What St. Clare thought was that Miss Steele was a remarkably accomplished flirt for a girl who couldn’t be any older than one and twenty. She simpered, she pouted, and she batted her lashes. No doubt her tactics worked on a great many of the men she met. They didn’t work on him. “You look very well, Miss Steele.”

“You look divine,” Mattingly said.

“Flatterer!” She laughed. “I know I do not. Not in this gown. And not with this necklace. I would have worn my pearls, for they look best with my hair, but Mama insisted I wear the diamonds. The duke said I must always wear diamonds because I am a diamond myself.”

While Miss Steele directed her attentions to Mattingly, St. Clare’s gaze drifted around the packed house. He didn’t require a set of opera glasses to see into the tiers of boxes across the theater. It was easy enough to make out the titled and the wealthy, the famous and infamous.

Ladies draped in jewels sat at the forefront, gentlemen in gold and silver waistcoats behind. He recognized women he’d met at balls and parties, and men he’d seen at his club. There was even a famous Cyprian or two.

And then, just as the play began, he saw her.

Margaret Honeywell.

A jolt of simmering recognition shot through him.

She was seated in the front of a box opposite, one tier below his own, in the company of a slender fair-haired gentleman, an equally slender fair-haired young lady, and an elderly female who appeared to be asleep in her chair.

Observing St. Clare’s arrested expression, Mattingly discreetly handed him a pair of mother-of-pearl opera glasses.

St. Clare took them without a word, training them on Miss Honeywell. The lenses were powerful. Through them he could make out every curve and contour of her flawless ivory countenance. The deep blue of her eyes—like melting sapphires. The straight, elegant line of her nose and the delicate cleft in her stubbornly set chin. It was a face one didn’t easily forget. A face to haunt a man’s dreams.

And not only a face. She had a figure to rival it. One he hadn’t fully appreciated when she’d called on him in Grosvenor Square. Then she’d been clad in a dark, shapeless dress. But now…

Now she wore a gown of champagne silk, with tiny puffed sleeves dropping loosely off of her bare shoulders, and a neckline cut low along the swell of her bosom.

His fingers clenched reflexively on the opera glasses.