"No, of course not," murmured Letty, wondering which part of his anatomy she should kick first. Did the great oaf actually believe that she was so overcome by his manly charms that she would go along with this?

Jasper pressed his advantage. "Wouldn't you like to have revenge for all the ways he's wronged you? All the times he's slighted you? Think of it: a young, adoring husband. All the jewels you like. Parties, balls…"

"Eternal damnation."

"A minor concern, surely, with all you stand to gain. I'm offering you…me."

"Let me get this straight," Letty said slowly. "Just to make sure I haven't missed anything. I get to do away with my husband—"

"You can pick any means you like," Jasper offered generously.

"—while you stand safely out of the way, keeping your hands clean."

"Safer for both of us that way," Jasper assured her.

"And then"—Letty clasped her hands together and favored Jasper with a look of wide-eyed adoration—"you get to run through Geoffrey's inheritance, while I'm strung up for murder."

Listening to tone rather than words, Jasper started to nod before he realized that he really shouldn't.

"How could I refuse such a generous offer?"

"You don't understand," urged Jasper, showing a distressing tendency to grovel. "You've gotten it all wrong. I'll adore you. I'll cherish you."

"You mean you'll cherish your new income. Especially once I've been dragged off to the gallows."

Jasper opened his mouth to protest, but Letty cut him off.

"What on earth made you think I would go along with this? Did you really think I was that stupid? Never mind," Letty added hastily. "I don't want to know the answer to that."

Jasper's confident expression wavered. "Does this mean you're not going to cooperate with me?"

"Can I make myself any clearer? I find you repulsive. Your morals are beneath contempt. Your selfishness sickens me. Your conversation is tedious. And," Letty finished viciously, "your sideburns are unbecoming!"

Selfishness didn't bother Jasper, but his hair was sacrosanct. Jasper's expression turned ugly, all attempts at charm abandoned. "You don't understand."

Letty made no effort to hide her loathing. "I understand all too well."

"Why should he have everything when I have nothing? It's not fair. It's never been fair."

"Don't talk to me about not fair," retorted Letty. If he wanted unfair, she could give him enough unfair to make his perfectly tended hair stand on end.

Jasper wasn't listening. His face was contorted with three decades of resentment. "He doesn't deserve any of it. Not like I do. Mother always said…"

Letty took a step away from him, tainted just by proximity. "What have you ever done to deserve anything? Have you cared for the land? Have you made sure the fences are in repair and the agent isn't cheating the tenants? Have you stayed up all night with a sick cow?" Letty hadn't, and she was fairly sure her husband hadn't either, but she was running out of examples. She decided to quit before the agrarian imagery got out of hand. "Have you ever, in your life, thought about anything other than gratifying your own needs?"

"Oh, so that's what this is about. Saint Geoffrey, always above reproach. Not so saintly, is he? At least, not when it comes to…women."

Letty itched to fling his words back in his face, but there was no way she could do it without jeopardizing the mission—and how perfectly ironic that would be, to convince her husband of her unreliability by being too quick to defend him!

Letty bristled. "That's none of your concern! He's still worth ten of you—twenty of you! And if you had any sense, you'd go home to London and crawl back into your hole like the miserable little serpent you are before someone takes a machete to you."

Jasper looked her up and down from head to toe and back again, all five feet of her. Letty resisted the urge to stand on her tiptoes.

"You?" he asked, with palpable disbelief.

"Don't tempt me," spat Letty, feeling rather as though she could gleefully grab up a machete and swing it, if one were at hand. "Stay away from me. And stay away from my husband. Or, by God, I will do everything in my power to make your life more of a misery than it already is."

Whatever spirit had moved her Saxon ancestors back in the days when horned helmets were still au courant had hold of Letty. Little she might be, but Jasper slunk back a step under the force of her glare.

Letty lifted her chin, exuding disdain like the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale. "I believe we've said all that needs to be said. Good-bye, Captain Pinchingdale."

Letty swept grandly out of the box, every inch of her body quivering with indignation.

How dared he! That miserable, crawling, miserable…Letty was too angry to think of adjectives. How dared he!

