“I see.” Ginny faced him quietly. “I think there’s more to it than that. Is there something you don’t want to tell me, something to do with us?”

“Not tonight.” He bent, took her chin in his palm and kissed her swiftly, more to silence the questions than to serve a need, but that swiftly altered when she caught his lower lip in her teeth, a gentle, warning nip.

“Don’t lie to me, Steve Morgan,” she whispered when she relinquished his bottom lip, “Honesty, remember?”

He touched his lip with one finger, faintly amused by her vehemence. “Vicious little hellcat.”

“I would think you’d remember that.”

“And I was beginning to think you’d grown timid lately. I see how mistaken I’ve been in thinking you have tempered with time.”

She smiled. “Let’s just say I’ve grown wiser and less patient. Shall we go back inside? After all, we came to be seen, I believe. We’re quite the talk of the town now, I understand, the scandalous Mr. and Mrs. Morgan, with rumors about us as thick as a swarm of bees. I’ve had no less than three gentlemen ask me tonight if it’s true that I am a Russian princess.”

“And what did you reply?”

“That of course I am, and I expect to be treated as royalty.”

He palmed a fat, loose curl of coppery hair that lay upon her bare shoulder, shining against her alabaster skin like bright silk. Feathery strands curled around his finger in a soft caress. Regretfully, he released her hair, his hand remaining on her shoulder.

“I have to leave you for a little while, Ginny. Try to miss me.”

“Leave the ball?”

“No, I have some business matters to attend upstairs. I won’t be long, so don’t think you’re rid of me that easily.”

“I wish I believed that.”

“You should,” he said lightly, “because it’s true.”

On the surface, it was true. A few of the cabinet members were in attendance tonight, and in his new role as ambassador from Mexico, he was expected to join in the discussion about a possible international crisis. Since Juarez’s death in 1872, his successor, Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, a chief justice of the supreme court, had been unpopular. Lerdo was a liberal anticlerical, hated because he did not flinch from using the power of the state to enforce his policies. Porfirio Díaz had risen again to grasp power from him, and now revolution seethed.

“Disraeli will be here,” Lord Sedgwick had murmured to him earlier, “instead of dancing attendance on the queen.”

Disraeli, prime minister of England and newly made earl of Beaconsfield, was a powerful man in the confidence of Queen Victoria. His predecessor, Gladstone, had been hated by the widowed monarch. It was likely that England would lean toward the policies favored by Disraeli in regard to the civil unrest in Mexico. Peace was always tenuous.