"You refer to the flash ballad? Or to the man himself?"

He said it lightly enough. But there was nothing casual about the way he was studying her face.

He was a very astute man.

She managed a faint smile. "Given the events of the day, I shouldn't blame you if you were curious about the origins of the so-called legend. Shall I put your mind at ease?"

"It would be churlish to object to having my mind put at ease."

This was how they spoke to each other: with dry humor and gentle irony. They shared a pleasure in each other's intelligence and view of the world. It was easy and pleasant and safe, and she liked it, because she suspected he would never require more of her than that.

"I confess there was indeed an attraction when I was a bit younger-the legend, if you will, has its foundation in a certain truth-but it did not last long. I cannot tell you why he disappeared or where he is. Whatever took place then no longer has any bearing on the person I am now or wish to be in the future."

Attraction. The word was so pallid it felt like heresy. A scarce few months after she'd locked eyes with Lyon in a ballroom, she'd been lying alongside him in a clearing deep in the woods near Pennyroyal Green, her arms latched around his neck, kissing him as though the two of them had just invented kissing. The pleasure had been narcotic. They only wanted more and more and more.

If her abigail harbored any suspicions about the gra.s.s strains on her dress that day, she hadn't said a word.

As for the rest of what she'd just said, Olivia hadn't the faintest idea whether it was indeed true. It didn't matter. Lyon was gone, and Landsdowne was here. She'd said what he'd needed to hear.

"Funny, isn't it, how the 'legend'-I'll use that word-persists." Landsdowne said this idly. "One would have thought the bloods had given up the betting books and forgotten his name altogether by now. Instead, it seems to be sprouting heads, like a Hydra. And I wish I could protect you from it."

"I know, and you're a dear"-there, she'd said the word, too!-"to care so much, and I'm so terribly sorry to concern you. The Everseas have always been a gift to the gossipmongers of London and to the bloods at White's who've had such a wonderful time filling the betting books with nonsense. So many things rhyme with Eversea, you see. And I've been rather a sport for so long, like cricket or pugilism, I suppose this is their last opportunity to profit from it. Though your future may be filled with flash ballads about my relatives, as I hardly think my family will breed a sedate generation. Do you mind terribly?"

He smiled faintly. "One day someone will supplant the stories, I suppose. When we're in our dotage. What stories we'll tell our grandchildren."

He said these things so easily now. To make grandchildren they would need to make children, and to make children they would need to make love, and to make love she would need to lie naked beneath Landsdowne's naked body, and- "I'm glad you think so," she said hurriedly. "Although a dose of 'dull' might be restful upon occasion."

"It's funny about youthful experiences . . . so often the things that happen to us in our youth shape us into our permanent selves. When we're still young and malleable."

"Surely you're not suggesting you're old and calcified?"

He laughed. "I think you'll discover I'm rather limber."

Her eyes flared in surprise, and she looked down into her tea. Heat rushed into her cheeks.

Landsdowne naked. Landsdowne reaching for her. Landsdowne next to her in bed for the rest of her life. Did he moan and make noises and . . .

She tensed and pushed it out of her mind. But she must spend more time imagining all of this. Surely the notion was not distasteful. He was tall and manly, he possessed all of his teeth, he smelled wonderful. Surely more time spent dwelling upon it would help her to prepare for that inevitability. Surely it should be something she welcomed . . . one day.

She looked up to find his dark eyes on her intently.

He wasn't smiling.

But she sensed he was imagining precisely the same thing.

Landsdowne wanted her, in every sense of the word.

Perhaps he thought the blushes meant she was modest, and would need to be gently tutored in matters of romance.

If only he knew.

"In the spirit of mutual disclosure, I feel I should ask whether you left a trail of broken hearts behind you on your way to matrimony. You've managed to remain out of the broadsheets, if so, something my family seems unable to achieve."

His eyebrows shot up. He tonged sugar into his tea and swished it about long enough for her to realize he was about to confess something.

He took a fortifying sip.

And then he leaned back and sighed.

"Very well. There is a . . . Well, I've known Lady Emily Howell since we were very young. A lovely girl, very kind, and I admire her a good deal. Our families believed we would one day enter into an agreement. I suppose I believed it, too. And then . . . I met you."

