes after ten. Ned sighed. Well, little enough time had passed. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that it hadn’t been a minute yet.

But just to be sure, Ned checked again.

Indeed. It was still thirty-eight minutes after. Ned sighed in frustration and looked up, scanning the crowd. He wondered which of the ladies he saw was intended for his cousin. None seemed particularly interesting.

“Ned,” murmured Madame Esmerelda. “Do you recall what I told you about patience?”

“I am being patient,” Ned muttered.

She cleared her throat. “Your foot.”

Ned blinked, looking down. His damned foot was tapping in frustration. He willed it to stop, and then, because at least two seconds had elapsed, he allowed himself to look down again.

“Still thirty-eight after? Blakely, is the damned thing broken?”

Before his cousin could answer, it happened. The minute hand shivered, like a cat preparing to stretch. It trembled. And then … It ticked. A shiver shot through Ned’s spine, and he glanced up at Madame Esmerelda.

“The thirty-ninth minute is upon us,” Madame Esmerelda intoned.

“And woe betide us, every man.” It was a mystery, how Blakely maintained that bored appearance with his future hanging in the balance.

But Madame Esmerelda would handle everything that mattered. Ned turned expectantly to her.

She was scanning the throng. “There,” she finally said, pointing one long finger at an exceptionally thick portion of the crowd. “That’s her. In the blue. By the wall.”

Ned followed the line of her finger. He goggled. Then he gasped, choking on the impossibility of it all.

“Are you perhaps referring to the lady wearing the delightful feathers?” Blakely did not betray so much as a flicker of horror. “She’s lovely. I think I’m falling in love already.”

“She—I—that—” Ned turned to Madame Esmerelda, his hands aquiver. The incoherent stream of syllables from his mouth refused to resolve into anything so cogent as a complaint. He’d felt doubt before, looking into her wise and knowing face. But all those times, he’d doubted himself.

He’d doubted he would escape the darkness that periodically captured him.

For one timeless second, though, the cold fingers of uncertainty touched the back of his neck, and Ned doubted her. If she’d pointed to a pig, he’d have believed it under an enchanted spell. One that could be broken with a kiss. But she’d picked the one woman who simply could not marry Blakely.

“Of course not her,” Madame answered dismissively.

Ned’s breath came back in a relieved gasp.

“I meant the pale blue. Moving. Right there.”

Ned looked over to his left. He could see little more other than a beribboned hairpiece perched atop blond hair, and a blue-and-white gown. From behind, she looked young. She looked slender. When she turned, her gown glinted, and he realized that what he had taken for white fabric rosettes were actually pearls. Whoever she was, she was wealthy.

“Drat,” said Blakely. “I had my heart set on Feathers.”

Ned squinted across the room. Was Blakely’s bride-to-be opening that door? She was. Ned’s heart constricted. She was leaving.

“Well, Ned,” Blakely said, without a care for the fact that his future wife was deserting him, “you queered the deal. Next time, let Madame Esmerelda pronounce without prompting.”

Ned gave this inscrutable comment the moment’s consideration it deserved, before deciding to ignore it. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”

Neither of his companions moved. Ned put one hand on his hip and gestured in the direction of the lady with Blakely’s watch. “She’s escaping. Don’t you want to meet her?”

“Oh,” said Blakely in a depressing tone. “Dear. What ever shall I do?”

Ned stamped his foot. “Nonsense. After her!”

Blakely smoothly plucked his watch from Ned’s fingers and dropped it, chain and all, into his pocket. “Do calm yourself, Ned. We will attract more attention than this event warrants if the three of us pelt across the ballroom like dogs on a scent.”

Ned scowled. “Madame Esmerelda,” he protested, “tell Blakely he has to hurry. The way he’s acting is just not respectful.“

Madame Esmerelda looked at him. “Ned, take a breath and calm down.”

“I’m not—” Ned started, before he realized that he was, in fact, on edge with anticipation. He shut his mouth with a click.

“And, perhaps, Lord Blakely, you could consider putting one foot in front of the other. It would be the rational thing to do. If you must wait for her to come back, you’ll have to present your elephant in front of the entire assemblage.”

Blakely’s lip curled in obvious distaste. “You make an excellent point.”

