Her hair was piled high in an obsequious arrangement. Upon her face, she’d affixed the most nauseatingly insincere smile.

His jaw hardened.

She’d donned that same smile after he’d completed her dirty work, ruining her son’s happiness.

Perhaps his mother had been correct after all.

“I am fetching a drink,” he said curtly to his mother, who’d been joined by Lady Donning.

Chatting amicably with the other woman, his mother lifted a hand in acknowledgement.

Taking advantage of her distraction, Anthony cut a path along the side of the ballroom, bypassing a servant carrying those glasses he’d said he was after and continuing on.

At last, he put the room and the din of it behind, the swell of revelry muted in his ears.

Eager to leave the crush behind, Anthony headed along the corridors, winding his way through his host and hostess’ household before he ultimately found his way to the double doors leading outside.

He pushed them open, and even as warm as the spring weather had been, a rush of cool greeted him.

Anthony drew in a deep breath, welcoming that light breeze, a balm after the sweltering heat left by the crowd of guests.

Closing the glass, curtained panels behind him, he wandered onto the terrace, loosening his cravat on the way.

At last. Quiet.

Peace.

Click.

He stiffened.

Alas, quiet and peace were apparently too much for him to either expect or hope for.

But then, this was London, the land of trysting couples, where respectable lords and ladies sneaked off to engage in all manner of sins.

Turning to announce himself, Anthony stopped in his tracks.

This time, he froze for altogether different reasons.

One of the doors hung open behind his intruder. The well-lit halls cast a bright halo of light around a crop of auburn curls that had been arranged like a coronet about her head, giving her the look of a russet-haired Athena. Slender of form, but generous of hip and bosom, she’d a siren’s form, one that immediately sent a wave of lust through him.

She assessed him with the same intensity he did her, and yet, he remained wholly incapable of stopping himself from that impropriety.

For, it was her smile that suspended time and this moment and kept him rooted to the stone floor, incapable of words and capable only of gazing upon her mouth, curved in a winsome smile.

Wide and generous and showing pearly white teeth, the smile dimpled both cheeks, and he’d wager if he were ten paces closer and able to glimpse the color of her eyes, he would find they sparkled.

“Anthony!” she exclaimed, suddenly and unexpectedly, so that he was certain this hungering and awareness of her and for her was what accounted for the imagined sound of his given name falling from her generous lips.