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This time Mr. Marsden wore a silver ring in the shape of a serpent. The serpent had tiny, emerald eyes, and wound itself twice about the middle finger of his left hand.

Lizzy couldn’t stop looking at the ring. She wanted to touch it—and perhaps Mr. Marsden’s hand, too—to see his naked reaction in that first fraction of a second, before self-preservation could intervene.

She’d spent what little spare time she’d had in the past few days staring at his drawings, because she couldn’t get enough of them—or rather, couldn’t get enough of the secret thrill that ran amok in her when she gazed upon their painstaking lines and fragile colors. Couldn’t get past the idea that he’d done them for her and her alone.

She knew it to be a stupid and possibly harmful preoccupation. She knew that it was the vanity in her, yearning to be the object of
somebody’s
grand passion. She knew that Georgette was never wrong in her gossip. And still she kept at it.

“What do you think?” asked Mr. Marsden.

She retracted her gaze from his hand and pretended to study the sheets on the
secrétaire
some more. They’d spoken on the telephone two days ago. She’d informed him that she’d decided to use a calligraphist to hand-letter the invitation, and he’d said he’d bring her some samples from a calligraphist he knew.

“I think it’s superb,” she said. She wrote a very fine hand herself, but the calligraphist was an artist. “Is it the work of a man or a woman?”

“A man.”

A man, was it? “And how do you know him?”

He’d stood by the writing desk while she perused the calligraphist’s samples. Her gaze once again slid across the papers to his hand, laid lightly at the edge of the desk. His cuff link was silver too, but without ornamentation, a rarity for him. And good Lord—she hadn’t noticed this until now—his shirt was not white, but the palest shade of green.

“We share a house.”

“A particular friend of yours?”

“We exchange books from time to time.”

She decided that this was as good a time as any. “Only books. You haven’t exchanged anything more significant?”

His fingers splayed and dug into the rosewood top of the
secrétaire.
Then he removed his hand altogether. “I beg your pardon?”

Oh, good. He was on the defensive already. She leaned her shoulders back and tilted her face up. Watchful eyes. Compressed lips. And was that a quickened pulse she detected, throbbing the veins of his jugular?

“I know why you had to leave England,” she said, drawing out her words, savoring the power they gave her. “So you need not pretend otherwise.”

“I’m sorry, I’ve always believed that I left England for an adventure abroad. Please enlighten me as to the true reason.”

He was guarded, but not nervous enough. She had a moment of doubt. To counter it, she rose and looked him straight in the eye. “And not because you were discovered doing the unspeakable with an Oxford don?”

She sensed the shock in him. A long pause of silence. He looked down. “It was hushed up. How do
you
know?”

She smiled a little, almost as much in disappointment as in triumph—at least now her obsession with the drawings would cease. “Nothing is ever completely hushed up. And I have my sources.”

He tilted his face and glanced at her from beneath his lashes. Her heart skipped a beat. It was a beautiful, almost seductive look. “Is that so?”

“You needn’t worry,” she said, trying to regain her upper hand—not that she’d ever lost it. “I won’t breathe a word to Mr. Somerset. I know how important it is to him to have a reliable staff…and how important it is to you to retain your livelihood.”

“Why, thank you, Miss Bessler.”

She did not fail to notice the sarcasm in his words. Her upper hand seemed not to have properly subdued him. “I shall expect you to conduct yourself with suitable decorum. It would not do to have Mr. Somerset’s reputation besmirched by association.”

“Could you elucidate as to what the proper decorum entails? Do I need to live in complete abstinence, or would you be satisfied with discretion on my part?”

“I wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than absolute discretion,” she said haughtily.

“You’ve any suggestions as to how I am to accomplish that?”

“There are places, are there not, for men such as yourself? Places where everyone allowed entrance has a stake in the discretion of everyone else.”

“I’m sorry to say I gave up those places years ago. The last time I went to one, I caused quite a scene.” He smiled. “Have you ever had two men fight over you, Miss Bessler? It’s not pretty—bleeding noses and dislocated jaws abound.”

“Two men fought over
you
?”

He flicked a speck of invisible dust from his cuff. “Two drunken fools. I prefer my courtship more civilized.”

She swallowed. She supposed she could see how he might rouse such passions. He was beyond comely. And there was something deeply wicked about him.

“But to return to your point, Miss Bessler, you may rely on me to be discreet. Not only because of my admiration for Mr. Somerset, but also because I’ve a passionate concern for my own hide and no desire to see the inside of a gaol.”

“No, I’d imagine not,” she said, shivering a bit. She’d not thought of the ghastly consequences of a possible prosecution against him.

“And to reciprocate your magnanimity…” He paused, as if considering. Then he smiled, and it was
that
smile again. “To reciprocate your magnanimity I’ll let Mr. Somerset discover for himself that your maidenhead is as lost as the Ark of the Covenant. I won’t breathe a word.”

She took an involuntary step back. “That is slander.”

“That is derogatory. But truth can never be slander, no matter how derogatory,” he said. “I work for a barrister, I should know.”

She bit back the panicky
How do you know?
quivering at the tip of her tongue and cast a glance toward the door of the drawing room. She’d left it ajar, but there was no one about. “Do you care to explain yourself, sir? Such is a strong accusation indeed.”

