“I don’t know.” Amy shrugged helplessly. “It just seemed the thing to do.”

“Come along, girls.” Miss Gwen propelled them out of the dining room. “We don’t want to keep our guests waiting.”

“I’m surprised you’re taking this so calmly,” Jane hissed to Amy as they approached the threshold of the green salon.

“Well, I was a little worried, but you dealt with him splendidly.”

Jane looked at her confusedly. “Oh, do you mean Marston? I was talking about”—the footman, walking before them with a candelabrum, flung open the doors of the green salon—“Lord Richard,” Jane finished weakly.

Amy’s mouth opened but no sound emerged.

Lord Richard Selwick leaned nonchalantly against the mummy case, his arms crossed over his chest. At Amy’s entrance, he uncrossed his arms and smiled with a depth of welcome that made Amy’s stomach do more flip-flops than an entire troupe of acrobats at a village fair.

Those lips, curved into a devastating smile, were the ones that had so passionately claimed hers last night. That hand, so idly playing with his quizzing glass, was the one that had cupped her face and stroked her hair and caressed her . . . um, well. Amy’s cheeks flared with color.

Uppington. Amy would have whacked her head with the heel of her hand if too many people hadn’t been looking on. That’s what she got for reading Latin and Greek when she should have been memorizing Debrett’s Peerage. As Miss Gwen had so helpfully pointed out that afternoon, the Selwick family bore the Uppington title.

A petite woman in a green-and-blue gown was poking interestedly into a funeral urn, while the somewhat taller brunette beside her protested, “But Mama, do you really want to know what’s in there?”

As Amy and Jane approached, Jane keeping a hand on Amy’s arm for moral support, both looked up. Dropping the lid of the urn, the woman in green swept forward with a warm smile distressingly like Richard’s. “I do hope we’re not intruding! I was all agog to meet our dear Richard’s traveling companions. You must be Miss Balcourt?”

The brunette waved enthusiastically over her mother’s head. “Since we’re introducing ourselves, I’m Henrietta! You know, Henrietta? Hen? The little sister? Didn’t Richard tell you about me?”

Next to Henrietta, a broad-shouldered man in a crumpled cravat rolled his eyes. “Surely he must have mentioned me, the best friend?” he simpered, in obvious imitation of Henrietta’s enthusiastic greeting. “You know, the best friend? Miles?”

Amy saw murder written in the brunette’s hazel eyes.

“You can be so juvenile sometimes, Miles!”

“The next packet to Dover, Henrietta,” Richard warned in awful tones.

Henrietta’s mouth snapped shut. She even refrained from responding in kind when Miles stuck out his tongue at her.

“They were just fed,” Lady Uppington explained apologetically.

Rap! Rap! Rap!

“Young man!” snapped Miss Gwen, leaning on the parasol she had just pounded against the floor. “Kindly replace that object in your mouth!”

Miles’s tongue disappeared behind his lips with the speed of an army retreating into a castle and yanking down the portcullis.

“How splendid!” Lady Uppington bustled forward, laying a friendly hand on Miss Gwen’s bony arm. “You must tell me how you do it. And who you are,” she added as an afterthought.

Miss Gwen, with an angle to her chin that amply portrayed her disapproval of the impropriety of the proceedings, even if the cause of the mayhem was a marchioness, made herself known to Lady Uppington, and presented Jane and Edouard, the latter still a bit purple about the throat and bulging in the eyes.

Lady Uppington ignored the disapproval emanating from Miss Gwen and beamed directly at Amy. “I still haven’t introduced myself, have I? I am Lady Uppington, and this”—a wave of an emerald-laden hand at the silver-haired man looking on with amusement a few feet away—“is Uppington, and that’s—oh, well, you know, Henrietta.” Henrietta dimpled. “And the ill-behaved young man with the unkempt hair—”

Miles’s hand went anxiously to his head. Henrietta smirked.

“—is the Honorable Miles Dorrington. Let’s see, you all know Richard already. Have I forgotten anybody?”

The brunette, otherwise known as “you know, Henrietta,” twined her arm through Lady Uppington’s. “You left out Geoff again.”

“Geoff, darling!” Lady Uppington let out a cry of distress and held out a hand to a quiet young man standing near Richard. “I didn’t mean to neglect you.”

“He’s used to it by now,” Henrietta explained in an aside to Amy.

“That”—Lady Uppington leveled a quelling glance at her daughter—“was unkind. Geoff is just so much better behaved than the rest of you that it’s easy to forget he’s there.”

“Was that a compliment?” Miles inquired of Geoff.

