"Really? When was that?" he impudently murmured.

"So I find you irresistible. Am I supposed to apologize?"

"Not for a thousand years at least," he said, grinning. And leaning over to kiss her he paused midpoint. "When did it become so quiet?" Swiveling his head, he took note of the keen scrutiny focused on them, all activity arrested as if they were performing on a stage. "Haven't they ever seen a man and woman talk before?" he murmured.

"Your remark about my pregnancy may have piqued their curiosity," Serena sardonically noted.

"Give me the rings," he briskly ordered, reaching for the boxes in her hand. Plucking the rings out, he slid them on her fingers. "Now we're formally engaged," he said, patting her hand with avuncular complaisance.

"Will it be a long engagement?" she asked with levity.

"Longer than I'd like-ten minutes, maybe eleven.... Now smile, darling, for our rapt audience." And swinging her around with him, Beau proclaimed, "Miss Blythe has had a change of heart." He held her hand with the glittering rings aloft. "She's done me the honor of accepting my marriage proposal. You're all invited to our wedding-to be celebrated forthwith."

A collective gasp masked Serena's whisper.

"If the Castellis allow us the use of their salon," Beau added, reminded of their hosts.

Beaming, Julia nodded her approval.

"Do we need a priest?" Beau inquired in an undertone.

Serena shook her head. "But we need Mrs. Calvacanti. She's been adamant I marry. She wouldn't want to miss this."

"Marry whom?" A small scowl formed between Beau's brows.

"Preferably you but she wasn't fussy. Father Danetti was one of her numerous candidates."

"Numerous candidates?" he repeated with heated male affront.

"Hers, not mine. I had no candidates."

"You'd better not have had."

"Don't take that tone, darling, or I may find I prefer a priest after all."

"You're marrying me," he curtly declared. "It's my child."

"Maybe," she sweetly said.

"What the hell does that mean?"

"It means I'll marry whom I please." It never hurt to set boundaries.

"Just so long as it's me." Another boundary setter.

Serena's mouth twitched into a smile. "I can see you're going to be difficult to control."

"Impossible, I think, is the word generally used," he softly murmured, his answering smile luscious as sin.

"Our life should be interesting then."

"And happy ... madly happy."

"Yes," she whispered. "Always ... with you."

"Come here," he said, pulling her close. "Where I can keep you safe from the other matrimonial candidates until the wedding, my sweet seductress ... my joy, my delight-"

"My honeymoon fantasy," she breathed.

He paused an infinitesimal moment, her hand enclosed in his, the scent of possibility nearly palpable. "In an hour," he quietly said. "We should be married by then. Can you wait?" he graciously asked, because he knew she often couldn't.

Her eyes sparkled with merriment. "I'd like an abbreviated ceremony."

"Done," he said, competent and assured.

"And a long honeymoon."

"Would a lifetime do?" Whisper soft, he offered her paradise.

"I'd like that," she said, her eyes suddenly filling with tears.

When he kissed her-a boyish, deep-in-love kiss-an outburst of applause rippled over them, followed by gasps and giggles as their kiss deepened, took on risky undertones of scandal. Raised eyebrows, broad smiles, and knowing glances ensued.

But the Earl of Rochefort and his bride-to-be didn't notice.

They were conscious only of the warm magic of love.

EPILOGUE.

They were married in the Castellis' parlor a short time later, the ceremony delayed only briefly, awaiting Mrs. Calvacanti's arrival and the delivery of several cases of Champagne. Most of the guests were delighted by Serena's nuptials and those men disgruntled at the news soon realized that she was enormously happy and contented themselves with that.

The honeymoon lasted a month, until the French armies approached Florence, as Beau knew they would and then he persuaded Serena to go back to England at least for the sake of the baby. She couldn't argue with such sound logic, and after packing all her paints and canvases, the young St. Jules couple left for Leghorn on the first stage of their journey home.

They were feted at Palermo and then at Minorca, where they stopped for an amorous fortnight holiday, the news that the Earl of Rochefort had been caught so precipitously a great wonder to all who knew him. The ladies wished to meet his new bride, who had managed what no one else could, and the men were fascinated to see the woman who could hold Beau's interest.