There was a hint of rueful, careful ardor around the word "you."

As if it had been destiny. As if anyone could understand he'd had no choice at all in the matter.

She often thought Landsdowne had viewed her as a challenge. He was wealthy, a bit older, owned property all over England, was known to be fair and yet ruthless in business.

His determination to pursue the allegedly un.o.btainable Olivia Eversea and her new willingness to capitulate had likely coincided. Their courtship had hardly been the stuff of legends, but many a marriage began on less fortuitous footing.

She smiled but said nothing.

"Lady Emily has been all that is gracious and congratulatory, as a friend would be. Though I expect she is in fact disappointed. I can honestly tell you that I did not court her, and I do not believe anyone a.s.sumed we had a formal understanding. And yet."

"And yet," Olivia repeated softly.

"I do greatly regret any pain I may have caused her."

Olivia pictured Lady Emily and her no doubt well-bred disappointment. There would be no hysterics. No foolscap covered in Landsdowne's name, burned at midnight.

When the word that Lyon Redmond had disappeared finally penetrated Pennyroyal Green, and then the whole of London society-it took some time, the way it takes time for damp to make a weak roof cave in-Olivia had stopped eating. It was as if whatever made her human, gave her appet.i.tes and needs, had been excised. She had no more need for nourishment than a wickless candle needs a flame. She felt just that pointless.

She hadn't even fully realized she'd stopped eating until her mother began to panic.

And at some point she had begun again, because here she was.

Yet food had never tasted quite the same since.

Lyon had abandoned her.

And Landsdowne was here.

"You're very kind," she said impulsively to Landsdowne. For he was. Good and solid and kind and perhaps most importantly, here.

He quirked his mouth self-deprecatingly.

They each took fortifying sips of tea.

"I have a friend who trains and races horses," he said, after a long pause. "It is his pa.s.sion. He fell off a spirited one and broke his arm badly, and the doctor told him he could set it one of two positions. If he set it the usual way, the way that afforded him the most freedom of movement, he wouldn't be able hold reins effectively ever again. He chose to have his arm set in the second option-in such a way that he could grip the reins."

"So you say we are broken into the shape of our wounds. Or in the shape of the thing that means the most to us, and so we are suited to one thing only."

He smiled at her swiftly. Landsdowne genuinely appreciated her intelligence.

She didn't smile. A chill was slowly spreading in her gut.

"Do you perhaps speak from experience?" she challenged lightly. Suddenly nervous.

He shrugged. "Oh, I don't think so. I just thought it was anecdote worth sharing. That it perhaps merited a philosophical discussion."

"I'm not certain I'm equal to a philosophical discussion at the moment, when I must tell Madame Marceau before next week which trim to use on the hem-the silver or the cream? Or beading? Perhaps Parliament would be thoughtful enough to put it to a vote. Though I'm certain your metaphor doesn't apply to me."

He was quiet, and this time it was he who turned his teacup a few times.

"You haven't yet wed, and you've had countless options."

A fortnight after she'd filled a sheet of foolscap with Lyon's name she'd filled another one: Olivia Redmond Olivia Redmond Olivia Redmond. Over and over and over. She hadn't known what else to do with the geyser of emotion she could share with no one but Lyon. It was too new, too potent, and far, far too big to contain or understand.

She'd thrown that sheet of foolscap into the fire, too.

Because as far as her family and his were concerned, it amounted to heresy.

"I haven't wed because I've only lately met you," she told Landsdowne.

It was such a perfect thing to say that he decided to believe it.

He reached for her hand and gripped it. And his was so solid and warm and real and fine, and nothing in her lurched in joy or in any other emotion, and she thought, surely this sort of safety was better, and madness was for the very young.

Chapter 4.

About five years earlier, at the Suss.e.x Christmas Eve a.s.sembly . . .

"NO, NO, MILES, IT'S like this."

Jonathan Redmond slouched against the wall of the milling ballroom, shoved his hands in his pockets, narrowed his eyes, and aimed a look down the bridge of his nose at a young woman who was at least five years his senior.

The woman intercepted Jonathan's gaze, frowned faintly, puzzled but indulgent, gave her fan an irritated little twitch, and turned away. Coltish Jonathan, of course, was all but invisible to her at his age.

