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“There’s no need—” Stella began.

“Your gown is creased,” Merry said firmly.

“Given that you insist on wearing those spectacles, I just don’t understand how you fell!” Stella’s aunt cried after they were ushered into the duchess’s own bedchamber.

“I was confused by the quadrille,” Stella explained.

Lady Jersey had recently introduced the dance, and it had taken off like wildfire. But prancing back and forth in little quadrangles while circling at precisely the right moment wasn’t easy.

“I expect it was Lord Belper’s fault,” Merry said. “He drinks to excess. He walked into a lamppost at Vauxhall a few weeks ago.”

“No, it was my fault,” Stella confessed. “I misjudged the distance between us and turned too early.”

“I don’t understand,” Mrs. Thyme wailed. “You’ve had the best of dance masters. Your uncle and I have shirked no expense. And yet social indiscretions follow you everywhere.”

“Me too,” Merry said kindly, if ungrammatically.

Mrs. Thyme waved her fan in the air as if she were conducting an orchestra. “Last week, Stella knocked over a glass of red wine that poured into Lord Pettigrew’s lap. He was wearing pale yellow breeches. I was hopeful he’d come up to scratch with a proposal, but now he’s dancing attendance on Lady Lydia. Moreover, my butler tells me that the table linen, woven in Venice, will never be the same. Never!”

“Here’s a robe, Stella,” Merry said. “Lucy will sponge and press your gown, and you’ll be back downstairs in no time.”

While Mrs. Thyme amused herself by recounting all of Stella’s mishaps since the Season began, the duchess’s maid eased Stella’s gown up and over her head.

“Please send up a tray of champagne and some canapés, Lucy,” Merry said.

“Lord Belper was stretched on top of her,” Mrs. Thyme moaned, returning to her previous lament. “Everyone will think the worst!”

Merry shrugged. “The worst being that Belper took some pleasure in the act? I doubt it.”

“He took advantage!”

Her Grace winked at Stella. “Dear Mrs. Thyme, may I suggest that you return to the ball and make certain that no one has vulgarly suggested Belper chose to leap atop Stella in the middle of my annual ball? I will keep your niece company, as I would welcome a chance to rest my feet.”

Stella sighed after the door closed. “My aunt is convinced that every man who dances with me is a wolf. As well as those who don’t dance with me.”

Merry grinned at that. “I encountered a wolf or two in my first Season in London. My husband among them.” Responding to a quiet knock, she rose and went to the door.

Stella would not have called Merry’s husband wolfish. The Duke of Trent was dignified and handsome in a distant sort of way.

Yet her aunt was convinced that all men were lustful marauders. Hounds straining at the leash, eager to destroy a lady’s reputation for sexual or financial gain. Her greatest fear was that a man would climb into Stella’s bedchamber from the conservatory roof, but since Mr. Thyme religiously nurtured seedlings over the winter, he flatly refused to tear down the greenhouse.

Practically from the moment Mrs. Thyme took on the unexpected burden of raising her orphaned niece, she had made a point of informing Stella that men want more than a kiss.

Worse than a kiss.

But lo these many years later . . .

To Stella’s mind, the evidence just wasn’t there.

Lord Belper had taken no pleasure in bouncing on her like a featherbed. She had never experienced the press of a male thigh or even the brush of a knee during a waltz. No one offered her illicit kisses in the shrubbery.

Stella’s conclusion?

Male lust was wildly overestimated.

Chapter Two

Merry carried a silver tray across the room and set it down. “One of the irritating things about being a duchess is that the title supposedly renders one incapable of labor. I had to wrestle this out of my butler’s hands.”