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“I doubt it,” she said tranquilly. “A small village contains just as much greed as a large city.”

He looked up, a faint smile curling the edge of his mouth.

“Now I am both affordable and greedy?”

“I did not say that. And I didn’t mean it either.” Something about her eyes looked trustworthy.

“I did visit my aunt to determine whether she was, in fact, carrying my uncle’s child,” he said, looking away. “ ’Twas an ugly thought.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“I was quite wrong. I believed my uncle and aunt to be estranged, but it seems I was wrong.” He didn’t understand his uncle’s marriage, but there was no denying it had been a real one.

His companion said nothing, probably shocked to the bottom of her little country soul.

“Marriage is a strange business,” Darby muttered. “Are you drinking champagne?”

“Yes, I am.”

Darby signaled to a footman. “Would you like another?”

“No, thank you. I rarely drink more than one glass. I enjoy the bubbles, but not the effect.”

As someone who had taken the unusual (for him) step of drinking himself under the table at least four times since inheriting small children, Darby did understand. Understood and didn’t agree.

“Please bring me another Madeira,” he told the footman,

“and Lady Henrietta another glass of champagne. One more 72 Eloisa

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glass of champagne won’t affect you in the slightest,” he told her. “I shall use it for Dutch courage, myself, and perhaps even take your advice and approach Miss Aiken again.” He didn’t mean it for a moment.

“I think that if you approached Lucy again, you would find her quite pleased to talk to you,” Henrietta replied. “She doesn’t really see you as a commodity, Mr. Darby. Lucy is merely young. But I think she was quite taken with your symmetry.”

He looked at her sharply, and there was just a trace of laughter in her eyes.

The wine was set down before him and he took a sip, rolled it like potent fire on his tongue. Since she was bold in her speech, she presumably would not be shocked by the same bluntness.

“So why are you not on the market, Lady Henrietta Maclellan?” he asked deliberately. “I have watched you talk to old ladies, and young ladies, but no gentlemen.”

“Not so!” she protested. “Lord Durgiss and I had a long conversation about his hedges, and—”

“Is that Lord Durgiss?” He nodded toward a stout peer dressed in a florid satin waistcoat. “The man wearing a violet waistcoat?”

“No, that is Lord Durgiss’s son, Frederick. Frederick does have dreadful taste in waistcoats, does he not? You see, he fancies himself the next Lord Byron. He’s been writing perfectly appalling verse to my sister Imogen for the last month or so.”

“And why isn’t he writing verse to you? You are far more symmetrical than is Lucy Aiken, for all her thousands.” He leaned just a trifle closer and held her eyes for a moment before she dropped them. “You are quite exquisite. Your hair is truly out of the ordinary, and yet here you are, in a rural backwater.”

Deliberately he reached out and picked up her hand. It was Fool for Love

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tiny, dwarfed by his own. In the back of his mind he realized that his heart was pounding, a ridiculous response to nothing more than a beautiful face and a fringe of black lashes. She swallowed. Her throat rippled. God, she even had a lovely throat.

“Because I am not symmetrical,” she said finally. She took a drink from her glass of champagne, looking at the bubbles rather than at him.

“What do you mean?”