It wasn't nearly as satisfying the second time.

Heels clicking angrily against the Portland stone of the corridor, she stomped toward the stairs, still seething. She wasn't sure what made her angrier, the threat to Lord Pinchingdale or the fact that that miserable, crawling…thing had actually assumed she would go along with his disgusting designs. Would fling herself into his arms, no less!

"'I'm offering you…me,'" Letty mumbled in savage imitation of Jasper's self-satisfied tones. "Revolting!"

Did he think she would be that pathetically grateful for any attentions shown her that she would just rush out and bump off her husband?

"I should have kicked him," muttered Letty. "No, too easy. I should have shoved him off the balcony and called it an accident."

Just thinking of his hideous, rubbery lips shaping the word "accident" made her feel as though she had rolled in pig slop. Letty rubbed her hands up and down her arms as though she could wipe off the taint of his touch.

"Abominable!" she fumed.

"Well, really," she heard someone say, as a pair of ladies passed her on the stairs, "I didn't think the first act was all that bad."

As far as Jasper was concerned, there wasn't going to be a second act; Letty would see to that.

Without conscious thought, she took a sharp right turn, toward the stage door. Goodness only knew what Jasper might do now that his plans were discovered. He must, Letty thought disgustedly, have been awfully sure of himself to have taken the risk of telling her. Either that, or awfully stupid. Or both. Letty supposed she could see his reasoning—the unwanted marriage, the flaunted courtship of a much prettier woman—but it still rankled.

Following the route she had seen Lord Vaughn take before, Letty pushed through the stage door, looking for Geoff. Someone had to warn him before Jasper decided the safest route was to bump him off at once.

Finding her husband wasn't quite so easy as Letty had anticipated. She wasn't sure what she had expected the backstage area to be like, but it hadn't been anything so dark, or so crowded. She darted out of the way as a group of stagehands came through carrying scenery, picking a side corridor at random to duck into. Farther away from the stage, the passageways grew even darker. Letty tripped over a footstool—who left a footstool in the middle of a corridor?—and went limping on her way. At least, she thought, rubbing her aching shin, if she couldn't find Geoff, presumably Jasper couldn't either.

Weren't there laws against planning your cousin's murder? Geoff was the head of Jasper's family; there had to be some suitably draconian edict against threatening one's liege lord. Not to mention attempting to seduce the liege lord's wife. Wasn't that still accounted treason in some contexts? That sort of thing must have come up all the time in the Middle Ages, Letty was quite sure, with punishments to match. Whatever the punishment was, she hoped it was suitably gruesome, involving lots of rusty thumbscrews and maybe a few barrels filled with tacks.

A gasping cry jarred Letty out of her gruesome reverie.

"Hello?" Letty called.

The sound was followed by a thudding noise, like a sack of flour hitting the kitchen floor.

"Blast." Letty picked up her skirts and set off down the corridor at a run, hoping whomever it was hadn't hurt herself too badly. Certainly, it was dark enough in the corridor for someone to have tripped and lost their footing, and there were more than enough obstacles to trip over.

"Are you all right?" Letty's question ended in a gasp of her own as someone charged past her from the opposite direction, banging into her with so much force that they both staggered. Letty caught at the wall to steady herself, just as something tumbled onto Letty's left foot, landing with unerring accuracy on her little toe.

"Ouch," muttered Letty. Clearly, whoever it was couldn't have been hurt that badly if they had the strength to bang into her like that, and then go racing off again without so much as an apology.

Moving very carefully—who knew how many other sprinting lunatics there might be lurking backstage?—Letty bent over to pick up the fallen object. Her toes were quite convinced that it was a brick, but as Letty groped along the ground, her fingers closed around the familiar, rounded shape of a reticule.

"Hello!" Letty called, beginning to straighten. "You've dropped your—"

The beading on the bag bit into Letty's palm as something else caught her eye, pale against the dark wood of the floor. Still half hunched over, Letty froze, her fingers convulsively tightening around the little round bag.

There, on the floor, only a pace away from Letty's slipper, was a small, white hand. It lay pointing toward Letty's shoe, the palm facing up as though in supplication.