Just as he obviously enjoyed lording it over a certain duke of her acquaintance. If a mere duke was a coup, how much more so the ruling power in the realm?

“We need to know more about Medmenham,” pronounced Henrietta, in the air of one delivering a royal command. “Besides, I find him oddly intriguing.”

“Henrietta!”

“Not that kind of intriguing! I meant as a potential villain. I have excellent instincts when it comes to spotting wrongdoers.”

“We don’t know that Medmenham is a wrongdoer. The real Dr. Simmons may very well have cured his aunt.”

“Does he have an aunt?” asked Henrietta.

Charlotte raised both hands in a gesture of helplessness. “For all we know, he might have a dozen.”

“That’s easy enough to find out,” Henrietta said decidedly as the carriage drew up before Loring House. The waiting footmen advanced to open the door and unroll the folding stairs.

“It may be even easier than you think,” said Charlotte, gathering her skirts to descend. “I hear that he intends — ”

A dark figure loomed up out of the night. Charlotte caught at the steadying arm of the footman as she nearly tumbled off the second step.

Blending with the bushes beside the house, he seemed huge, a monster out of myth, the dark cousin to the unicorn. As he stepped into the square of light cast by the drawing room windows, it became clear that it wasn’t a monster but a man. When she saw which man it was, Charlotte wasn’t sure she wouldn’t prefer the monster. At least a monster had a certain élan to it. Perfidious men were as common as the muck on the street.

“Charlotte?” Henrietta came careening down the steps after her. “What — oh.”

The Duke of Dovedale bobbed stiffly at the neck. He looked as though the high points of his shirt collar pained him. “Lady Henrietta. Cousin Charlotte.”

“To what do we owe this . . . er . . . ?” Henrietta looked from Robert, stiff as the iron railings, to Charlotte, prickly as winter rosebushes, and lapsed into silence. Not even the most optimistic hostess could possibly call his appearance a pleasure.

“I fear that when I visited this morning, I inadvertently left a bagatelle behind me.”

“Your dignity?” suggested Charlotte, her breath misting like smoke in the cold air.

Behind her, she could hear Henrietta’s swift intake of breath, half horrified, half amused. Charlotte didn’t care.

Something like appreciation flashed through Robert’s blue eyes. Or perhaps it was just the light from the torchères burning on either side of the door. “My snuffbox.”

Charlotte folded her arms across her chest. “I don’t think it’s in those bushes.”

“My dignity, you mean?” said Robert blandly.

Charlotte narrowed her eyes at him, hating him with every bone in her body. It was unforgivable of him to sound like that, amused and urbane, so very like the man with whom she had fancied herself in love.

“Your snuffbox,” she said, a little too forcefully.

“Well, that’s easily solved, isn’t it?” Quickly interposing herself between them, Henrietta threaded her arm through Charlotte’s in a mingled gesture of support and restraint. With a swooping gesture, she indicated that the Duke should precede them through the open door, where the footmen waited on either side, silently storing up every detail to repeat in the servants’ hall later that evening. “I’m sure Stwyth will be happy to help you recover it — your snuffbox, I mean.”

Turning back to Robert, Henrietta asked, “Where did you leave it? The snuffbox, that is.”

With Robert in it, the entry hall, which could easily fit at least two of Charlotte’s grandmother’s tenants’ cottages, felt ridiculously small.

“I left it in the morning room,” he said, speaking to Henrietta, but looking at Charlotte. “This morning.”

“Morning is an excellent time to use the morning room,” commented Henrietta to no one in particular. “And the snuffbox is — ?”

Robert frowned in that way men do when asked to describe trumperies. “A snuffbox?”

“Stwyth?” commanded Henrietta.

Taking his cue, Stwyth shuffled off to hunt for what Charlotte was sure would be the latest in invisible snuffboxes. If you couldn’t see it, could it still be in the height on fashion? Goodness, she was so angry she was positively giddy with it.

Her only saving grace was that Robert, for all his vaunted urbanity, looked as uncomfortable as she did. Good. Charlotte took a small, malicious satisfaction in his catching his foot on a roll of drapery fabric that was unaccountably lying half unrolled just inside the front door.

“Oh, dear,” Henrietta clucked, making distressed hostess noises. “That really shouldn’t be out here. Will you excuse me for a moment?”

