"Yes, Towse," Cam said finally, not looking up from her face. He was tracing the line of his wife's rosy mouth with a finger.

"Her Grace has a visitor," Towse said majestically, his eyes fixed on a nearby bush. "The Earl of Mayne."

"If Mayne thinks he's going to add you to the notches on his bedpost, he'd better think again," Cam said softly, and suddenly the urbane duke disappeared, replaced by a muscled wild man who had spent years in Greece and thought Greek husbands weren't overly savage when it came to protecting their women.

"Mayne is wooing Helene," Gina told him.

Cam thought about that for a second. "She could probably use his attentions," he said with a wicked grin. "I always thought she was a bit too sober for her own good."

"Cam!" Gina protested, an instant scowl appearing on her face. "I won't have my friends insulted by you or anyone else." She turned to Towse and called, "Please ask the earl to join me in the garden."

"I'll give you ten minutes with that seducer," her husband said, grabbing her slim waist again and pulling her back against his hard body. "Ten minutes only, Gina, and then you belong to this seducer."

Objections trembled on Gina's lips, and then she realized that there was no point to cutting off her nose to spite her face. She no more wished to deny her husband's provocative smile than she wanted to kiss the Earl of Mayne, be he the most seductive man in London or not.

"All right," she whispered. "Ten minutes." Even meeting his eyes, seeing that sweep of smoky eyelash, made her stomach curl.

"Don't be late," he said, and the urgency in his tone had nothing to do with ducal responsibilities.

The Earl of Mayne found the duchess clipping roses and looking rather flushed from her gardening endeavors.

"How delightful to see you," she said, smiling at him and holding out a delicate hand.

Mayne admired the lovely picture she made, pale red hair gleaming in almost the precise color of the blush roses she carried in a basket.

"It's a shame that you're so happily married," he said, dropping a kiss onto her palm. "May I say that I would be very delighted should that circumstance ever change?"

She chuckled, and the low, happy sound of it jolted his loins. If he could find a woman like her, marriage wouldn't seem such an unenviable prospect.

"I suspect you have come to see me for reasons other than my supposed marital bliss," she said, but the smile curling on her lips left him in no doubt that bliss was likely the right word.

"In fact," he said, "I was hoping you could give me the direction of your lovely friend Helene."

"Are you and Helene on terms of such intimacy, then?" she said, eyeing him with obvious curiosity.

"She was kind enough to give me leave to use her Christian name."

The duchess obviously remembered the story she had been told to recite.

"Helene has decided to take the waters," she said piously. "She finds herself exhausted by the season. I'm afraid that I'm not at liberty to give her address to anyone."

"Hmm," Mayne said. "I would have thought the countess was one to eschew ill-smelling medicines. And when I saw her last... she was in the very pink of health."

"Yes, well," Gina said, conscious that at least eight minutes had passed since Cam went upstairs, "I'm afraid that I can't give you her direction without betraying her confidence."

He sighed inwardly and took a billet from his breast pocket. "In that case, would you be so kind as to forward this to her?" he enquired.

She gave him a beaming smile and began walking rather quickly toward the house. "I shall give it to a footman immediately," she said, towing him along.

Two minutes later, Mayne found himself deposited, rather unceremoniously, outside the front door. He walked to the pavement and then paused, examining his watch fob until the Girton butler closed the door. The house, and indeed the whole street, were sleepily dozing in the unexpected heat that had struck London that morning.

The only sign of life was the servants' entrance to the left. As Mayne watched, a greengrocer dropped off an order of cabbages. He nodded to the footman standing beside his carriage. "We'll wait here a moment or two, Bantam." If he wasn't mistaken about the duchess's character, she would dispatch of business matters at once.

Indeed. A footman, smartly dressed in Girton livery, emerged from a side door. Mayne smiled to himself. The footman passed a note to a groomsman; Mayne smiled again. The groomsman trotted sedately down the street on a placid old horse, and never noticed that he was being followed at some distance by a coach with an insignia on the door. Mayne smiled and smiled. He only stopped smiling when he realized precisely where the note was delivered.

What in the devil's name was Helene Godwin doing at the Godwin residence? Why was she staying with her oh-so-estranged husband, to be blunt about it?

Chapter Twenty-six.

Darling Girl.

Helene's stomach gave an odd lurch when she walked into the library before dinner and saw Lina sitting next to Rees on a small settee. Her shock was likely due to revisiting her youthful infatuation with her husband. All the better reason to forget she ever felt the emotion in the first place. It had only taken an hour after they returned from the picnic for Helene to remember that her husband had a beautiful young woman sleeping in the room next to his.

"Champagne, my lady?" Leke said now, bowing. Helene gave him a nod of assent.

"I should like to go to Vauxhall tomorrow night," she announced in a high voice that almost cracked like shattered glass. "It's the only place I can think of where I can go without being recognized, and I simply cannot stay in this house day and night."

Lina looked up, startled, and Helene was gratified to see her spring further from Rees's side. It was a sad thing indeed when one was grateful for the good manners of one's husband's mistress.

"Don't have the time," Rees growled.

"Make it," Helene said, with a tone of pure steel in her voice.

Rees looked up from his papers. "What do you think I should put at the end of Act Two, when Captain Charteris has discovered the Princess in the Quaker village? All Fen has noted is 'musical number.' "

"Some sort of dance, I expect," Helene said, sipping her champagne. It was deliciously cold and icy, and made her feel almost as if she would sneeze.