Ned’s cousin turned and strolled toward the exit where the blond lady had disappeared. Ned dashed in front of him, ducking between a surprised couple, and around one large man wearing a hideous waistcoat. It didn’t take long to wrest open the unobtrusive door in the wall.

He stepped into a deserted servants’ corridor, dim and hazy after the well-lit ballroom. The walls were a nondescript whitewash, and the narrow passage stretched before them. Why had she come here?

It didn’t matter. Whatever she was doing, she hadn’t gone far. She was a scant fifteen feet down the hall. She walked almost noiselessly. Despite the bare wood floors underfoot and the unadorned walls, the quiet tap of her steps faded, folding into the muted roar of the gathering behind them.

Behind him, Blakely’s shoes clacked noisily. She heard the sound and paused.

Blakely took advantage of her hesitation. “Pardon me,” he called.

The lady turned around slowly. Very slowly. Ned caught his breath. She was younger than he was. Her features seemed almost too sharp, too pronounced. But her eyes were wide and intelligent, and even though she’d been caught alone by three people she did not know, she held her head high and her shoulders straight. She did not speak; instead, she cocked her head, as if silently granting the rabble permission to approach. That aloof calm rendered those sharp features almost beautiful.

With that haughty demeanor, she would make Blakely an excellent marchioness. Ned darted a glance at his cousin. The man seemed unaffected by her elegance.

“I believe you dropped this back in the ballroom.” Not an ounce of emotion touched Blakely’s voice as he strode toward her, holding the gouged lump of ebony in his hand.

Ned wasn’t sure which constituted the greater sacrilege: Blakely’s cursory adherence to Madame Esmerelda’s tasks, or his ability to remain unruffled when confronting his future wife. Annoyed, Ned scrambled after his cousin.

The lady frowned as Blakely came closer. “I dropped something? How clumsy of me.”

Her voice sounded like bells, Ned decided, except not the harsh clanging kind. She put him in mind of clear, high chimes, ringing out in winter weather.

Her gaze fell on the indecipherable object in Blakely’s outstretched hand. That perfect brow furrowed in consternation. “I dropped that? I think not.” A discordant note sounded in those bells.

Blakely shrugged. “As you wish.” He swiveled from her.

The effrontery of the man! He wasn’t even trying to give Madame Esmerelda’s prediction a fair chance.

Ned clamped his hand about his cousin’s wrist and turned him back around. “Oh, I think so. Where else could it have come from?”

Aside from Blakely’s pocket. Or any of the fifteen other sources that sprang to mind.

“I assure you,” she said with some asperity, “if that object had belonged to me, I shouldn’t have waited until I attended a ball to dispose of it. Even if I had dropped it, I would never admit prior ownership when questioned.”

“Well.” Ned drew out the syllable and squared his shoulders. “If you didn’t drop it, you must accept it.”

Her lips thinned. “Why?”

Why? Damnation.

“I can’t think of any reason,” Blakely interjected. His gaze seemed subtly mocking. Ned’s stomach sank. His cousin would continue to perform all his tasks in this halfhearted fashion. He had no intention of taking Madame Esmerelda’s strictures seriously. He intended to do the bare minimum, and no more.

But Madame Esmerelda was right. She saw the future. She had to do so. Because if she were wrong about Blakely, then her prediction about Ned was suspect, too. And that he could not bear.

Ned plucked the ebony from his cousin’s hand and held it out. There was only one thing for it. He was going to have to do all the work.

“Unfortunately—” Ned sighed “—there’s no good reason. You’re just going to have to take it anyway.”

She peered at the unfortunate lump of wood. “What is that thing, anyway?”

“What do you think it is?”

The lady reached out one slim finger and tapped the dark surface. She pulled back the digit immediately, as if she’d tapped a hot stove. “It appears to be some sort of round, pockmarked, misbegotten, battle-blackened … citrus?”

“You see?” Triumph boiled up in Ned and he poked Blakely in the lapels. “She knew! She knew it was an elephant! You can’t possibly deny Madame Esmerelda’s power now!”

That, at least, finally got a response from Blakely. The man shut his eyes and covered his face with a hand.

The lady frowned. “An orange is an elephant?”

She was intimidating and elegant. Ned imagined the figure he must cut in her eyes. Boyishly skinny. Overshadowed by his taller cousin. Awkward, ungainly, and just a little too loud at all the wrong times. Most especially at this moment. He flushed from head to toe.