Serena was large with child when they reached London, although it was still early fall, and Chelsea immediately said, "Twins" when she saw her daughter-in-law, while Beau said with a pleased smile, "Who is this?" of the baby in his stepmother's arms. He was introduced to his two-week-old baby brother by his other siblings, who now felt very grown-up with a newborn in the house. Serena immediately asked if she could hold Ian and father and son stood apart from the noisy, milling group cooing over the baby and exchanged complacent glances. Life was good.

The twins came early, as is often the case-the first week of February-and the Earl and Countess of Rochefort welcomed a tiny boy and girl into the world. The infants were very fragile but a score of midwives kept them warm with hot bricks wrapped in lamb's wool and they thrived. By spring Felicity and Seth were plump and cooing, the absolute center of their parents' life.

And the young Earl of Rochefort found he preferred his country home and his family to the gaming rooms and vice-ridden activities in his past. "Can't explain it," he'd say when his friends would rail at his tame amusements and lack of interest in their amorous play, "but I recommend it. Vastly."

NOTES.

1. When Great Britain plunged into the revolutionary wars at the beginning of 1793, her national debt amounted to 230,000,000. From that point the war was financed by means of loans to such an extent that the funded debt for Great Britain and Ireland at the time of the Peace of Amiens in 1802 had risen to the astounding sum of 507,000,000. The figure is perhaps best understood when contrasted with the funded debt of England at the outbreak of World War I. In 1914 it amounted to no more than 587,000,000.

Both in England and on the Continent during this period, there were doubts as to the durability of the British system of credit, particularly after the Bank Restriction Act of 1797, which released the Bank of England from the obligation to redeem its notes-an obligation it didn't resume for twenty-two years. Great Britain had a paper currency throughout the whole of the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods.

2. Sponges as a form of contraception have been used since ancient times and Mediterranean sponges were always readily available. The sponge in various forms, with or without strings attached for ease of removal, functioned as a mechanical barrier to sperm.

3. Angelica Kauffman and Mary Cosway are two examples of female artists much feted by British society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Kauffman, Swiss-born and trained in Italy, spent the years 176681 in London, where she became a founding member of the Royal Academy of Art. Her neoclassic history paintings garnered high praise throughout England and Europe; she was much in demand for her portraits as well. Her client list included a glittering array of international nobles who paid her enough to make her a wealthy woman. Married when she was young to an imposter masquerading as a count, she separated from him immediately when his duplicity was revealed, but she wasn't able to remarry until he died in 1780. Her second husband was the Italian artist Antonio Zucchi.

Mary Hadfield Cosway, born in England and trained in Rome, married Richard Cosway, a painter of miniatures who had the patronage of the Prince of Wales. Her paintings, mostly poetical-Cupid and Venus, Psyche, Rinaldo and Armida-were first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780.

She and her husband enjoyed entree into the finest aristocratic circles and their receptions were always crowded with the most select lords and ladies. They lived as ostentatiously as the wealthiest of aristocrats, but after the prince regent turned his portly back on Richard Cosway because of Cosway's imprudent sympathy for the French Revolution, the splendid crowds melted away.

The haut monde was always fascinated and intrigued with the newest fashionable artists but with a dilettante and fleeting interest. Artists were reguarded as distinguished craftsmen, not equals, no matter how charming their social aquaintance might be. As for those nobles who dabbled at painting, they never actually sold their work; it would have been declasse.

4. Lord Byron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage had sung the praises of Sintra-that "glorious Eden." He writes to his mother in August 1809: "The village of Cintra, about fifteen miles from Lisbon, is, perhaps in every respect, the most delightful in Europe; it contains beauties of every description, natural and artificial. Palaces and gardens rising in the midst of rocks, cataracts and precipices; convents on stupendous heights-a distant view of the Sea and the Tagus.... It unites in itself all the wildness of the western highlands, with the verdure of France."

5. The Carronade was a short, lightweight ship's gun developed by the Carron Ironworks in Scotland in 1778. It was a weapon of particular attraction to the merchant marine. Because it was light, it was also relatively cheap and could be handled by a very small crew, an important consideration on merchant ships.

The gun was optimal for short-range work.

6. Larboard is the port or left side of a ship as one looks forward.

7. Chelsea's proposal is on page 12 of Sinful by Susan Johnson.

8. Divorce in England required an act of Parliament. Disturbed by France's legalization of divorce on grounds of mutual incompatibility in 1792-after which the floodgates of divorce opened in France-conservatives in England attempted to make divorce harder to obtain.

