That very safe smile in his eyes had developed an edge of wickedness.

This presumably was kicking up her heels. He must know that her family would not knowingly allow her within fifty yards of him unescorted. Not that she needed their escort. Good heavens, the very idea! She was twenty years old.

“I hope I do not need my brother and sisters to ensure that I behave as I ought, my lord,” she said, hearing the primness in her voice.

He laughed softly. It was enough to send shivers up her spine.

“Or Con either?” he said. “I have teased him so mercilessly about turning himself into a prim nursemaid since your advent in town, and Miss Wallace’s, that he has turned tail and fled into the country to hide his mortification.”

“He has not fled anywhere. He has gone into the country to see his new estate,” Katherine told him. “It is in Gloucestershire.”

“However it is,” he said, moving his head a little closer to hers, “he is gone, and so are your brother and sisters and your brother-in-law.”

He made it sound as if she had plotted long and hard to be rid of them in order to be free to allow this forbidden tryst. It was not a tryst. She had not even known he was going to be here. She had not-

But suddenly it felt like a tryst.

“I am staying at Moreland House,” she explained to him, “with the dowager Lady Lyngate as my chaperone.”

“Ah,” he said. “The lady who is conspicuous in her absence this evening?”

“I am here-” she began indignantly, but she stopped when he laughed softly again.

“-under the chaperonage of Lady Beaton,” he said, “who does not even appear to have noticed that we have fallen behind the group.”

And so they had. Several people had passed them and were between them and their own party. She could see Lady Beaton’s royal-blue hair plumes nodding above other heads in the middle distance.