Loretta snapped open her fan and fluttered it angrily back and forth in front of her face. She looked her best, and here was Duncan, not even noticing. All he could talk about was Maggie. “I think,” she ventured to say, “it might be better if we don’t go to the theater tonight, Duncan. I can assure you that Maggie makes a very naive Kate.”

That stupid grin was still on Duncan’s face. “If you don’t want to see the play, Loretta, that’s fine with me. Personally, I wouldn’t miss it for all the tea in China.”

Loretta stomped one delicately slippered foot. “I don’t like being made a fool of, Duncan. Just what, exactly, are you planning to do?”

Duncan gave an odd, slanting shrug and winced at the pain in his sore shoulder. “Offer my sincerest sympathies, of course.”

Loretta rolled her eyes. She had half a mind to stay home that evening, but there was always the possibility that dear little Maggie would botch her opening performance completely, and Loretta didn’t want to take a chance on missing that. She reached for the bell cord and pulled for a carriage to be brought around. “Don’t make any foolish mistakes, Duncan,” she warned acidly. “Maggie may think Reeve is dead, but we know better. And his revenge is something you’d rather not experience, believe me.”

Duncan opened the front door of Loretta’s town house and gestured grandly, with his good arm, for her to precede him.

Maggie’s own pallid face stared back at her from the lighted mirror. The makeup she’d applied for tonight’s performance gave her a garish look, and her stomach was gyrating crazily. “I can’t do this,” she said softly.

Behind her, Philip Briggs laid his hands on her shoulders. Her costume, a lovely thing of plush gray velvet, left them bare. “What do we say in the theater, Maggie?” he prompted as though she were a slow child and not a woman who’d been widowed before she’d even had a chance to be a wife.

Maggie sighed. “The show must go on,” she recited forlornly.

“Exactly. This is your chance, Maggie, to make a real place for yourself in the world. Don’t ruin it.”

She bit her lower lip. What Philip said was true; with Reeve gone, her only chance to offer her baby a good life was to make a success of her acting career. If this play went well, she would be on her way.

Philip bent his head and planted an innocuous kiss on the curve where Maggie’s neck and shoulder met. “You’ll be the toast of Sydney, darling,” he said.

Maggie slipped away from him to fuss with her elaborately coiffed hair and examine her makeup. “Yes,” she repeated obediently, woodenly, “the toast of Sydney.”