"I could do a polonaise," Rees muttered.

"I'd do a waltz," Helene said. She would have wandered over to look at his paper, but she wasn't going anywhere near the couch, even if Miss McKenna was a frigid distance from Rees's hip now.

"A waltz? I have never written a waltz. Weren't you working on one last summer?"

That was the odd thing about Rees. He never forgot a passing word said about music, although he had never remembered her birthday, not even during the first year of their marriage.

"Yes," Helene said, finishing her champagne.

"How do you think the audience would take it?" he said, frowning. "I have quite a prudish contingent going to the Theatre Royal."

"When did you ever worry about shocking someone?" Helene asked. Rees's brother was taking Lina away to look out the far windows. That was diplomatic.

"You know I'm conventional. When it comes to music," Rees replied with a lopsided smile. Helene's heart skipped and steadied again. "Will you play me your waltz?"

"There's no piano here," she pointed out. And what if he didn't like it?

But Rees was standing up. "We'll go in the music room. Tom and Lina can dance for us. Tom!" he called. "You know how to waltz, don't you?"

His brother turned around. "No, I haven't the faintest idea how to waltz. The sight of their vicar trotting around the dance floor would likely give my parishioners apoplectic fits."

"My father used to dance once in a while with my mother," Lina said to him with a giggle. "Though not a waltz, of course!"

"Too fast for a vicar, isn't it?" Rees said with satisfaction. "I can't think why I didn't write a waltz before. Come on, Helene. Lina, you show Tom the steps. It's easy enough and there isn't a single member of your godly flock here to disapprove, Tom."

A moment later they entered the sitting room. Helene put her arm on Rees's sleeve. "Did you forget something?" she asked, nodding at the floor.

Rees stopped and stared at the ocean of papers as if he'd never seen them before. "We can't-" he stopped.

Helene picked up a sheet. It had three words scrawled on it: night dances past. She handed it to Rees and picked up another. It had three staves of cascading arpeggios.

"Unfortunately, we cannot dance on paper," Tom said, looking rather relieved. "It wouldn't be safe. Miss McKenna might slip and fall."

Lina rounded on Rees. "Why are you keeping all this garbage?" she asked. "Do you honestly think there's a good piece of music on the floor somewhere?"

He looked at her, his face unmoving. But Helene saw a spark of uncertainty in his eyes and cursed Lina inwardly. How dare she make him feel worse about his music than he already did?

"There might well be something marvelous here," she said quickly. "This piece is breathtaking and fresh, for example." She sang the little score she had picked up from the floor, adding a couple of minor aeolian triplets, for emphasis.

Rees snatched it out of her hands and then gave her a hard look. "Breathtaking after you got hold of it, perhaps," he said. But he didn't sound truly distressed.

"Supper is served, my lord," Leke said, appearing behind them.

Rees dropped both sheets back to the floor. "Right," he said briskly, standing back and allowing Helene, Rees, and Tom to pass before him. "You are spared the indignity of waltzing for the moment, Tom."

"Tell the footmen to clear up all this mess," Rees said to Leke, jerking his head at the floor.

Leke's jaw literally fell open for a second before he snapped it shut. "Yes, sir," he said hastily.

"I should like the room cleared by the end of our meal. And move that harpsichord to the side so that we have a dancing floor," Rees said, striding after his wife.

In point of fact, he was striding after Lina and Tom, but somehow he didn't think of it that way.

"I didn't know that waltzes had a song with them," Rees said with considerable curiosity. "Where did you get the words from?" He had picked up Helene's score and was looking it over. Her fingers itched to grab it back. In the middle of the sitting room, Lina was showing Tom the steps of the waltz with a certain hilarity.

Helene bit her lip. The part of her that was terrified of being exposed as a rank amateur was urging her to dash from the room. "I wrote the words as well," she said, watching his eyes move over the paper.

Once he looked up at her briefly, but he said nothing. Then he put the score back down in front of her. "I feel as if I have never understood you."

Helene's eyes dropped to her fingers, waiting on the keyboard to begin playing. "There's not very much to understand," she said, embarrassed.

"Shove over," Rees said, sitting down.

"I'm playing the waltz," Helene protested. But her body traitorously welcomed that broad shoulder next to her, the heat of his body.

"I'm going to have to sing it with you, aren't I?" he asked.

"I can sing it myself," she said, the color rising even higher in her cheeks.

"I thought there were two voices!" he said, picking up the score again.

"Oh, no," Helene replied. "It's only one. I never marked a change of voice."

"Well, you should have done so," Rees said. "Look, here's your first verse, ending with Let me, lovely girl, embrace you, As would a lover his lovable bride. That line repeats, right? As would a lover his lovable bride."

Rees never sang things with florid emphasis. Instead his deep baritone took Helene's rather simple lines and gave them a masculine flair that turned them incantatory. "It seems obvious to me that the next verse should be sung by the bride, not the groom: So surrender ourselves to the delicious deception, Happily imagining what will never come to pass, Happily imagining what will never come to pass. The male voice wouldn't want to emphasize the fact their embrace will never come to pass. The female voice might, though."

"I never thought of making it a duet," Helene said, staring at the words.

"I would have to rewrite the fourth stanza."

"If it was a duet, they could sing the final stanza together," Rees said.

"What has wilted once, ne'er blooms again. Never will rosy youth bloom for us, again... That's a bleak line, but it makes sense to have their voices intertwine."