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the woman’s defense had prodded his old shame to lash out. On seeing her whitened cheeks, he’d regretted right away setting her up for sport. Too late—the damage had been done.
    He sighed. He should have been inured to feeling left out, and jealousy over the scholar’s life was only ridiculous self-indulgence at this point. The bookish woman, however, had a strange way of provoking his demons. She’d reacted with such courageous hurt that he could tell she, too, was accustomed to being made an outsider.
    Callista: he savored the name. Gorgeous gray eyes—he’d caught mere flashes—luminous, heavily ringed by black lashes and winged brows, yet haunted somehow. Porcelain cream skin, but so pale across the cheeks and shadowed under those lovely eyes. A tall, elegant frame, almost painfully thin—except, he’d noted, for a most pert little bosom. And hair he was ready to bet she would loathe to have described as red. Perhaps one could charitably call it a rich auburn brown, but he would put down money that, unpinned and unwound from those damnably tight braids and that chignon, her hair would be a vivid Titian red.
    He’d tried at first to be as lightly flirtatious with his new librarian as he was with the other ladies—indeed as he was with all ladies. But she just threw him fleeting glances from those serious gray eyes and refused to reply in kind. So he’d watched her throughout the meal and tried to figure her out; it was an old seducer’s trick—pay attention not to a woman’s words, but to the tone of their delivery, to her hand gestures and the movement of her body. In the case of the Honorable Miss Higginbotham, everything about her bespoke caution, reserve—even fear. He’d never met a woman who held herself so stiffly, with such an air of tense fragility radiating from that rigid spine. She cut her food with obsessive precision and drank very sparingly, although she ate surprisingly well for someone so thin. Had she gone hungry recently? She’d held her own with the company but hadn’t smiled once during the meal—not even while talking with the professors.
    What in blazes made someone so tautly controlled?
    And what made him so intrigued?
    You’re getting jaded, old boy.
    Self-disdain was no new emotion. What did surprise him, as he walked through the library’s heavy double doors, was the itch tingling through his veins to see her again. His prickly librarian put him off his stride, yet despite his careening emotions around her, he found he rather welcomed the novel sensation.
    It was his favorite time of day to be in the room. The late-afternoon sun slanted in low through the west windows overlooking St. James’s Square and cast the room in a rich golden glow. As a boy, he’d often hidden among these lengthening shadows to devour books his father and tutor had said scathingly were far beyond him. Pacing now into the chamber, the sight of its occupant brought him up short and lifted the corner of his lip.
    The oh-so-correct Honorable Miss Higginbotham was tucked in his favorite leather armchair by the low-burning hearth, asleep. One hand held a blue-bound book on her lap and the other pillowed her cheek in a childlike gesture that broadened his smile.
    He approached quietly. As a gentleman, he admonished himself for spying on a lady in a private moment, but the devil in him found it impossible to resist.
    Relaxed in sleep, she no longer gave off such a formidable impression of tight-lipped, grim determination. She was a handsome woman, although her looks were far more challenging than Anna’s petite and blond prettiness. She was quite tall for one thing, coming up even to above his chin, he’d noticed earlier. A strong jaw and high brow framed her face, centered by a nose he’d call . . . assertive, he decided, cocking his head for a better look. And her lips, soft in repose, had a tantalizing bow