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She gave him a measuring look, a weighing of an adversary’s strength. He’d kissed her before, but not as he meant to kiss her now. Apparently she decided she could meet the challenge.

“Remember,” she said. “It’s all about the family.” She put the book back on the bedside table and stood waiting for him to make the first move. He reached out and drew her into his arms and settled her against his chest. She leaned back immediately to look up into his face, a smile playing on her lips.

“You’re cold.”

Not all of me. “Only my toes, but you don’t have to kiss my toes.”

She shivered in his arms, and he pressed her closer, sliding his hands around her. Without stays, there was just the natural shape of her, the straight back, the bend of her waist, and the flare of her hips. She lifted her face to his, the smile gone, replaced by a look he recognized all too well.

He tried to keep his head, to remember that he was the one seducing her, making her forget her determination to stay with her cousins, but she stirred the forgotten longings of his boyhood, when he’d dreamed of being a knight and rescuing a fair damsel and earning her love as a reward for his noble deeds. He had dreamed then of being worthy of the prize. So he let himself kiss her as he wanted to kiss her.

He pulled her close, as close as their clothes permitted, locking his arms around her, lifting her off her feet so that her weight, which was nothing, rested against him, so that she had only him to hold her up. Her kisses rained down on him, melting his indifference to fate, washing away the slights he had endured for so long that they seemed a part of him. He had perfected his own form of self-mockery in defense, but there was no defense against her love.

When, minutes later, he set her lightly down, she rested her head against his chest.

“What was that?” she demanded.

“That was an argument,” he said, breathing unevenly. “That was the whole of Aristotle, all the grammar, rhetoric, and logic I ever learned. It was a speech in the Lords. Are you going to come with me?”

She shook her head. “It was very persuasive. I was moved. But I made a promise.”

“I can’t protect you here.”

“But you can protect my information. Take the book.” The solemn expression had returned to her face. She slipped from his arms, took up the book, and held it out to him. He slid it into his jacket. She turned him around and gave him a shove toward her door, and he went because though he was a man in love, he was also a spy.

His hand on the doorknob, he turned to have one last glimpse of her over his shoulder. She came up on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek.

He swallowed. “I will come for you. Do not leave that ball with anyone other than me.”

“I promise.”

* * * *

Miranda held the note in her hand. She had only to knock at the servants’ entrance to be admitted. She had promised to deliver the note directly into the hands of Miss Fawkener this morning, but she knew she would be asked to wait in a dark hall on a narrow bench or in some shabby, out-of-the-way room where the housekeeper dealt with tradespeople.

Though Lord Hazelwood had sent her in one of the club’s closed carriages with a driver and a footman, the lofty butler had turned her away from the front door with its brass knocker. And now, standing below the street with the iron railing above, the smell of the coal cellar around her, and the mean little door in front of her, Miranda felt her grievances fully.

Jane Fawkener had gone back on her promise to keep away from Lord Hazelwood. She had contrived somehow to ensnare him when it was Miranda who had loved him best and longest. She knew that Lord Hazelwood could love her with the proper encouragement. He had thanked her for her willingness to contribute to his last case. He had squeezed her hand with the note in it and said he owed her a great deal because she had believed him when no one else did.

And Jane Fawkener had exposed Miranda to Nate Wilde’s mockery. And worse, his pity. Nate Wilde, who came from nowhere and who was nobody in spite of his fashionable coats and his big words. Nate Wilde, who had been a pickpocket and a spy before better men had taken notice of him. Nate Wilde, who thought she, Miranda, should pick him, when she’d had a mother who’d been born a lady in France. What did his fine shoulders and his sweet kiss matter when he could never make Miranda a lady?

A swirl of cold, gritty air eddied around her, and she turned away from the door. She tucked the little note into her bodice and held her cloak close about her. Her gentlemen spies did not need Jane Fawkener to crack the code and save those Englishmen abroad in heathen places. Lord Hazelwood had figured out most of it himself. No doubt he would solve the case by himself. Miranda would help him.

Jane Fawkener didn’t love Lord Hazelwood. She had been willing to toss him aside, and now she was going to a great ball where there would be dozens of gentlemen. Let Jane Fawkener take one of them. Miranda would not help her to take the one gentleman that rightfully belonged to Miranda.

A ball is thrilling. Whatever the intentions of the host and hostess, whatever the motives of the individual guests, a ball promotes courtship, that form of intercourse between a lady and a gentleman that leads to love. In a ballroom a gentleman and a lady, though strangers, may progress rapidly through the stages of growing intimacy from first glances to direct gazes to conversation to an electric meeting of hands, and beyond to a striking degree of intimacy where the dance permits—the touch of a gentleman’s hand to a lady’s waist or her hand to his shoulder.

The ballroom itself is an altered space that delights the senses. Under the dazzling lights of the chandeliers, warmed by the exertions of the dance, breathing the perfume of banks of flowers, and feeling the pulse of the music in her very soul, the Husband Hunter feels exhilarated. Once singled out from among the ladies present to receive a charming gentleman’s particular attention, she must be hardheaded indeed not to be misled into believing instantly that she has found the husband she seeks.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Chapter Twenty-two

Until Jane entered the Langford ballroom, she had forgotten how her appearance marked her as a husband hunter of the common English variety. In little more than a fortnight of following her guide, she had acquired an appropriate look and manner and sufficient acquaintance to insure invitations to dance a set or two. Now all that remained was to complete the conquest of some available manly heart and choose a life for the years granted to her. Around her were gentlemen from the most humble who could offer a comfortable establishment to the most exalted. In choosing one man she might be called to be a political hostess. In choosing another she might be mistress of a vast estate and involve herself in the health and happiness of its staff and tenants and in the stewardship of its great treasures. She laughed at the idea. Allegra would choose one of those lives, not Jane.

Jane was not free to choose any gentleman unless she could unravel the skein of choices that made her someone quite different from the husband hunter she appeared to be. And really, she realized, as she looked in vain for the one face that would not appear, it was only one choice after all that she could not unravel—falling in love with Hazelwood.

She had had no word from him since the night she had given him the book, neither had she seen Nate, the footman, in two days, but she supposed there was a plan, and that she would hear of it soon. She was ready to leave the Langford ball on her own two slipper-clad feet if she had to. She knew where Hazelwood’s club was and how to enter through the chemist’s shop on Old Bond Street.