“Yes,” Ned said. His voice still rang too loudly.

At precisely the same moment, Blakely said, “No.”

She stared at the two men. “You,” she said stabbing a finger at Ned, “are mad. You—” pointing at Blakely this time “—are tainted by association. And you—” here, she pointed at Madame Esmerelda standing behind them “—are very quiet. As for me, I am leaving.”

If she left now, fate and all the angels in heaven couldn’t bring her together with Blakely.

“Wait,” Ned called. “We haven’t been introduced! And you didn’t take your elephant.”

She turned around again. “No, we haven’t been introduced. And I certainly couldn’t accept a gift from a stranger.”

Ned bit his cheeks and wondered if he could possibly—please?—disappear on the spot. “Oh, that stupid rule doesn’t matter here. It’s only applicable to nice things. Clothing or jewelry or the like. This is a piece of rubbish.”

She stared at Ned and shook her head. “You really are mad.”

“Yes,” he agreed through gritted teeth. “Now humor the madman, and take the dam—I mean, take the dratted elephant.”

She contemplated him for a long moment. Then, surprisingly, dimples formed on her cheeks. She did not smile, but her eyes sparkled. And she placed her gloved hand, palm out, in front of her.

He dropped the wood into her hand. “There,” Ned said. “Now it’s your misbegotten lump of citrus.”

She looked up. Her eyes were gray, and Ned had the sudden impression that she saw right into his heart. That organ thumped heavily under her observation. Ned swallowed, and the world slowed.

Then she dropped a curtsy. “Thank you,” she said prettily. She turned. Ned watched her leave. She strode as confidently as a queen. Ned felt humiliated and exposed. It was only when she turned the corner that he realized that they’d still not been introduced. Of course not. He’d just painted himself as the biggest fool in London. Who would want to make an acquaintance of him?

Not that it mattered. It was Blakely who was fated to have her. He could have her; he’d match her, his intimidating glares bouncing off her cold elegance. No doubt Blakely would fall in love with her.

He turned to his cousin. “Someday,” Ned said bitterly, “you are going to thank me for what I just did for you.”

Blakely gestured sardonically. “I wouldn’t wager on that, were I you. For now, I’ll thank you to head back to the ball.”

CHAPTER FIVE

BEFORE JENNY SET FOOT back in the ballroom, bringing up the rear of their party, they were accosted. Lord Blakely swung the door open into the bright hall, and a voice called out.

“Blakely,” said the woman, “why are you hiding in the servants’ quarters? And why didn’t you tell me you were attending tonight?”

Lord Blakely stopped so abruptly that Jenny nearly ran into him from behind. As she stumbled forward into the open hall, the lights dazzled her eyes. It took a moment to adjust from the dim illumination of the corridor, and when she was finally able to see who had confronted them—or, rather, who had confronted the marquess, she coughed.

It was Feathers. The woman in blue, the one she’d pointed to before Ned’s choking reaction and Lord Blakely’s own smooth acceptance convinced her to change her mind.

Feathers was not pretty. Despite her fresh-faced youth, her features were too angular to qualify for that label. But she gleamed with a sleek, polished air that would have made even the plainest lady pleasant to look at. She looked almost as imposing as Lord Blakely, dressed as she was in a fine light blue gown embroidered at the edges with flowers, and littered with silk rosettes. Luminescent pearls shone about her neck. Sandy brown hair was bound up in a tight mess of curls, from which her namesake—three waving peacock feathers—bobbed.

She was definitely not pretty, but she was striking in a way that struck Jenny as oddly familiar.

And yet Feathers showed not one iota of the confidence her dress and ramrod-straight posture should have imparted. Even younger than Ned, she ducked her shoulders and smiled, a universal signal that she was eager to please.

Here was a puzzle. For all her fine demeanor, Lord Blakely’s earlier behavior suggested the lady was somehow unsuitable for marriage. But the lady had called him by the familiar “Blakely.” And he hadn’t corrected the importunity with typical frosty disdain.

Light dawned. No wonder she seemed so familiar. And no wonder the marquess had wanted Jenny to pick this woman.

“Lord Blakely,” Jenny said. “You never told me you had a sister.”

“See?” Ned flung his hands in the air. “How can you disbelieve her? I never said a word of it!”

Feathers eyed Jenny with open curiosity. “The rumor that swept the ballroom is that this lady is a distant cousin. I didn’t know we had any Barnards in our family.”

