For her part, Charlotte felt as if she had been waiting her whole life for this moment. There was her beloved, beloved footman at the top of the stairs, in his green domino with his silver-shot hair. But he looked for her this time. And when Alex’s eyes met hers, a message of such tender passion passed between them that she shivered and had to hang on to Narcissus’s cool stone arm in order to catch her balance.

Then her shiver turned into a grin. Alex was striding through the ballroom as if the servants, merchants, and the rest didn’t exist. No one, watching his combination of unconscious arrogance and effortless grace, could reasonably think him a footman. Even in a cloak some five years old he was clothed in the nameless confidence of high blood matched by high intelligence. Finally, after an eternity, he stood before her.

Her hair was powdered. Her skin was so white that her hair had to be red. She was wearing a black domino, and sheltering herself in the shadow of a statue. She was herself … she was his garden girl … she was Charlotte.

Without missing a beat, Alex wrapped his wife in his green domino and kissed her so possessively, so lovingly, and so passionately that Charlotte’s knees gave way and she had to cling to him for balance. She slid her hands inside his formal black coat, hands drifting over the faintly rough texture of his fine lawn shirt, over the muscled expanse of his back.

Alex looked down at her from underneath his black eyelashes. “I should kill you for this trick,” he said, his voice hoarse with emotion. “Or I should kill myself for being such an utter, unmitigated idiot.”

Charlotte grinned up at him impudently, still leaning against his chest.

“Happy birthday, love.”

“Vixen,” Alex growled, bending his head again.

When a patron of the ever-popular Cyprians’ Ball swept through the throng of revelers holding a woman in his arms and headed up the stairs, hardly anyone in the assembly spared him a second glance. And the fact that the man in the green domino pulled his amour into his lap the minute they were settled in the carriage, without exchanging a word, would have been considered unsurprising as well. It wasn’t until much later that night—nearly morning, actually—that the Earl and Countess of Sheffield and Downes had the time and breath to discuss the earl’s birthday present.