He looked down at the box he had just left. Really, Miss van Stork had a very sweet, upturned nose, especially given the fact that her father’s nose was rather large. The candlelight was catching her hair, making its red highlights gleam. She looked at the stage, not at him. He wouldn’t mind going back, he thought. Except she had shooed him out of their box as if she knew that he was just fortune-hunting…. Well, of course she does, a voice said in the back of his mind. Look at her! She’s an intelligent woman, dressed like a dowdy in the midst of London’s most elegant women. She knows you only want her fortune. I wonder why she’s wearing that gown, Will thought. He caught himself. What the devil was he doing? He was sitting next to the most beautiful women in the ton and he didn’t even feel like being amusing. He couldn’t think of a single seductive metaphor. He was thinking about a frumpy woman in a corset. Charlotte’s pearly shoulder gleamed next to him, a soft expanse leading the eye irresistibly down to the creamy mounds rising from her slight bodice. His breathing quickened. Will banished the thought of Miss van Stork, sitting alone in her box. The hell with it! Didn’t he vow to stop fortune-hunting?

Down in his box Alex’s fists curled with rage. He had risked one more look at Charlotte only to find his old friend Will Holland hovering behind her and leering down at her breasts, unless he was grossly mistaken. He turned to Daphne Boch and, leaning intimately over to her, complimented her fan. Daphne looked at him a bit ironically. She had no particular aversion to flirting with this so-handsome earl, even if he was really just interested in that tall beanstalk of an Englishwoman.

The play was starting, trumpeters blowing an entrance, signaling the presence of the king—King Lear, that is. Charlotte’s thoughts were tumbling over each other, but she felt calmer now that Will had joined their box, as if he were camouflage somehow. She didn’t feel so naked, so certain that everyone in the audience knew that her eyes kept straying to the right.