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But this year was different. Last night she had slept like a baby. The ball would be easy, because Mayne would be by her side.

Contrary to his usual custom, and quite contrary to what she herself would have expected, he was still showing her marked attention. It was the most delightful and unexpected pleasure of her entire life. They had been intimates, as one might say, for exactly one week, and his ardor showed no signs of cooling. Felicia had to hug herself for the pure joy of it. Everyone wanted to know her secrets. How could she, Felicia Saville, hold the attention of a man known to flit from woman to woman like the proverbial butterfly?

Felicia frowned over her morning hot chocolate. Frankly, she hadn’t the faintest idea how she was keeping Mayne’s attention. It wasn’t as if they shared scintillating conversation. Nor were they terribly intimate with each other in private, if the truth were known. He certainly kissed her with a great deal of finesse, but then he muttered phrases about respecting her too much to overstep, and carried the business no further.

Which was rather disappointing. Felicia’s marital partner, after all, was past hope in that area. After one night in which he shouted tally-ho! in an intimate moment, she banished him from the bedroom.

She was beginning to think that perhaps Mayne had never slept with any of the women he accompanied. Perhaps the women in question were so enchanted by his attentions—and their reputations so enhanced by his presence at their side—that they told no one their relationship was unexpectedly chaste. If that was the truth of it, Felicia was perfectly happy to continue the tradition. In fact, in the last week, when her friends kept noting that she was looking particularly becoming, she had given one and all a twinkling glance that put her renewed looks at Mayne’s bedstead. The truth, after all, was hardly important in these situations.

With a shrug, she finished her hot chocolate and dismissed perplexing thoughts about Mayne’s continued attentions. She was beautiful enough, wasn’t she? Or at least, she would be, once she finished the four-hour dressing process that would ready her for the ball tonight.

She was three hours into the ritual, bathed, perfumed, painted and powdered, but only half-dressed, when a footman informed her maid that the Earl of Mayne wished a brief word, if she were available. A smile curled on Felicia’s lips. Oh, this was even better than she could have imagined! She cast a look at herself in her dressing room mirror. She hadn’t yet put on her evening gown. She was wearing stockings of the palest rose silk, tied above the knee with a silver garter. Her chemise certainly covered her flesh adequately, and its edging of rose lace would entice any man alive.

“I’d like my corset,” she ordered.

Felicia’s lady’s maid, Lucy, rushed forward with her corset and laced it tightly over her chemise. Yes! That was perfect. Now Felicia’s breasts swelled enticingly and her waist looked to be the span of a man’s hand. She had never done such a risqué thing as entertain a gentleman in her dressing room. Not even her husband. Mind you, Saville had never shown the slightest interest in joining her during the dressing process.

Her maid began tucking tiny rosebuds high into a coronet on her head, from which hung precisely four ringlets. Felicia reached out and applied more color to her lips. “He may come up,” she said coolly, as if she entertained gentlemen every day of the week. “And Lucy, you may go. Return in a half hour, if you please, as I shall need to finish dressing with some dispatch.”

Lucy could be counted on to gabble to all the maids in attendance at the ball tonight, Felicia thought happily. She tweaked one curl forward over her shoulder. She did have a long nose, but really, she was remarkably well preserved. It must be her beauty that tied Mayne so closely to her side.

There was a knock and the man himself strode into her bedchamber. Felicia almost gasped. Her chamber was all frothy lace and pink ribbons; in contrast, the earl looked like the very personification of sleek masculinity. Tonight he was dressed with supreme elegance, in a coat of smoky blue that outlined the breadth of his shoulders and gave his hair the sheen of a raven’s wing. He looked utterly male and (had Felicia the wits to perceive it) rather dangerous, as if some subtle rage were driving him forward.

“Darling,” he said, bending down and dropping a kiss on her cheek so that their eyes met in the mirror. “This is an honor that I didn’t expect.”

Felicia tilted her head back, the better to show her neck. Her mother had once called it a trifle long, but Felicia disagreed. A graceful neck was a never-fading virtue. “You are always welcome by my side, even in the most intimate of circumstances,” she purred.

Somewhat to her relief, he didn’t take up the obvious suggestion, but just smiled and brought over a chair for himself. Felicia could hardly contain herself at the sight of the two of them in the mirror: he so beautiful, so potent, so devastatingly powerful. And she, leader of the ton, exquisitely dressed…Their coloring was quite perfect together.

“I need your help,” he said, bending close to her ear as if he couldn’t resist kissing it.

Felicia shook with excitement. “Anything!” she said eagerly, and then contained herself, adding languidly, “of course, darling, whatever you request.”

“I seem to have made a small mistake,” he said, “in the matter of Lady Godwin.”

Felicia blinked. “You did?”

“You are the only woman powerful enough in the ton to salvage my disastrous follies,” he continued, tracing her ear with his lips. And his hands…Perhaps Mayne did bed all those women. Perhaps he was just saving himself, building her anticipation for the moment when he would besiege her virtue. Felicia shivered a bit at the thought.

“If there’s any way I can help,” she said rather absentmindedly. It was hard not to gaze at the two of them in her mirror as if she were at the theater, watching one of those Restoration comedies from the last century. But his actual comment had finally sunk in. “I doubt I can do much to salvage Lady Godwin’s reputation, Mayne.”

“Do call me Garret,” Mayne said, trying not to breathe deeply. The woman had practically papered herself in rice powder! He was like to sneeze, if he didn’t watch himself.

“My pleasure,” she sighed.

“It appears that Lady Godwin had returned to her husband’s house merely in order to chaperone Godwin’s brother’s fiancée,” Mayne told her. “The girl is a tender little Scottish vicar’s daughter, if you can believe it, and doubtless horrified to hear that she’s been mistaken for a strumpet.”

Felicia sat straight up in her chair with the air of a fox scenting a rabbit. “You don’t mean it!”

Mayne nodded. “I’ve made an ass of myself,” he said, pulling a face of laughing mock repentance. “Blotted my copybook.”

“And what’s your excuse?” she asked, fluttering her eyelashes at him.

“Something about Lady Godwin irritates me,” he admitted. “I’m afraid that I didn’t bother to corroborate my impression that Godwin was still living with an opera singer. Now I feel, naturally enough, culpable.”

“I share your feelings about Lady Godwin,” Felicia agreed. “And now that she looks for all the world like a shorn lamb, I positively shudder to look at her. Her hair was her only beauty, you know.”

Mayne’s lips tightened, but his companion simply trilled on. “Goodness me! Are you quite, quite sure about the Scottish fiancée, Garret darling? I mean, that she’s the daughter of a vicar?”