Lord Blakely grimaced. “Restrain yourself, Ned. Do recall we are at a very crowded ball. And, Laura, she is not your cousin.”

The lady sighed. “Carhart side? Still, a cousin of yours is a cousin of mine.” She looked at Jenny and smiled almost shyly. “Isn’t that just like my brother, to ignore me when I’m so obviously angling for an introduction? What is Ned jabbering on about?”

Ned put his hands on his hips. “Well, don’t ask the great Marquess of Blakely for explanations. Or introductions. He can’t even be bothered to deliver his own elephants. He doesn’t believe anything unless it’s right in front of his nose.”

The blue feathers in the lady’s coiffure bobbed earnestly. “Oh, don’t I know.” She glanced at Jenny again, and then imparted in confidi ng tones. “He doesn’t even trust my fiancé to handle my funds in the future. He doesn’t trust anything he can’t see and smell and taste.”

Lord Blakely didn’t act either to scold or to assuage his sister’s obvious worries as to how her teasing would be received.

“Actually,” Jenny interjected earnestly, “he’s even more discriminating than that.”

Lord Blakely’s shoulders stiffened. His lips pressed together and a furious warning lit his eyes. Jenny met his angry gaze and dropped one lid in a lazy half-wink.

“Believe me,” she said. “He really doesn’t believe everything he tastes.”

Lord Blakely’s mouth dropped open a fraction. His eyes dropped to her lips; he was undoubtedly remembering the hot openmouthed kiss they’d shared. He froze, almost as if he’d experienced a great stabbing pain. And then a miracle occurred.

He smiled.

The expression changed his whole face from serious and frozen to warm and tinged with the pink of embarrassment. The effect was immediate and electric. He looked almost ten years younger. Jenny’s toes curled in her uncomfortable heeled slippers and she caught her breath.

No wonder the man never grinned. He would have posed a serious danger to womankind if he did so more than once a decade.

He blinked, horrified, as he suddenly realized what he was doing. The corners of his lips turned down sharply. He blew out his breath and turned abruptly to his sister.

“If I failed to greet you earlier, Laura, it was precisely to avoid this moment. I have no intention of introducing you to this woman.”

Jenny felt as if she’d been smacked with an icicle. It was almost as if she’d been back at school. As if the girls were talking about that Jenny Keeble again, pretending Jenny was not standing right in front of them.

The feathers drooped as Laura bowed her head. “Surely, in the family—”

Lord Blakely interposed his body between Jenny and his sister. He dropped his voice, but pitched his words loud enough for Jenny to hear. She had no doubt he intended her to absorb every last hateful sentence. “She’s not a Carhart cousin, either. She’s not any sort of relation. She’s a fraudulent fortune-teller who has sunk her claws into Ned, and she’s not fit for you to know.”

Not fit. Every word he said was undoubtedly true. It still hurt, scraping a wound that was raw even after a dozen years. Jenny had run away from school to escape the snide remarks about her family and her likely fate. Even after all these years, it stung to hear them repeated.

“Oh, dear.” Laura peered around the marquess’s lean form. “Do you really tell fortunes? Can you tell mine? Do you pay house calls, or shall I visit you?”

Jenny could imagine Lord Blakely’s teeth grinding.

“She’s fabulous at it,” Ned answered. “Two years and she’s never been wrong. And now she’s predicted Blakely’s marriage.”

The marquess winced. “Hush,” he remonstrated. “There’s no need to shout—”

But his sister’s eyes lit up like two candles. “You want Blakely to marry? Capital! I knew I liked you.” She sidestepped her brother and linked her arm in Jenny’s.

Jenny looked at the arm in hers. She was too shocked to do anything other than goggle. She hadn’t expected a friendly face smiling into hers after the marquess’s cold dismissal. A lump formed in her throat.

Naturally, Lord Blakely interrupted.

“Mrs. Barnard,” he emphasized coldly, offering her his arm, “I do believe we have terms to discuss. Laura, I’ll see you—I’ll see you next month.”

The smile slowly slipped off his sister’s face as she realized she’d been dismissed. She unlocked her arm from Jenny’s, pausing only to give Jenny’s hand a squeeze. Her brother’s visage darkened at the gesture.

