“Ash!”
Fox’s voice cut through the swelling hum. Against the stream of guests beginning to file from the supper room, he was bearing down on them, Lady Felicity on his arm. Quickly, Gabriel rose to his feet, drawing Camellia up with him.
“Why are you hiding in this corner, Ash? We’d begun to think you’d got quite away.”
Camellia’s fingers twitched again. Suddenly aware he was still gripping her hand, he released his hold and stepped toward his friend. “Nonsense, Foxy. You can’t have looked very hard. And Lady Felicity has promised me the next dance,” he added, holding out his arm to her. “What could possibly drag me away?”
Felicity promptly let go Fox’s arm and took Gabriel’s instead. He did not fool himself into thinking she took pleasure in bestowing her attention on him. But neither did she resist.
Her complaisance was to be expected, given his hold over her family. Having recently been reminded of the delights of the unexpected, however, he found himself wondering whether they might not get on better if she’d slapped his face and told him to take a swim in the Thames instead. Then again, he knew better than to wish for some sort of grand passion to flare between him and his soon-to-be bride.
“Shall we join them in a turn about the ballroom, Miss Burke?” Fox asked, offering his arm to Camellia.
A bright spark of jealousy crackled through Gabriel once more, like the glow at the end of a cheroot being smoked in the dark. This time, however, he could not step between them without cutting the woman who was meant to be his intended.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the sharp movement of Camellia’s dark head. “I’m afraid you must excuse me, Mr. Fox. Another time, perhaps?”
Relief coursed through him, followed quickly by remorse. Good God, did he lack the decency to set aside his own decidedly illicit interests in favor of even the momentary happiness of the most honorable man he knew?
But Camellia was already gone, murmuring something about the ladies’ retiring room to her cousin as she passed, not sparing any of them a backward glance.
* * * *
Thwarted by the crush, Cami ducked through one of the disguised doors at the back of the room, those through which servants discreetly came and went. The narrow passageway behind was unlit and, for the moment, empty. She had no notion of where it might lead. But she kept walking, hurrying away from what she had just done. It had been one thing to divert the marquess from Felicity for an hour, another thing entirely to discover herself the sole focus of his attentions.
To discover those attentions were not entirely unwelcome.
When she could bear the heat of his gaze, the intimate murmur of his deep voice, no longer, she had tried to turn the tables. She had not set out to be cruel. It was only a silly game she sometimes played with herself, saying the most outrageous, unexpected things, merely to observe the response they produced—a sort of study in human nature. A way to understand how characters ought to act and react. She had prompted him to recall his boyhood, then offered unexpected words of consolation, thinking to see…guilt? Or anger?
Something, anything other than the raw grief that had streaked across his face, making her feel as if, with the crack of one whiplike sentence, she had flayed the tough hide from his heart. A heart everyone—even the man himself—seemed persuaded he did not have.
At the end of the dark corridor, a dim rectangle of light suggested a doorway, promised an escape. When she reached it, however, she paused to choose: go through it into the unknown, or turn around? Her hand trembled as she reached for the handle. The soft glow of unseen candles in the room beyond limned her hand, the ink-stained fingertips he had kissed in…in gratitude? As if he believed she understood, as if he imagined she cared.
Oh, God. That was the worst of it—the suspicion he might be right.
He…he intrigued her.
There. She had admitted it. She had set out to study him with the same detached, practiced observation a painter might apply to the subject of a still life. But Lord Ash—no, Gabriel—was not a plate of fruit, a loaf of bread, or a glassy-eyed fish waiting to be gutted. He moved. He spoke. He charmed.
A dark angel, indeed.
Nothing she had seen of him had increased her alarm on Felicity’s behalf. In fact, she was no longer certain he was the villain he had been painted. Cami balled her hand into a fist and scrubbed the pad of her thumb over the callus on her middle finger, where his lips had been.
No, this sudden rush of fear was all for herself.
“Your fears are entirely justified.”
She jerked her hand from the door and stuffed her knuckles into her mouth to stifle a scream. The voice was rough, low, breathless. And the speaker to whom it belonged was standing just inches away, on the other side of the service door.
“I am not afraid of him.” A second, younger man’s voice. Frightened, for all his bravado.
“You should be.”
Almost unwillingly, Cami leaned forward, drawn by the drama unfolding beyond the wall. Closer to the door now, she pressed one lens of her spectacles to the peep, a tiny square through which the parlor maid might look to make certain the room was empty before entering to clean it. Although her vision was partly obscured by the man leaning against the door, she could just glimpse the younger speaker. Lord Montlake, their host.
“I understand you had quite a near brush with him not long ago,” the rough-voiced man continued. The words seemed to be whispered in her own ear. “And emerged unscathed only through his…mercy, shall we call it?”
“I am determined he shall never