The first concrete attempt to turn back the tide of divorce petitions to the House of Lords was the introduction by the lord chancellor in 1798 of a new set of Standing Orders, known as Lord Loughborough's Rules.

The first of the Standing Orders of 1798 demanded that an official copy of proceedings for separation in an ecclesiastical court be provided to the House with every bill of divorce. The second Standing Order was more far-reaching. It ordered that every petitioner must present himself at the bar of the House, to be cross-examined about possible collusion and prior separation.

In the hands of an energetic and intelligent lord chancellor, these Standing Orders offered a formidable weapon. Even before their passage, Lord Thurlow, lord chancellor from 1778 to 1792, had shown that it was possible, by relentlessly harassing petitioners, both to drive down the numbers applying and to increase the proportion of bills that were rejected. Whereas in the fourteen years before he took office, all 37 petitioners for divorce had been successful, during Thurlow's chancellorship the success rate fell to twenty-five out of thirty-two. (Note the small number of divorces-thirty-seven in fourteen years. Divorce wasn't an option generally considered except in extreme circumstances.) In 1801 Lord Eldon succeeded Lord Loughborough in the office of lord chancellor; he was to hold it for over a quarter of a century, until 1827. Using to the full the new powers of investigation offered by the Standing Orders of 1798, Eldon by fierce cross-examination almost single-handedly succeeded for at least his first twenty years in office in frightening off petitioners and greatly increasing the number of bills that were abandoned, withdrawn, or rejected.

Under those conditions, it behooved a petitioner to have a strong phalanx of supporters in his camp.

9. When King Ferdinand's Neapolitan army was routed from Rome and the French followed the retreat in hot pursuit, the royal family fled Naples. But the escape had to be kept secret or the populace-at times more resembling a mob-might try to prevent the king from leaving the city.

Prior to their departure, the royal family's possessions, including the crown jewels and the state treasury, were secretly brought down to the quay from the palace in covered wagons in the dead of night. And on the evening of December 21, 1798, under the cloak of a grand reception for the Turkish minister, the Hamiltons, and royal family along with numerous courtiers, diplomats, ambassadors, and household servants, surreptitiously slipped away from the festivities and made their way on foot to the quay, where boats took them out to Admiral Nelson's ship in the bay.

After a storm-tossed journey in which the royal family's young son died and many passengers feared for their lives in the turbulent seas, the Vanguard at last sailed into Palermo harbor on the twenty-sixth. The royal court would remain in Sicily until the Peace of Amiens was signed in 1802.

10. Emma Hamilton had come a long way from her humble birth as the daughter of a blacksmith in Cheshire. Sent out to work as an under-nursemaid at twelve, by sixteen she was the past mistress of one of the Prince of Wales's most intimate cronies, Captain John Willett Payne, and the current mistress of Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh. She had a daughter at this time, fathered by either of those men, and soon after when she was deserted by Fetherstonhaugh, she came under the protection of the Hon. Charles Greville, second son of the Earl of Warwick and nephew of Sir William Hamilton.

When Emma was twenty, Greville found a rich heiress to marry-a necessity for a penurious younger son-and wishing to dispose of his mistress, struck a deal with his uncle to have Emma come stay with him in Naples. Sir William was reluctant although he found Emma very pretty and likable. He knew she was in love with Greville.

But Greville persisted and Emma was sent to Naples ostensibly, for a brief visit. She didn't know her exile would be permanent.

As the months passed and Greville didn't appear in Naples to fetch her home, she became frantic with anxiety, writing him poignant, pleading letters asking him to come to her. Receiving no reply, Emma was forced in the end to realize Greville had no intention of coming.

Although she was fond of Sir William, she still resisted his polite advances. But after a time rumors began circulating that they were married; she began serving as hostess for him and was accepted as such by Neapolitan society. On returning to England in 1791, Sir William received the king's permission to marry Emma and they became husband and wife September 6 at St. George's, Hanover Square.

Sir William never regretted his marriage. "I have no reason to repent of a step which I took contrary to the approbation of the world," he told Lady Mansfield. "Marrying Emma was my own business. I knew what I was doing for as you know I had lived with her for five years before I married.... Look round your circle of prudent well assorted matches in the great world and see how few turn out so well as our seemingly imprudent one."

11. 10,000 in today's terms is equivalent to 600,000.

12. "Monkey" was the slang term for fifty pounds.

