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He was tired. But the day wasn’t over yet—he had an invitation to a ball. And not just any ball, the Duchess of Arlington’s ball.

His medals of valor, his new inheritance, his stature as one of the youngest members of Parliament—he’d won his seat in a by-election two months ago—those all counted. But the Arlingtons’ ball tonight,
the
social event of the year, would cement his acceptance by Society, and stamp him with that particular cachet dispensed only by matrons of the highest standing.

Then the business of finding a wife would begin in earnest. He would leverage his current success. The young ladies would make their calculations concerning his future prospects. And he’d come to an agreement with one of them—a process of bargain and trade not essentially dissimilar from that which went on in a Delhi bazaar at all hours of the day.

So to the ball he would go. And dance. And talk of subjects that mattered no more to the course of history than a barnacle on the hull mattered to an ocean-liner. And then he would get up early in the morning for a meeting with the Lord Justice who’d sponsored him to Inner Temple.

He turned onto his street and stopped. There, not twenty paces from him, was a scene he did not associate with living in one of London’s best districts: a street brawl. Worse, it was two men against one woman. The woman fought hard, but she was no match against her assailants.

He broke into a run.

The men threw the woman to the ground. One of them sat down on her and lifted his fist high. Stuart grabbed him from behind and heaved him away. He vaguely heard the man connect with a lamppost as he grabbed hold of the man’s accomplice and hurled him in the same general direction.

The men groaned and scrambled to their feet. One of them reached for the reticule that had been dropped. Stuart put his foot on it. The men looked at the reticule, looked at Stuart, looked at each other, and ran as if their shirts had been set on fire.

The woman on the sidewalk slowly lifted herself to her elbows. Her hair had tumbled loose during the melee. A wild mass of curls concealed much of her dirt-smudged face. Her mouth was wide open in astonishment.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

And if she was, he’d return her reticule and get on with his own business. She was likely a prostitute whose healthy haul for the evening had lured her would-be muggers, and he owed her no more than a question of courtesy.

“I’m…I’m…” She looked about her person. “Oh, no!”

Her accent, all adamantine consonants and efficient vowels, did not sound like that of any street-walker he’d ever met. And he’d met plenty during his years in the slums of Ancoats.

“It’s all right. I’ve your reticule.”

He pulled her to her feet. Her scuffed and dirtied reticule, along with her crumpled hat, he pressed into her gloved hands. She curled her fingers tight about her belongings.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice muffled. “Thank you, sir.”

At some point within the past thirty seconds, she’d begun to weep, her tears as copious as seawater. She fumbled in her reticule. Her hands shook; she couldn’t seem to find anything.

“Are you hurt?” He offered her his own handkerchief.

She shook her head and pressed his handkerchief to her eyes. But it was like trying to stop the Deluge.

No, not a prostitute, too soft for a life of streetwalking. He tried to place her. Her clothes, a good tailor-made jacket-and-skirt set, were less the choice of a tart than that of a respectable governess. Perhaps she was the employee of one of his neighbors, coming back from her evening off?

“Which house is yours, miss?”

She shook her head once more. “I don’t live here,” she said, her voice breaking. “I will see myself home, thank you. Please, don’t let me keep you.”

Again that accent, like the tapping of silver tines on a crystal goblet, more indisputably aristocratic than that of the viscountess with whom he’d conversed several days ago.

“I can hardly do that. You’ve already been set upon once,” he said. “Come with me. I’ll find you a hansom.”

As soon as he made his offer he realized he couldn’t very well walk with her while she was in such a state, disarrayed and sobbing. He took her by the elbow, turned her around, and guided her the short distance to his house. He unlocked the front door, stepped aside, and waited for her to precede him.

But the woman, who’d followed him with the docility of a spring lamb, did not do as he indicated. Instead, she drew back, alarmed at last. He could almost hear her jumbled thoughts.
He is a stranger. The other men had only wanted her money. He could do far worse to her.

Good. So she wasn’t altogether stupid.

She gasped. Her face swung to him. From behind her veil of hair, he almost made out her eyes. She stared at him as if he’d materialized out of thin air, her reaction something between shock and paralysis.

“Would you like to wash up a bit before we look for a hack?” he asked. “Have the use of a mirror?”

She stared at him one more second, then her hand went to her hair. She squeaked. After that, she followed him meekly into the house. He turned on the lamps in the vestibule and the main hall and pointed at the stairs. “The bath is two floors up. Second door to your left.”

She ran for it.

And so her very well-justified mistrust of him had evaporated at the mention of the word
mirror.
Stuart shook his head. Perhaps she wasn’t altogether stupid, but neither was she much smarter than a sack of turnips.

Verity clung to the scalloped edge of the washbasin. Her hand hurt. Her back hurt. The outside of her thigh hurt where it had hit the ground when she’d been thrown down. But the pain was only a mute dissonance compared to the din in her head.

What should she do now?