His brother Miles stifled a laugh. "You look like you just took a cricket ball to the head. It's more like this."

He tipped his head back, slitted his eyes, clenched his jaw, and aimed a gaze at the same woman.

And while Miles Redmond, the second oldest, had many splendid qualities, he wore spectacles and hadn't yet quite grown into his nose, and this time the woman remained oblivious.

"You've succeeded only in looking constipated." Jonathan was indignant. "And what woman will succ.u.mb to that?"

"How do you know that isn't Lyon's secret?" Miles retorted.

They both laughed.

Lyon Redmond rolled his eyes. His brothers were taking the p.i.s.s out of him, which he normally rather enjoyed. Taking the p.i.s.s out of each other was one of the myriad pleasures of having brothers. Affection, if displayed, was usually conveyed via insults and wrestling, which they all found satisfactory and sufficient.

But then, his brothers could laugh.

They didn't have to be him.

It was true he did, in fact, have a patented sultry look. It really didn't require much more than simply being Lyon Redmond while aiming appreciative, unswerving attention at a woman for a tick longer than was strictly proper.

It raised a blush nearly every time.

And it was generally agreed among the bloods of the ton that given an option, they would choose his life over theirs, if only for a day. Perhaps that day would be spent at Manton's, shooting the hearts out of targets or whipping the foil out of his fencing master's hand; followed by an hour or two in London at their father's secretive and exclusive Mercury Club, where England's wealthiest men devised strategies for making themselves and each other wealthier; and perhaps conclude with a ball much like this one, where most of the women could be counted on to look yearningly past every other man present in the hopes they would intercept one of his smolders.

What Lyon could have told nearly anyone was that even he envied Lyon Redmond. Because the Lyon Redmond of current lore was primarily simply that: lore.

It was said he effortlessly excelled at everything. It wasn't true. He focused on what he wanted to master and methodically, ruthlessly conquered it, whether it was cricket or calculus or fencing or shooting or a woman. And while it was true he invariably got what he wanted, he made absolutely certain the effort never showed.

He'd been born knowing the power of subtlety and the advantage of surprise. It was in the Redmond blood, after all.

Which meant he was also discreet about his carnal indulgences.

All in all, given other choices, Lyon would still ultimately probably decide to remain himself.

But he was beginning to feel like a prize bull confined to a gilded pen until such time as his father, Isaiah Redmond, deemed it was time for him to fertilize a carefully chosen aristocratic heifer. The Duke of Hexford's daughter, Arabella, seemed a likely choice. Though Arabella was hardly a heifer. She was stunning and shy to the point of muteness and blushed apologetically after everything she said.

But she wasn't here tonight. This particular ball was far too rustic an event for the daughter of a duke. Lyon was home for good from Oxford, though he had come by way of a lengthy stay in the family town house in London. London's diversions were a startling contrast to those of Pennyroyal Green, whose closest thing to a den of iniquity was the Pig & Thistle and the perennial cutthroat chess game between Mr. Culpepper and Mr. Cooke.

Not that Lyon lingered in any iniquity dens. He cherished his inheritance, and he knew precisely what was required of him in order to keep it.

"Pay attention, you hapless fools," he commanded his brothers. "It's more like . . ."

Dozens of young women were milling about, most of them in white, some of them t.i.tled, all of them glowing and pretty in the way that youth and hope is always pretty, and it was charming and comfortable and as English a scene as one could wish for.

Later, Miles would swear he literally heard the sound of a gong being struck when Lyon clapped eyes on her.

But for Lyon, the prevailing sensation could only be described as panic.

Panic that she might be a vision rather than an actual woman. Panic that she was an actual woman, but that he might never be able to touch her, and his entire life would be rendered meaningless if he couldn't. Panic that she would have nothing to do with him. Panic that he wouldn't know what to say if she would have something to do with him.

It was absolutely absurd, and all of this would have amused every person who had ever met him, for Lyon, like his father, seemed to have been born knowing just what to say to get people to do just what he wanted.

She was wearing white muslin, beautifully cut and simple, but so were many of the other girls. She was pet.i.te. So were many of the other girls.