“I’ll be damned if you can just waltz into this dining room as if nothing happened in the last month and ask me on a picnic,” she said furiously.

Patrick looked up and nodded to Clemens, who directed the footmen out of the room with a wave, then quickly followed them.

“Why not?” Patrick looked at his wife with stupefaction. This was a new Sophie. There was no difficulty reading the fury in her eyes.

Sophie stood up and threw her napkin on the table. “I never complained when you went off with your mistress. I didn’t reproach you—once. If you want to go, go! But don’t come back to me as if I were a fish that you could reel in when you pleased. I suppose you think I will smile gratefully and go on a picnic with you, now that you’ve decided to grant your wife a bit of your time?”

Patrick stared at his wife, his face imperturbable.

“I’m going to my chambers,” she said abruptly. “I will accept your escort tomorrow to the ball, but I must decline your kind invitation for a picnic. I don’t feel like a wanton trollop today, and I don’t expect to feel like one tomorrow either. Therefore,” she said with savage irony, “I’m sure you wouldn’t be comfortable in my company!”

And with that she walked out of the room and up the stairs, as quickly as she could manage in her state.

The Duke and Duchess of Gisle lay in their separate bedrooms that night, both staring at the ceiling. If an angel had happened to look through the roof of the mansion on Upper Brook Street, he would have seen separate, sleepless figures. Patrick was, perhaps, the more despairing; Sophie, having rediscovered anger, was finding it a not unpleasant emotion.

Had the same angel bothered to peer through the elegant silk roof of the Gisle carriage as it inched its way to a halt before the entrance to Lady Greenleaf’s mansion in Hanover Square the following night, he would again have seen two separate, silent figures, but with one difference: Sophie was staring at the wall, and Patrick was staring at her.

Sophie was dressed in a ball gown that deliberately emphasized her newly lush figure. Gossamer silk in a pale, pale blue, more lucid than a robin’s egg, wound its way around her bodice, playing hide-and-seek with the curves of her breasts.

Oblivious to Patrick’s gaze, Sophie adjusted her cashmere wrap as the carriage drew to a halt, an action that unconsciously caused her breasts nearly to topple from their frail cover.