How easy she had made it for him. He had stopped only because it was too easy to offer any interesting challenge.

There was a written wager in one of the notorious betting books at a gentlemen’s club. With her name in it. Her name was being bandied about by countless gentlemen of the ton. And perhaps today he would be amusing them all with an account of exactly what had happened.

Only one thought persisted in Katherine’s brain as she sipped her tea and conversed with her hostess. She wanted to go home-preferably all the way home to Throckbridge. She wanted her old life back. It had been a serene and happy one. She wanted to go back there and marry Tom Hubbard, who had asked so many times that they had probably both lost count. But no, Warren Hall would be better. Meg and Stephen were there. And it was in the country, in Hampshire, far away from London.

“We are to be busy during almost every moment of every day for the next week and a half,” the dowager was saying. “It is very gratifying, is it not? And both you and Cecily are swarmed by admirers wherever you go. It should be altogether possible to have both of you happily betrothed before the Season ends and perhaps even married before the autumn. Is there any very special gentleman, Katherine?”

Katherine set down her cup with a clatter and blinked her eyes so that they would not fill with tears again.

“I want to go home,” she said.

She could not bear-she really could not bear the very real possibility that she would see Lord Montford again as soon as she set foot beyond the door. She could not bear to see him again.

Ever.

“Oh, you poor dear,” the dowager said, getting to her feet to come and sit beside Katherine and set a comforting arm about her shoulders. “Of course you do. I have sensed it, but I did not realize just how homesick you are.”

Despite herself Katherine had tears in her eyes again, and they were spilling over to run down her cheeks. She gave one hiccup of a sob.

But she need not have worried, even though it took three days of preparations before she was on her way back to Warren Hall in the comfort and safety of the dowager’s own traveling carriage. Lord Montford did not come calling. Nor did he attend the one evening concert for which Katherine dared venture beyond the doors of Moreland House.

In fact, she did not see him again for three full years.


Jasper’s public admission of utter and abject failure the morning after the Vauxhall debacle was greeted with stunned astonishment by all the gentlemen who were fortunate enough to be present when he made it. The initial silence was soon replaced, however, by delighted rejoicing by those who had wagered against him and by much mirth and hearty back-slapping and commiserations and witty, ribald comments.

London’s most prolifically successful rakehell had been ignobly vanquished by an inexperienced country mouse, who had seen through his ruse in a flash and had led him almost literally down a garden path in Vauxhall, not in order to hurl her virginity at him in eager, panting surrender, but to deliver an eloquent and cutting scold that had forced him to concede that continuing the campaign for what remained of the two weeks would have been an exercise in futility.

The picture of a vanquished Monty hanging his head in mortification before the eloquence of a country virago was too delicious a one not to be revived again and again in male conversation during the coming days. Miss Katherine Huxtable herself soared in everyone’s esteem. A dozen gentlemen declared themselves to be quite in love with her. Two declared themselves forever her slaves. One promised to offer her matrimony before the Season was out.

Jasper, even after the first burst of exuberance had subsided, was the recipient of a chorus of sage advice mingled with mock sympathy, much of it concerned with the sharp decline in certain accomplishments a man must expect to endure once he had passed his twenty-fifth birthday.

“One is well advised to spend half an hour of each day at the mirror in one’s dressing room, plucking out gray hairs,” one not particularly witty wag said.

“And he is not referring to your head, Monty,” someone else added.

“Or one risks finding the ladies discovering one’s gray hairs,” a third voice said, “just when one has launched into the final phase of seduction.”

“And he is not referring to your head, Monty,” the same voice repeated.

And so it went on.

“You may not have to worry about gray hairs, Monty. There may never be a final phase ever again.”

“Of course there will. But he will have to learn to concentrate harder to get it up.”

“And to get it in once it is up.”

“What you really need to learn, Monty, is to spot a country mouse from a mile away and run like the wind in the opposite direction.”

“But the eyesight begins to dim once one passes one’s mid-twenties.”

“As do the legs. And other parts.”

“Never mind, Monty, old chap. There is always the church as a career.”

“And the monastery.”

“All of London’s courtesans are going to go into collective mourning, Monty. But perhaps they expected this if they knew your birthday was looming.”

“I can afford to purchase a new pair of boots at Hoby’s with my winnings. You can borrow them, Monty, if you wish, the next time you spot a mouse bearing down upon you looking as if it is about to pounce.”

“How far did you get with her, Monty? I am almost disappointed with my winnings, dash it all. Whose prowess can we believe in if we must lose faith in yours? It is the end of an era, by gad, and it is not just the courtesans who will suffer. There should be a national day of mourning.”

“Black armbands for everyone.”

Jasper took it all with resigned good humor. He had no choice in the matter short of telling the truth, which was even more humiliating than the lie he had told. He did answer the question about how far he had got, though.

“I got absolutely nowhere at all,” he said on a mournful sigh. “I did not accomplish even a squeeze or a tickle or a kiss-not even a peck on the cheek. She did take my arm, it is true, but only so that she could lure me off the main avenue in order to have some privacy in which to read me a scold the like of which I have not endured since I was in leading strings. My ears were all blisters within a minute. They are still ringing. It was all quite, quite lowering, as you might imagine. So lowering, in fact, that I have decided to creep off into the country in order to lick my wounds and rethink my seductive techniques. This is not the end for me. I shall return next year or so, like the phoenix, rejuvenated and better than ever. It is a solemn promise. Gentleman’s honor and all that.”

The vow was greeted with a guffaw of derisive laughter from a few and a rousing cheer of appreciation from most of those gathered about him.

He was quite serious about leaving. He really was going to withdraw to his country estate for a while. He was going to leave London for Miss Katherine Huxtable’s use. He even persuaded himself that his motive was a noble one. It was to save her the pain and embarrassment of risking running into him at every social event she attended for what remained of the Season. If his mind touched upon the possibility that it was just as much to save himself the embarrassment of seeing her, he firmly quelled the thought.

But it was harder to deny the utter humiliation he felt.

She had been his for the taking. He had been within a whisker of taking her. With one forward thrust she would have been his, and his wager would have been won. He would have enjoyed the experience too. So would she. His reputation would have remained intact-indeed, it would have been enhanced.

She would have been ruined, it was true-but that would not have been his concern since she would not be able to cry rape. She had been more than willing.

But he had stopped. He could still scarcely believe that he had stopped.

A crisis of conscience was something quite unfamiliar to him-and it was something he had no intention of cultivating. It would be too deuced uncomfortable and would put far too many restrictions upon his freedom. It had not been conscience that had made him stop but boredom, just as he had told her. Seducing her had been too easy.

He almost believed it, God help him.

He returned home to Cedarhurst Park in Dorsetshire three days after the Vauxhall evening. What he needed, he had decided, was something new upon which to focus his mind and energies, something different, something to alleviate the boredom.

He found that something quite unexpectedly on his own estate, which had run so smoothly and so prosperously all his life under the capable management of three successive and excellent stewards that he had never felt the need to trouble himself over the details. But for the rest of that summer and on into the autumn and through the winter he did just that and surprised both himself and his steward by finding it all rather absorbing. He even discovered that he had ideas.

He would go back to London next year, though. Of course he would. Why would he not? Katherine Huxtable and his strange crisis of conscience and his humiliation before his peers soon receded in memory and became nothing more than ancient history. Indeed, they were soon utterly forgotten.

He told himself so quite frequently.

5

THREE YEARS LATER