When she’d been pinned down on the sidewalk, about to become a victim of London’s criminality and her own stupidity, she’d sworn with the fervency of a new convert that she’d never again try to involve Bertie’s brother in her pathetic affairs.

Her resolution had been followed by gallons of tears, brought on by an overwhelming relief that for once, it seemed, she would walk away from an act of immense idiocy unscathed.

And then she’d seen the number on the door: 26. 26 Cambury Lane. And it had stopped her tears cold: Her rescuer was none other than Stuart Somerset himself.

Was it preordained that they should meet this way? Did it mean that her scheme wasn’t as harebrained as she’d thought? Should she, now that she’d cleaned up and repaired the worst of the damage to her hair, introduce herself and explain her purpose?

Except she couldn’t see herself broaching the subject to Stuart Somerset. As brief as their exchanges had been, she’d been struck by his remoteness, the remoteness of the absolutely perfect. He was the kind of man who looked down upon follies like hers as she would regard an infestation of bedbugs.

Stuart Somerset would gravely tell her that he did not believe her story of woe and reprisal for a moment. That she’d been sent by Bertie out of some malicious mischief. That he certainly wasn’t about to employ or sleep with a complete, not to mention dotty, stranger.

She could see herself belaboring the point, reminding him, in a manner both desperate and mean, of the pain they could cause Bertie. And he’d smile politely and show her the door. He had quite enough going on to cause Bertie any amount of pain. He didn’t need
her
help.

Stupid, stupid, stupid; she mouthed the words at the woman in the mirror, at her hollow eyes and tearstained cheeks. Yes, it was stupid. Stupid to come to London, stupid to believe that Stuart Somerset could be her answer, and doubly stupid to never once think through her plan to the conclusion: Bertie’s rage, her dismissal, her dismal chances of respectable employment elsewhere, given her now scabrous reputation, and Michael’s tears, when she must once again give him up.

Perhaps her aunt had been right. Perhaps she was indeed weak, dim, ridiculous—a waste of her mother’s womb—that after having already lost so much, she still stood ready to throw away everything else.

Well, she wouldn’t. She’d go down, thank Stuart Somerset profusely, and leave in the first available hansom. Mr. Somerset and she would remain strangers, and that was that.

Stuart left the morning room, where he’d finished the previous day’s copy of the
Daily Mail,
to fetch the whiskey from his study. Something made him turn his head as he crossed the front hall. She was there at the top of the first flight of steps, standing still, her reticule and hat in hand, the hair that had been all over her face smoothed back and put away.

He had been to a few balls and had seen his share of pretty young girls descending grand staircases. His own stairs were quite plain. Her jacket-and-skirt set of gray wool was hardly ravishing. Nor was she even all that young—a good few years into her twenties, at least. And still she stopped him cold.

She was not classically beautiful—her mouth a bit too big for her thin, undernourished face, her chin a bit too strong. But such eyes she had, pre-Raphaelite eyes, deep and mesmerizing, the sort of eyes that inspired verse in the dullest man. And such lips, the sort of lips that incited sin in saints and angels.

“You were quick,” he said.

“The damage was less substantial than I’d feared,” she said, descending slowly. She had splendid vowels, pure sounds that sang of family trees with roots going as far back as the Battle of Hastings. Who was she?

Her eyes were still visibly red-rimmed. She held them slightly downcast, discreetly taking in his dwelling. Sir Francis had willed to Stuart everything that was not entailed. The Lords Justices of Appeal, before whom the case had eventually gone, had given Stuart the Somerset town house on Grosvenor Square. But without the rent-rich urban tracts that went to Bertie, the sheep land that Stuart received couldn’t generate enough income for the upkeep of such a house.

So he’d sold the Somerset town house and much of its contents and bought the terrace house in Belgravia. The address was excellent. The house was more than adequate for a family of five, plus servants. And the furniture he’d retained from the other house—the best pieces—had been arranged with care and, he thought, some panache.

The console table near the foot of the stairs was a Chippendale. The mahogany longcase clock, by John Brown of Edinburgh, dated from the middle of the previous century. And the small oil of pastoral greenery set above the console table had been painted by none other than John Constable himself.

He had the strange sensation that she thought his house passable—nothing grand, but passable. In her swift glances there had been a certain familiarity. She recognized the pieces in the hall for what they were. And what they were merited the fleeting attention she directed their way and no more.

Her gaze returned to him. “Thank you,” she said. “For coming to my aid.”

Her eyes. When she looked at him full on, it gave him gooseflesh. “You shouldn’t have been out alone this late,” he said, more harshly than he intended.

“Yes, it was terribly asinine of me.” Her face lowered. Her fingers twisted the rim of her hat. “I’m afraid I haven’t the luxury of a footman.”

“Why not?”

She looked and sounded highborn enough to have half a dozen footmen at her disposal. She was too old—and too striking-looking—to not already be married. Had she slipped out for an adulterous rendezvous?