“What is there to explain? You’ve been afraid of me for a long time, for something that you thought I knew. And yet what I knew in truth did not worry you at all. So it stood to reason that it hadn’t been a woman, but a man, that it had gone too far, and that Mr. Somerset has no knowledge of it.”

She’d struggled with it, the fact that she’d likely contracted a marriage under false pretenses. She’d decided that Stuart was too sophisticated a man and too kind a friend to take her to task for it, and that she’d make up for her lack of a hymen by being the best possible wife under the sun. But Mr. Marsden’s provocation again placed that moral dilemma front and center, forcing her yearning for worldly security to war with her conscience.

“You’ve no proof,” she said.

“And neither do you.”

He was referencing her breached maidenhead again. She almost snarled at the double entendre, but limited herself to a deep frown. “Well, this is a pretty impasse.”

In the silence that followed, he collected the sheets of calligraphy samples into a neat stack and slid them into his document case. He strapped and buckled the case shut, lifted it, then set it down again, as if he couldn’t decide whether to walk away or to stay. Then he glanced at her. “Perhaps we could learn to be friends.”

She snickered. Friends with this popinjay who wanted nothing more than to take her down? “And we will base our beautiful friendship upon…?”

“Our mutual knowledge of each other’s darkest secrets—and that it would cost us too dear to be enemies.”

“That is not enough,” she said flatly.

He twisted the serpent ring once around his finger. “Would it offer additional inducement if I said I liked you?”

At the beginning of their meeting she would have instantly believed it, but now she only frowned deeper. “My goodness, what do you do to people you
don’t
like?”

“I’m somewhat doubtful as to whether you will be good for Mr. Somerset. But that doesn’t mean I cannot appreciate you for what you are: a beautiful, clever, witty woman, cool under fire and persistent.”

Something in her ached. He’d described her precisely as she wanted to see herself, but increasingly could no longer. “Can a man such as yourself truly appreciate a woman?”

“As well as you can appreciate another woman.”

She said nothing.

He came close, took her hand, and brought it close to his lips. “What do you have to lose?”

Much, she was sure, though she could not name what her loss would be.

She thought he’d kiss the air above her wrist or some such, but he pressed his lips into the knuckles of her middle and ring fingers, and the contact was an electrical experiment gone awry. The nerves in her arm nearly snapped with the shock—and the thick pleasure—of it.

She yanked her hand back. He raised a brow.

“Good day, Mr. Marsden,” she said.

“Good day, Miss Bessler,” he replied. “And think of my offer.”

“Oh, Stuart, it’s beautiful,” exclaimed Lizzy.

They were in her drawing room and Stuart had come to present her engagement ring. He’d spared no expense. The ring he’d had in mind at first had been an ordinary engagement ring with a row of gems that spelled
regards
acrostically. The ring he’d been determined to buy when he returned from Fairleigh Park would have featured a large single sapphire—her birth-stone. The ring that was on her finger now, purchased in the morning, after he’d spent a fitful night dreaming of Madame Durant, was a spectacular diamond, burning with white fire.

“You shouldn’t have,” she scolded him. “Why, this could have paid for our servants for years to come.”

“I want you to be pleased,” he said. “That’s far more important. And—”

“But I am pleased,” she said, almost vehemently. “I couldn’t be more pleased with you.”

“And I want you to know how happy I am that we’ve made this commitment to each other,” he finished, hoping his words conveyed all of his sincerity and none of his desperation.

He
was
happy. He couldn’t be happier. Lizzy had so many qualities to recommend her.
And
she was beautiful, her face flawless, her figure straight out of a fashion plate.

Yet even as he gazed fully upon her loveliness, it was Madame Durant he saw in his mind’s eye—Madame Durant, who most emphatically did not have a nineteen-inch waist, or the slender arms that Lizzy showed to such advantage in her evening gowns.

In reality, his cook was likely short and dumpy. But he had trouble thinking realistically of Madame Durant. Instead, he thought
voluptuous, shapely, erotic
—and hungered after her body as he hungered after her food.

He lifted Lizzy’s left hand and kissed her just above where the ring glittered. She looked at him, her dark eyes wide and intense, as if waiting for lightning to strike. Then she averted her eyes.

“Are you all right?” he asked, not sure what to make of her countenance. “Are the wedding preparations coming along?”

“They are coming along. And I’m very well.” She flexed her fingers and coaxed an even greater sparkle from the diamond. “How can I not be? My dearest one has just given me the ring of any woman’s dream.”

There was something in her tone that wasn’t quite all right. He should ask more questions, massage the problem out of her, and put her mind at ease—it was not too early for him to give her comfort and succor. But the guilt in him chose to latch on to her words. She
said
she was very well, didn’t she? Then all must be well, and he could console himself that his unfaithful thoughts were entirely without significance in the greater scheme of things.

“Will you stay for dinner?” she asked.

“I’d love to, but I can’t tonight,” he said, rising. “I’ve called a meeting at the club over dinner. May I have the pleasure of taking you for a drive tomorrow afternoon instead?”

“Of course. I shall look forward to it.”

“As shall I.”

He kissed her on her cheek and took his leave, departing her house with a sense of escape: he need not face his fiancée—or his conscience—for another twenty-four hours.