He opened the servants’ door they had just come through and led Jenny a few steps down the dim hall before brushing her hand off his arm and turning to tower over her. He stood inches away, his features implacable.

“Ned is one matter,” Lord Blakely said. “He is my responsibility. Do not doubt that no matter what else may occur between you and me, I will eradicate your influence over him. But my sister …”

“Your sister seems a pleasant enough young woman.”

His lip curled. “Miss Edmonton,” he emphasized icily, “is no consideration of yours. She is my junior by sixteen years, and I don’t mean to see her hurt. I tell you this as a warning, not an invitation. Interfere with my sister, and I will destroy you.”

Jenny put her hands on her hips. “Is that what you think I see when I look at her? A potential dupe?”

“I saw the way you looked at her when she took your arm. As if she’d handed you a gift.”

Jenny looked down to hide the sharp pain in her eyes. She felt like the twisting fibers in the carpet at her feet—threadbare and a bit frayed. In Lord Blakely’s scintillating world, both it and she would have been traded to the ragman. “I bow to your perceptive talent, Lord Blakely. It takes a special sort of intellect to make out only the worst in those around you.”

“Is that what you think I’m about?” He took her chin, turning Jenny’s face toward his. She couldn’t escape that searching gaze. “I can’t risk your lies on this point.”

Lies. Jenny swallowed shame. He dismissed her so easily. In a way, she shouldn’t have been surprised. She knew how the upper classes saw her all too well.

She’d given up on being good because her behavior made no difference. No matter how kind or good or sincere she may have been, they would all condemn her just the same. No matter what she did, she would remain baseborn, her parents unknown to her. What had she to lose by becoming a fraud?

If a gentleman saw her as anything other than an extra panel on the wainscoting, he saw what Lord Blakely did—a potential vessel for his seed, worthy of his notice only for the space of time it took to use her for sexual release. She’d escaped their world, but the only thing that had changed was the face of the man making the offer.

A week ago, Lord Blakely had seen clear through to the truth of her lonely childhood. Now he deemed her unworthy. Looking up into his eyes, she felt the most awful desire to kiss him. It was like the urge to pick off a scab—painful, idiotic and sure to start the bleeding all over again. Had she really been stupid enough to think this man different?

Aside from the sheer physical heat that dwelt between them, he was exactly like everyone she’d ever known.

“Tell me,” he growled at her. “Tell me truthfully you’ll not interfere with her.”

No. Not exactly alike.

There was one way he differed. He deemed her unworthy, but she was not alone in receiving his condemnation. Ned, his sister—he’d spoken harshly of them both. To him, everyone was wainscoting. He might as well have been alone in that crowded room out there.

His fingers dug into her chin. “Say the words,” he ordered.

She wondered, suddenly, how he saw himself. Cold, undoubtedly. Different, and superior to everyone else. He saw himself as the kind of man who could make a woman scream while he experienced little more than inconvenient lust. Maybe Lord Blakely despised lesser mortals who let their control lapse into such gauche and unforgivable errors as the giving of trust, the acceptance of affection.

The poor man.

“I don’t see your sister as a potential mark, my lord. My only surprise is that you do.”

He searched her eyes in the dim light. He must have found the truth in them, because he released her chin.

Jenny rubbed the spots where his fingers had pressed. Five points were emblazoned into her jaw. It hadn’t been painful, but she felt humiliated. After all these years, she should have been used to the feeling. At least, she thought bitterly, Lord Blakely had some real reason besides her birth to believe her dishonest.

He shook his head disdainfully. “I try to see the truth even in those I care for. I have no desire to fool myself. What else should I see?”

There were a million answers. Jenny hesitated, searching for the perfect response. Finally, she picked the cruelest possibility. She picked the truth.

“I thought you would see a younger sister who, despite everything you said to her, still adores you.”

His lips whitened. His hands clenched.

Oh, he strove to hide it. But that miserable flinch showed that Lord Blakely could care about someone, much as he tried to deny it.

This tantrum, she realized, was her punishment, unjustly meted out for winning his smile. For breathing warmth into the ice of Lord Blakely. It was his rage, that he’d caused his sister pain, when he’d meant only to keep her safe. Jenny was not the object of his anger, just its recipient. It shouldn’t have made her feel better, to play the scapegoat. And yet it did.

Jenny stretched up and placed her hand against his cheek. A moment of heat; a hint of stubbled roughness.

