Coloring, Charlotte broke off.

“Aha!” Henrietta jabbed a finger in the air. “Just because what?”

Penelope cast her eyes up to the intricate plasterwork on the ceiling, reciting in a monotone monologue, “Long walks together, domestic interludes at the breakfast table, tête-à-têtes in the library . . .”

“It was hardly a tête-à-tête!” protested Charlotte in a fierce whisper, desperately craning her neck in the fear someone might have heard. “We simply happened to be alone in the same place at the same time.”

“Same place. Same time. Alone.” Penelope ticked the words off on her fingers. “How else would you describe a tête-à-tête?”

“Exactly as it sounds. Head-to-head. And ours weren’t. They were quite properly on opposite sides of a table.”

“Hmm,” said Penelope.

Miles pushed back his chair with an exaggerated scraping sound.

“Right,” he said, holding up both hands and backing slowly away. “I know when I’m not needed. I’ll be in the card room if anyone wants me.” He dealt Charlotte an avuncular pat on the shoulder. “Best of luck with your duke, old thing.”

“I don’t have a duke,” repeated Charlotte. It sounded less and less convincing each time she said it. It would save her considerable time and energy to embroider the phrase on a sampler and hang it around her neck. “This is beginning to sound more and more like a game of cards,” she added, to no one in particular.

“Don’t be silly,” said Henrietta. “That would be kings, not dukes, and we don’t have any of those here.”

“Just jacks,” put in Penelope, her lip curling as her gaze made the circuit of the men scattered about the room. Neither Charlotte nor Henrietta was under any doubt as to what she meant. The jack was also commonly known as the knave. “We have plenty of those.”

“Well, Martin Frobisher, surely,” said Henrietta, surveying the assemblage. Charlotte would never forget the memorable occasion where Martin Frobisher had attempted to make an improper suggestion to Henrietta and been rewarded with a sticky stream of ratafia all down the front of his new jacket. He had never tried that again. At least, not with Henrietta. “And Lord Henry Innes. They’re as thick as thieves. And I’ve heard all sorts of stories about Sir Francis Medmenham, but other than that . . .”

“Don’t forget our duke,” added Penelope.

Charlotte didn’t like the way Penelope’s lip curled as she said it. “Robert isn’t like them.”

“No?”

“No,” said Charlotte vehemently. It was one thing for Penelope to put on worldly airs, but quite another for her to insinuate untruths about someone she barely knew. Penelope didn’t know him; she did.

“He hasn’t been back in the country long enough to do anything appalling. Has he?” asked Henrietta with interest. “Unless you heard something about his time in India.”

Penelope nodded in the direction of Sir Francis Medmenham. “Just look at the company he keeps.”

“What other company is he meant to keep?” argued Charlotte, as much for herself as for Penelope. “They’re the only ones here.”

Penelope just shrugged. It was amazing how much innuendo Penelope could pack into one small shrug.

Charlotte’s chin lifted stubbornly. “I don’t see why you need to be so cynical about everyone. Especially about Robert.”

“Dear Charlotte. Dear, innocent Charlotte,” said Penelope condescendingly, “if you had been out on as many balconies as I have, you would be a cynic, too.”

“Well, who told you to go out on all those balconies?” said Henrietta tartly. “That’s just asking for trouble.”

“But I do it so well.” Stretching sinuously, Penelope rose from her chair. “Speaking of which, I promised Lord Freddy a dance. You’ll have to carry on the duke-hunting without me.”

With a backwards twitch of her reticule in farewell, she turned her back on her friends and began to move away. Henrietta exchanged an alarmed look with Charlotte behind her back.

“Pen?” Henrietta called.

Penelope stopped where she was and angled her head over her shoulder, her very stance a challenge. For all her bravado, she looked very alone and strangely vulnerable as she looked back at Henrietta.

Henrietta forced out a smile. “No balconies.”

Penelope’s habitual mask of indifference clamped down over her features. “It’s too cold for balconies. Alcoves, on the other hand . . .”

“Are an equally bad idea,” finished Henrietta, but Penelope was no longer there to hear her.

“Blast,” said Henrietta.

Charlotte squeezed Henrietta’s arm. “She will come around, you know. In time.”

“I know,” said Henrietta, but she didn’t sound as though she meant it, and there was an unhappy expression on her face as she watched Penelope swagger across the ballroom.

