His face jerked up when he heard her voice, but she slipped away without a backward glance and dashed through the tall windows into the crowded ballroom before he even moved. And when Alex cursed and sprinted after her, he couldn’t distinguish her among all the cloaks and dominoes and masks moving about the floor. Burnt yellow silk brushed shoulders with rose cotton and the occasional greeny gold taffeta. Men dressed in shabby black coats peppered the floor. But there wasn’t a slender girl wearing a black domino to be seen.

Alex sighed. The girl couldn’t have just disappeared. She must have rejoined her party. And like a guilty thief, struck with remorse and eager to compensate for his crimes, he needed to find her. With a muttered curse he mentally divided the room into quarters and then patiently wove through each quarter, surveying all the young women who reached his shoulder. But he couldn’t find her. Yet even when he knew rationally that she must have left the ball, he kept searching, doggedly, until the dance closed down.

She was gone. And whoever she was, she’d gone with her loss of virginity, and he’d paid nothing. But that wasn’t it, and he knew it. He wanted to see her again. The thief was only hiding behind a wish to compensate for his crimes: In fact, he wanted her, with an urgency that made him feel slightly insane. He wanted to reclaim that lovely, untouched body, to kiss away her little pants, to repeat the crime again and again and again.

The odd thing was that she sounded like a lady. And she looked like a lady. But of course no ladies came to the Cyprians’ Ball on a Saturday night, and so she was just a very clever whore—but what was a whore thinking, to give away her most prized possession for free, in the gardens? Alex left the ball in a ferocious temper.

That night he woke from dreams of wild seduction completely confused, gazing around his room as if he’d never seen it before. His garden girl … her body had been just there, and he had been tracing the shape of her breast with his tongue, and she was moaning in his arms. For some reason she had stolen into his mind and wouldn’t go away.

For a few weeks Alex treasured the hope that he’d receive some sort of a ransom note from her protectors or perhaps even from her parents, if she were a serving girl rather than a whore. He rather hoped she was; he would protect her, and find her a house in London, a quiet little house. But there never was a note.