13. Sir John Acton officially held a minor ministerial post in the government of Sicily, but was one of the most influential advisers to Queen Marie Caroline. Sir John had intended to remain a bachelor and to bequeath his estate in Shropshire to his younger brother Joseph. But since Joseph had served in the French army, he was disbarred from inheriting. So Sir John asked his brother for the hand of his daughter, who was not yet fourteen. Joseph had no objection: a papal dispensation for Sir John to marry his young niece was forthcoming. But the girl herself was naturally reluctant to marry an uncle sixty-four years old. She hid under the sofa while Sir John and her father discussed her disposal and then attempted to escape from the house in boy's clothing. Caught as she was running across the courtyard, she was brought back and married in the Hamiltons' house by Lord Nelson's chaplain.

14. During the siege of Genoa, Major Franceschi had been sent off by General Massena on April 24 with a dispatch to Bonaparte detailing the serious condition of the garrison. On May 27, after leaving Antibes in a rowboat, he slipped past the British corvettes blockading Genoa and swam ashore with a letter from Bonaparte written a fortnight previously, informing Massena that the Reserve Army had begun to cross the St. Bernard Pass. This was tremendous news for Massena, who knew the Austrians would be compelled to turn round to face Bonaparte in a few days and abandon the siege. Massena calculated that Bonaparte might be able to break through to Genoa and raise the siege by the thirtieth. He was determined not to capitulate before that date-the latest his rations would last.

April 30 was a day of some emotional excitement, as this was the day when Bonaparte's arrival was expected to raise the siege. But it was a false hope. That evening General Ott and Admiral Keith, realizing that the garrison must be at its last gasp, despatched Count St. Julien under a flag of truce to the French outposts at the mouth of the Polcevera, repeating their previous offer of an honorable capitulation. But Massena still temporized, for he felt that Bonaparte must now be threatening the Austrian rear and in a day or two would relieve Genoa. On the thirty-first a number of his troops began deserting to the enemy lines and the civilian population was getting out of control. Hundreds were dying daily of typhus and starvation.

On June 1 Massena sent Colonel Andrieux to Ott's forward headquarters to discuss terms for the exchange of prisoners.

On the morning of June 2 the three armistice delegates met and discussed the terms of the capitulation. Matters were not eased by the arrival of Massena's private secretary with a message saying Massena would refuse to sign any document that contained the word "capitulation." No agreement was reached before nightfall. The conference was renewed at noon on the third and continued for eight hours. The British naval representative proved the most stubborn, for he insisted unyieldingly that all French vessels in the harbor must be handed over as prizes. That morning Massena was informed by his chief commissary that only one more day's ration of food remained in the depots.

The three principals at last met at 9:30 A.M. on June 4 to settle the final terms and sign the convention. It was finally agreed that 8,110 French soldiers (all who were capable of marching) should leave Genoa by road for the French frontier with all their arms, artillery, and baggage, while the British navy would transport the remainder of the garrison to Antibes. Admiral Keith was still obdurate about the French vessels in the harbor, insisting that naval prize law was enshrined in the British constitution and that he could not concede anything without reference to London. Massena's grim face relaxed for the first time. "My Lord," he said, "after taking all our big ships from us, you might at least leave us the little ones." Keith graciously replied, "Really, General, one can refuse you nothing."

The convention was signed at 7 P.M.

As the conference ended, the admiral seized Massena's hand and said, "General, if only England and France could get together, they would rule the world." Massena with a withering look replied, "France will be enough."

Massena's dogged resistance at Genoa contributed materially to the success of Bonaparte's Reserve Army, which was now pouring into Italy through the Alpine passes and had already occupied Milan. On June 15, the day after the battle of Marengo, when the campaign in Italy was over, the Austrian chief of staff said to Berthier as he signed the Armistice of Alessandria, "You won the battle, not in front of Alessandria, but in front of Genoa."

15. Very few of Napoleon's officers were models of conjugal fidelity when on campaign. Many took mistresses with them. This behavior was normal practice among the military leaders of the Revolution and Consulate and Napoleon's attitude in the matter was as self-indulgent as his officers'. In commenting on Murat's conduct during the Marengo campaign, he said, "What faults Murat committed in order to set up his headquarters in chateaux where there were women! He needed one every day, so I have always allowed my generals to take a strumpet along with them in order to avoid this trouble."

And here's an excerpt from BLONDE HEAT.

the tantalizing new novel of passion from

SUSAN JOHNSON.