With that, Eloise turned and walked from the room, closing the door behind her.

Tears welled in Sophie’s eyes. It was not unusual for her mother to descend on a member of the household like an avenging Fury out of a Greek play, although generally Sophie was able to ignore her embittered comments.

But tonight Eloise had struck a nerve. Sophie knew that she skirted the edge of propriety: Her gowns were the most daring in London and her manner was seductive.

Sophie had heard those dreary odes composed for her mother many times: “Thus from a thousand virgins, heav’nly fair,/One sees the Diana of the sex, whose hair—” Eloise’s hair was the same reddish-gold color as hers, but Eloise’s lay sleekly along her head, the line of her chignon never disturbed by a curl or a streamer. Sophie’s hair curled, and it rebelliously escaped from ribbons and pins. What’s more, Sophie had cut off all her hair before any other woman in London had thought of imitating the French fashion, and now that every young miss cropped her curls, she had chosen to grow hers again.

What her mother didn’t understand was how impossibly difficult it had been to turn down Patrick Foakes’s offer of marriage. She stared at herself blindly in the mirror for a moment, then sank onto the bed as she remembered the Cumberland ball last month. The glory of it when Patrick made it clear that he was stalking her. The twisting excitement in her stomach when she glanced up from the intricacies of a cotillion, and caught his glance.

Even thinking of the lazy greeting in those eyes, the way his right eyebrow flew up in silent acknowledgment, the utterly masculine arrogance of his glance made her stomach jump. Her heart beat fast the entire evening, and excitement tingled in her limbs and weakened her knees. By ten o’clock Patrick Foakes had exerted such a pull over her that she was living for those moments when he would suddenly appear at her elbow or when she would turn in the swirl of a dance and catch a glimpse of silver-streaked black hair on the other side of the room. At supper, in the midst of a chattering crowd huddled around a small round table, her heart leaped every time his leg or arm accidentally brushed hers, sending a drugging velvet excitement down her legs.

They danced together once; they danced together twice. To dance together a third time would be akin to announcing an engagement.

Sophie didn’t dare speak during their second dance, a Maltese Bransle that kept parting them and then suddenly jolting them back together. She was afraid that Patrick would guess the spinning tenderness that shivered down her body every time the figure brought them back together.

When he silently took her arm and led her out of the ballroom as if to fetch a glass of syllabub, but instead turned into a quiet room full of spindly tables and frothy chairs, she followed with no objection. Patrick propped himself against a biscuit-colored wall and looked down at her teasingly, and Sophie’s only excuse was that the emotional stimulation of the last hours had gone to her head. She impishly grinned back, behaving precisely like the wanton her mama believed her to be.