“That’s an absurd line of questioning, because you did.” But he didn’t need her frown to see that she had a good point. “All right,” he muttered. “I’ll cut out the poor Scot. He probably thinks to marry her, you know. I rather liked him last night, and I’m fairly sure that he said he has to marry well.”

“He’ll find someone.”

Another thought struck Mayne. “What about Rafe? He’ll slay me.”

“I’m sure you two can work it out between yourselves. Perhaps a fistfight?” She needn’t sound so condescending.

“Right. A fistfight. Maybe I can get Rafe drunk first and just trip him up.”

She patted him on the arm. “You males know precisely the best way to solve these little problems amongst you.”

“Tess. You do realize what this is going to do to my reputation, don’t you?”

She cocked her head to the side and looked at him thoughtfully. “Imogen is an extremely beautiful young woman, but also a grievously sad one. If you could see your way to having this affaire without engaging in any intimacies, I’d be very grateful.”

“That’s off the subject. I was pointing out that my reputation is going to be destroyed by first jilting one Essex sister, and then having a highly improper affair with a second, widowed Essex sister.”

“Yes,” she said thoughtfully. “But darling, if you were going to miss your reputation, you should have noticed years ago, when it first went missing. Now, if you could get right to work, I’d be very grateful. Because so far today Imogen hasn’t shocked anyone, but she has a gleam in her eye that I don’t like.”

Mayne sighed. “And just how do you interpret that gleam?”

“She had just this look when she went riding over to the Maitland house, and the next thing I knew she had sprained her ankle, and a day after that she’d eloped with Draven Maitland, and the devil take the hindmost. Imogen simply doesn’t consider reputation very important. You two should get along very well.”

That was another slur, but Mayne let it pass. Obviously, he was being pointed like a bullet in the direction of Imogen, and since there was no way to escape it, he might as well give in.

Eight

Mayne found Imogen was sitting at the banquet next to her sister Annabel. There was a strange sense of isolation about her. Mayne had seen that time and again; he knew precisely what was happening. Imogen was being given the cold shoulder by the ton.

He walked over and sat down next to her. She was eating pigeon pie, and (thankfully) looked unperturbed. Some women dissolved into tears at their first snub; others felt deprived if they didn’t receive at least one cold shoulder of an evening.“May I join you?” he said, giving her the special smile he reserved for future chères amies.

“Of course.” She looked indifferent.

“I am so happy to see that you are out of mourning,” he said softly.

“In that case, you’ll be disappointed to learn that the fact I’m wearing black means I’m still in mourning.”

“Black suits you like no other woman,” he said, gazing soulfully into her eyes. She did have beautiful eyes, with bewitchingly long eyelashes. In the old days he would have been after her like a hound scenting a fox.

“Actually, black makes me sallow,” she said. “But once I told my modiste to lower my bodice as far as it would go, every man I meet seems to find it a satisfactory color.”

Of course, his gaze automatically shifted to her breasts, and then flew back to her mocking face. “There was no need to call my attention to such a lovely aspect of your figure,” he said, with just a touch of asperity.

“Actually, there was,” she said, taking a deep draught of wine. “You hadn’t noticed, had you?”

“I was entranced by the cupid’s bow of your mouth,” he said.

“Nice phrase,” she said, obviously unimpressed.

He suppressed a sigh. Apparently he’d lost his touch, but he couldn’t bring himself to give a damn. He could report failure to Tess, and this little episode would be over. After all, in his experience a woman bent on sending her reputation into flames usually succeeded. There was no reason for him to burn to a crisp with her.

But then Imogen glanced at him over her shoulder and said, “So who put you up to my seduction?”

“What?”

“You don’t know Annabel well enough, so my guess would be Tess.” She must have read the truth in his eyes. “Tess! Who would have thought that she could stop thinking about her delectable husband long enough to give me a thought?”

The thought of Tess and her husband seemed to give her a pang, because she got a queer look on her face, like a little girl lost in a storm, and Mayne felt some of his resolution to walk away slip.

“Thank you for the letter you sent after Draven died,” she said, abruptly changing the subject.

“I was sorry to miss the funeral. Maitland was a good man with a horse. And a humorous story,” he added.

“He was funny, wasn’t he?” Imogen said. “I—” She looked away from him and drank some more wine.

Someone brought him a plate of food. He took a bite and choked on its sweetness. Imogen looked back at him, all mocking again, and said, “In the Renaissance, spices were the only way to preserve meat. I think there might be quite a lot of nutmeg in this food. The recipes are all authentic.”

“God.” He signaled the waiter for wine. Which wasn’t quite normal because there were strange, small objects floating about in his glass, but he could live with that.

“How well did you know Draven?” She asked it very casually, as if the answer meant nothing to her, but Mayne hadn’t spent his twenties sleeping with married women without learning the ins and outs of a casual question. Imogen very likely knew the answer; she just wanted to talk about her husband. His mother had been the same, after his father died.

“I didn’t know him well,” he said, wracking his brain for some sort of story he could tell her.

“How did you meet?”

“We met at the Ascot in ’12,” Mayne said. “Maitland was racing…” He paused, trying to remember.

“Seashell,” she said. “Remember? He was a chestnut who ran like a dream.”

“That’s right,” Mayne said. “Excitable, wasn’t he?”

“He should have won, but he bit his jockey in the ear just before the race, and Draven said it put the jockey off.”

“But that was long before you married.”

“I had known Draven for years,” she said with a lopsided little smile. “He trained his horses at my father’s stable.” Then she looked directly at him, and he felt as if he were being struck by her eyes: they were that passionate. The thought drifted through his head that no one would ever look as unbearably sad when he was dead.

“So shall we have an affaire, then?” she said, as if the question followed rationally from their talk of her dead husband. “I would guess that Tess placed your jilting of her against your seduction of me,” she said, as cool as a icehouse in July. “It’d be a pity to waste her request. And as it happens, I had initially considered you as a companion.”