And then he recoiled as if a beetle crawled across his skin.

Yes. She was going to make him pay for this moment in the very currency he rejected. Heat. Smiles. And, oh— perhaps just a touch of humiliation. He must have seen the promise in her eyes because he backed away.

“Think whatever you like,” he said, retreating toward the crowded, well-lit hall. “Just stay away from my sister.”

JENNY’S HEAD ACHED from exhaustion. Only the sharp chill of the evening and the throb in her feet kept her from falling asleep while standing. Her little party waited for Lord Blakely’s carriage on the stone path leading away from the ball. She’d come from a room crowded with oppressively bright fabrics, rich dyes, jewels and food that must have taken the poor servants days to prepare. But just outside those white stone walls, Mayfair shared the same night as all of England.

No amount of money could drive away the pervasive London fog that shrouded the street in dimness. In the darkness of night, lords and commoners looked much the same.

There were differences. Ned drooped next to Jenny. He yawned; his teeth reflected dim gaslight from the windows behind him. But Lord Blakely stood as straight and crisp as he had at the start of the evening. Jenny was willing to wager his feet didn’t ache in the slightest. Unsurprising; if they were cut from the same stone as his features, they likely lacked nerves with which to feel pain.

“I looked for her,” Ned mumbled through a yawn. “But I couldn’t find her again. Now how do we track her down?”

Lord Blakely looked straight ahead into the gloom. “Simple. We ask for Lady Kathleen Dunning. She’s the Duke of Ware’s daughter, and it appears she’s made her come-out this year.”

“Good.” Ned yawned again. “Your way is clear. Now where’s the carriage?”

Lord Blakely clasped his gloved fingers together. “Coming ‘round the corner. Right … now.”

At Ned’s startled glance, Lord Blakely sighed. “I heard it coming. I know the gait of my own cattle. And if you’d pay any attention to your surroundings, you’d know it, too. Just as you’d know your dear Madame Esmerelda nearly matched me with my own sister. Had you not called attention to the matter with your coughing and hacking, you’d have undeniable proof of her lack of skill at this moment.”

That, at least, Jenny told herself, was unfair. She’d been warned off the lady in question the instant Lord Blakely pretended interest.

“Even then,” Ned mused, “I was wondering—can you unmake sisters the same way you make them?”

A long exhalation from Lord Blakely. “Make sisters?”

“I read about it in a book of Norse mythology. Well, I read about brothers, really, and the making of a blood oath. You cut your palms until they bleed, and press them together so the blood mingles—”

“More claptrap. Must you believe everything you read? One cannot manufacture brotherhood. It arises out of biology and breeding. As you would surely know if you thought at all.”

Ned tried not to react, but Jenny could read his hurt in the turn of his shoulders away from the approaching conveyance. And when it rumbled to a stop, Ned’s fingers clenched hers in bitter shame as he handed her in. Lord Blakely arranged himself precisely on the opposite seat, unaware of the devastation he’d wrought.

Oh, yes. Jenny was going to make him pay.

She leaned forward. “Lord Blakely,” she said, “for all your rational bent, I notice you’re hard at work performing your own particular sort of alchemical magic.”

The marquess’s hand dropped slowly to his knee. “I beg your pardon? Did you accuse me of alchemy?”

“Yes, Master Paracelsus, I believe I did.”

“Explain yourself.” His words huffed out, colder than the clammy fog enveloping their carriage.

“The typical alchemist attempts to transmute lead into gold. But, being stubborn and perverse, you of course have insisted on reversing the process.”

“You’re talking nonsense.”

When Jenny had said the words, she hadn’t known what she intended. But there he was, attempting to distance himself from any hint of irrationality. A plan burst into her mind, brilliant as the midday sun.

“Oh, you’ll figure it out,” she said. She grinned so hard her cheeks hurt. “I’m speaking of the second task.”

For several seconds, the only sound was the clatter of their passage over cobblestones.

“You want me to convert gold into lead?” A hint of bafflement; a touch of disappointment. “I suppose, I should be delighted you have been defeated so easily. After all, if something downright impossible is a precondition for your prediction, you admit your fortune-telling will never come to pass.”

Jenny leaned forward and patted his cheek. “Oh,” she said, “you silly naturalist. Are you always so literal-minded? I’ve watched you turn gold to lead ever since I met you.”

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