Charlotte could feel the mirror of it on her own face. It hurt her to see Penelope hurting so, and to know there was nothing she could do about it. It wasn’t as though she could fill Henrietta’s place for Penelope. As much as she knew Penelope did care for her, and as fiercely as Penelope would defend her if anyone were ever to threaten her, they had never quite spoken the same language. It was Henrietta to whom Penelope had always turned, Henrietta who knew how to jolly Penelope out of her bad moods, and persuade her out of her more ridiculous schemes. But Henrietta, as Penelope saw it, had chosen Miles over her and that was the end of that.

“It’s just that she doesn’t like change,” Charlotte tried to explain, knowing how inadequate her efforts were.

Henrietta twisted indignantly in her chair. “But I haven’t changed.”

She might not have, but her situation had, and for Penelope, that was much the same thing.

Since there was nothing else Charlotte could say, she did the only thing she could do. She squeezed Henrietta’s hand. “She will come around.”

Henrietta made a moue of annoyance indicative of extreme dissatisfaction. Shaking her thick brown hair like a horse swatting off flies, she twisted around in her chair, scanning the ballroom. “Enough of this. Where’s your duke?”


Charlotte’s duke (although he would have been very surprised to hear himself referred to as such) was busy trying to look like a bored man of the world.

At least part of that was accurate. He was certainly bored. Standing around ballrooms evaluating the charms of the ladies and criticizing other gentlemen’s cravats had a very limited appeal. The card room appealed even less. Robert had never really seen the point of wagering one’s wages on the turn of a card. Perhaps that was because, for him, they had been wages. He had earned them. These bored young bucks of the ton, with their allowances and their constant excursions into what they called “dun territory,” were a complete mystery to him, as exotic as the elaborate multiarmed goddesses in the Indians’ temples.

After ten days of attempting to win their confidence, Robert was developing an extreme allergy to idleness. His enforced inactivity itched like a rash. Give him a river to be crossed, an enemy to be run through, even a ledger to be balanced, something simple and straightforward that one could do and get done, as opposed to this prolonged game of tricking confidences out of the unwary. Tommy had been no help; he was too busy yearning after Miss Deveraux. Without his cousin’s company over the past ten days, he probably would have run screaming out into the gardens of Girdings. Only his walks and conversations with Charlotte had provided a modicum of distraction from the distasteful exercise in amateur espionage.

It was, he realized, not unlike the roles they had played twelve years before, when dancing attendance on his shy little cousin had provided a welcome escape from the sordid arguments between their elders.

But they weren’t children anymore. And he wasn’t the only one to have taken notice of Charlotte.

Next to him, Medmenham trained his quizzing glass on the small figure in silvery green silk. “The little Lansdowne is in excellent looks tonight.”

Given that Medmenham had assessed all of the women in the room — most of them unfavorably — at some point in the evening, the remark should not have filled Robert with the fervent desire to pluck the quizzing glass out of his hand and stomp it to smithereens under his heel. But, then, none of those other women was his responsibility.

His very innocent, very defenseless responsibility, who was indeed wearing a very becoming dress.

Her hair had been pulled back from her face in a series of curls that seemed more golden than usual against the silvery green of her dress, making her look like an earthbound Christmas angel. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes bright as she carried on an animated conversation with her recently arrived friend.

As Robert watched, Charlotte’s friend said something that made Charlotte look up. Catching his eye, she cast him a slightly sheepish smile and quickly looked away again, her cheeks even pinker than before.

“Yes, she is,” Robert said shortly.

Medmenham’s glass remained trained on Charlotte. “Well dowered, I suppose?”

Robert had no idea. “Naturally.”

Medmenham let his quizzing glass dangle from one finger. It swung slowly to and fro, light glinting off its surface. “Excellent,” he said.

Robert forced his hands to unclench, finger by stiff finger. “I hadn’t realized you were in search of a wife, Medmenham.”

From society’s standpoint Medmenham was everything that could be desired in a husband. He had five thousand pounds a year, a baronetcy, and at least three properties of which Robert knew: the infamous Medmenham Abbey, a hunting box in Melton Mowbray, and a sugar plantation in the West Indies. He was young, personable, and undeniably clever. Charlotte needed someone clever, or at least someone who could understand her vocabulary, a requirement that ruled out a good three quarters of the ton. It wouldn’t be a brilliant match for a duke’s daughter, but it would be a respectable one.