“Do you see what I mean?” sighed Lady Uppington to Amy.

Amy, utterly bewildered by the entire Uppington invasion, did the only thing she could do. She smiled. She was rather thankful for Lady Uppington’s cheerful volubility. It saved her from having to speak to Lord Richard. By dint of keeping her eyes fixed on Lady Uppington and Henrietta, she could almost pretend he wasn’t there. Almost. The more she told herself not to look, the more her eyes strayed towards him.

How should she behave towards him? Amy wondered, as the Uppingtons and their entourage continued to bicker among themselves. She couldn’t scream or throw things; that would certainly alert Lord Richard to her newfound knowledge of his double life. Tormenting him had seemed like such a splendid idea in the carriage, but Lord Richard’s presence turned simple things complicated. Revenge, for example. Such a nice, simple idea. But whenever Lord Richard smiled at her over his mother’s head, Amy wanted to smile back.

Maybe that wasn’t such a dreadful idea, Amy rationalized. After all, she did need to lull him into a false sense of security before she meted out her revenge. She would flirt with him, repudiate him, and then best him at espionage. It was all part of the plan.

After much altercation, Lady Uppington finally got around to introducing Geoffrey, Second Viscount Pinchingdale, Eighth Baron Snipe.

“So many titles, so little Geoff,” sighed Miles, stretching to emphasize his two-inch advantage over the Viscount.

“So much brawn, so little brain,” countered Henrietta good-naturedly.

“Who beat whom at draughts last week?”

“Who underhandedly caused a diversion by bumping into the board?”

Miles assumed an angelic expression. “I don’t know what you could possibly be referring to. I would never do anything so low as to knock over the board and rearrange the pieces.”

“Richard never cheats at draughts,” Lady Uppington whispered to Amy.

“No, only at croquet,” Miles put in sarcastically. “Or did that ball just move two wickets all by itself?”

“You,” drawled Lord Richard, strolling forward to join the little group around Lady Uppington, “are merely sore because I sent your ball flying into the blackberry brambles.”

“Thorns all over my favorite breeches,” mourned Miles.

“Oh, that’s what became of those!” exclaimed Henrietta.

“Did you think Miles had suddenly discovered good taste?” Richard grinned.

“I don’t know why I put up with this family,” Miles muttered to Amy and Jane.

“It’s because we feed you,” Henrietta explained.

“Thanks, Hen.” Miles ruffled her hair. “I would never have figured that out on my own.”

“He’s like one of those stray dogs that follows you home,” Henrietta continued, warming to her theme, “and once you’ve given him a meal, keeps scratching on the kitchen door, and looking up at you with big mournful eyes.”

“All right, Hen,” said Miles.

“Madness only runs in part of my family,” Richard said softly to Amy. “My brother Charles is quite sane, I assure you. And Miles isn’t related at all.”

“Third cousin twice removed!” protested Miles.

“By marriage,” corrected Richard, his eyes not leaving Amy’s. “I trust you had a pleasant afternoon?”

Amy had spent the remainder of the afternoon on her stomach on her bed, contemplating the relative merits of boiling him in oil as opposed to hanging him by his feet and hitting him with a spiked stick.

“Yes. Quite.” Amy belatedly remembered that she was supposed to be flirting with him, and added, “I especially enjoyed the antiquities.”

“Ah, so you like antiquities!” Lady Uppington broke in, with a significant look at Richard. “How splendid! Do tell me more. . . .”

Within ten minutes, Lady Uppington had deftly extracted the information that Amy had been born in France, raised in Shropshire, and didn’t much care for turnips. Richard listened, mute with horror, as Lady Uppington ferreted out Amy’s literary preferences, and political leanings. She seemed on the verge of inquiring about her shoe size, when Henrietta fortunately intervened.

“Has Mother told you yet about the time Richard tried to tear up the floor of the gazebo with a pickax?”

Richard ceased feeling thankful. Over Henrietta’s head, he saw Miles bearing purposefully down on them. The room began to feel uncomfortably close.

“Miss Balcourt”—he broke into his mother’s wildly exaggerated account of the time he had accidentally skewered a gardener while fencing with the topiary—“the statues in the courtyard appear to be exceptionally fine. Would you do me the honor of showing them to me?”

Amy’s skin tingled with excitement at the invitation. Every sensible instinct in her body told her to decline. But there were certainly more than enough people about to chaperone them, Amy persuaded her sensible side. This was a perfect opportunity to put her plans for revenge into practice—what could be more romantic than a moonlit garden?—and she’d be a fool not to leap at it.