A scowl contracted his brow. He should never have kissed her. He certainly hadn’t planned to. But the moment had been too fraught with emotion to allow for anything like concrete plans. For the first time since he’d met her, she’d been vulnerable. Frightened, trembling, and in need of reassurance. That’s all it had been to begin with, an effort to reassure her.

Until Gabriel had taken it further.

He blamed the circumstances. The moonlight, the music, the fact that he’d just climbed to her aid.

And he blamed himself.

He’d spent the better part of the evening vowing that he wouldn’t be twined around her finger like the other hapless men in her wake. And yet, when it came to the point, the temptation of her soft, trembling lips had proved too great to resist.

In that moment, Gabriel had succumbed to the same bewildering, overpowering desire that had caught him in its grip the night he’d loomed over her in Compton’s library. Then, it had been only his pulse that had reacted. This time it had been every part of him.

He scrubbed the side of his jaw as he walked, forcing himself to think with his head.

She’d been on the terrace outside of Compton’s rooms. And she’d had a small taper candle and a silver match case secured to the tapes of her wire crinoline. Gabriel had caught a brief glimpse of them as Effie had lifted her skirts to climb over the rail.

She was up to something—had been since the first night he’d met her. Something sinister by the looks of it. Doubtless she’d been searching Compton’s bedchamber the same way she’d attempted to search the man’s desk. To what purpose? And what had she meant that someone had once been grievously injured rescuing her from the roof of a building? A roof, by God!

His chest constricted. The thought of her falling—

But no.

No.

He was determined to approach this logically.

As he continued alone through the moonlit garden, he catalogued what he knew about her. It was precious little, and most of it hearsay. She had been finished in Paris, and was by way of being Lord and Lady Belwood’s ward. Her instincts were charitable, as illustrated by her visit to St. Giles and to an Epping Forest girls’ orphanage. And she had a bluestocking spirit, as evidenced by the conversation they’d shared at dinner.

But though she spoke, dressed, and moved like a lady of the first rank, she regularly engaged in distinctly unladylike activities. Searching gentlemen’s desks and bedchambers. Dressing in widow’s weeds and traveling about the city without a maid. And who could forget the razor tip on her parasol?

What it all meant, he didn’t know. But as he departed Compton’s house that evening, Gabriel was determined to find out.

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