“What?” Ridgeway gave him a narrow glance. “Another heiress, do you mean?”

“Yes,” Jasper said. “Exactly that. Someone who . . .”

Someone who didn’t nearly faint at the sight of him. Who wasn’t afraid to look him in the face.

From anyone else, he could have tolerated well-bred disgust. It was a frequent enough reaction to his appearance. But he couldn’t accept it from her.

“Blast it,” he muttered under his breath. “This shouldn’t be so complicated.”

“It isn’t.” Ridgeway reached for his coat and tugged it on. “You require an heiress with no family or connections—no one to ask questions about you or to come snooping to Yorkshire. The only heiress who fits the bill is Julia Wychwood. If not her, then you may as well let the bailiffs take your estate.”

Jasper ran a hand through his hair in frustration. The bailiffs. Bloody hell. It wasn’t going to come to that, was it? Not after everything he’d already risked to forge a new life for himself.

Ridgeway laughed. “The look on your face. One would think you were too high-minded to follow through with it.”

An image of Miss Wychwood materialized in Jasper’s mind, her sapphire blue eyes shining vividly from behind her black net riding veil.

I believe I owe you an apology.

She’d taken him completely off of his guard. Had puzzled and disarmed him.

Was she really who she appeared to be? A sickly wallflower heiress, ripe for the plucking?

He was beginning to have his doubts. “I might be.”

“Bah,” Ridgeway scoffed. “That’s not the man my brother wrote to me about during the war. The cruel, ruthless, bloodthirsty Captain Blunt who had all of his men shivering in their boots. Surely, you remember him?”

“Only too well,” Jasper said grimly.

“Do you? Because it sometimes seems to me that you’re not that man at all.”

Jasper’s gaze jerked to Ridgeway’s face. There seemed to be no ulterior meaning in his words. No hint of a threat. “I may well have been ruthless,” he replied, “but never with women. And never outside times of war.”

“My dear fellow, this is a war,” Ridgeway said. “It’s the London season.”

Two

Julia sat immobile on the silk damask–cushioned bench in front of her carved walnut dressing table as her lady’s maid, Mary, put the final touches on her evening coiffure. It was a pretty enough style—a cascade of tightly pinned rolls at the back, secured with dozens of hairpins and several spritzes of liquid bandoline.

Julia hardly noticed it.

She turned the page of the small blue clothbound volume of Lady Audley’s Secret on her lap, her attention fully engaged by author Mrs. Braddon’s lavish prose. Never mind that she’d read the story countless times before.

“Miss Lucy Graham was blessed with that magic power of fascination, by which a woman can charm with a word or intoxicate with a smile,” Julia read aloud. It was one of her favorite lines in the entire book. “Can you imagine, Mary?”