“Of course.”

“I’m sure Charlotte will entertain you in my absence.”

Charlotte wasn’t feeling the least bit entertaining, unless one was talking about the sort of entertainment that involved goring gladiators.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” she said, not looking at Robert. It wasn’t quite so easy as it sounded. Not looking at Robert made the corners of her eyes hurt.

“Nonsense,” said Henrietta blithely. “I’ll be right back.”

With a swish of petticoats, she was gone, off to run an errand as imaginary as Robert’s snuffbox. Charlotte looked grimly after Henrietta’s retreating back. She knew exactly what her best friend was doing. Finding Robert on her doorstep twice in one day, Henrietta had obviously concluded that the pull of true love had overcome whatever temporary madness had driven Robert from Charlotte’s side. Or, as Henrietta would put it, that Robert had finally come to his senses. And she had left them alone to get on with the grand reconciliation she was sure would ensue. Knowing Henrietta, she was probably currently planning what to wear to the wedding.

Charlotte was not amused.

She had had enough. Completely, utterly, up to here, enough with everyone thinking they could run her life for her, from Henrietta, who tried to marry her off by leaving her alone in an entry hall, to ridiculous Robert, who couldn’t decide whether they were speaking or not speaking but definitely knew that he didn’t want her to go riding with Medmenham.

As far as Charlotte was concerned, they could all take a long, cold bath in the Thames.

Buoyed with righteous anger, Charlotte turned on her sometime knight in shining armor, who was as much the possessor of a snuffbox as she was the Queen of England. Did he really think she was ninny enough to buy that ridiculous story?

A nasty little voice in the back of her head reminded her that she had, in fact, been more than willing to swallow any story he cared to tell her not so very long ago. The thought of it only made her angrier.

“Why are you really here?” she demanded, glowering at him like a grand inquisitor with a heretic in his sights.

If Robert was taken aback by her tone, he didn’t show it.

“I’m rather fond of that snuffbox,” he said mildly. “It has a very attractive painting of Carlton House on the lid.”

Charlotte doubted he even owned a snuffbox. Robert made a most unconvincing dandy. The finicky clothes he had adopted since coming to London sat oddly on his athletic frame, like someone trying to swaddle a sword in lace draperies. Unless, of course, this lace-clad Robert was the real Robert, and the rough-and-ready soldier the act he had put on for her at Girdings. Which was real? Trying to sort it out made her head spin. That just made her even crankier.

“Did you take snuff much in India?” she jeered. She had never known that she had it in her to jeer. It was amazing the new talents one discovered under duress.

Robert wandered idly towards a marble topped table, where the day’s correspondence sat piled on a silver tray. “Perhaps my new station demands new habits.”

“Do you change your habits so easily as that?” Charlotte didn’t bother to hide the scorn in her voice.

She was punishing him, she knew, for not being what she had wanted him to be. It might not be fair of her, but it wasn’t any more fair of him to keep coming back when he had promised to stay away. Funny, to think she would once have given almost anything for his promise to come back. Now, all she wanted was for him to leave her in peace.

Perhaps, if she repeated that to herself often enough, she might even start to believe it. She had, unfortunately, got into the habit of daydreaming about him. While his habits might change easily, hers never had.

His eyes met hers, reflected in the hall mirror. It was rather uncanny, looking at his reflection instead of the man. But wasn’t that what she had been seeing all along? Only a reflection and a distorted one, at that, as pocked by untruths as this one was by the beveling in the Venetian glass.

“No,” he said at last, his eyes constant on hers in the mirror. “In fact, I find my habits very hard to change.”

Charlotte kept her voice hard. “I hope you are not going to make a habit of this. Of visiting here, I mean.”

Robert thumbed idly through the letters and invitations piled in the silver tray, lowering his head so that she couldn’t see his face, even in reflection. “Is that what you really want?”

It was very disconcerting speaking to the mirrored top of someone’s head. She could see the pale gilt where the Indian sun had streaked his hair and the darker hair beginning to grow out beneath it under the influence of a colder climate.

Charlotte spoke more loudly than she had intended, “I hadn’t realized that what I want is of any consequence.”

She didn’t need to see his face to see his shoulders stiffen as her words hit home.