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the soft silk of her gown. Once on it suited her even more perfectly than she had expected, the colour of the chiffon doing impossibly glamorous things for her colouring.
    As she looked up she saw that Dee’s cousin Harry was watching her rather anxiously. She smiled reassuringly at him as they waited in the receiving line to be greeted by their host and hostess. She had known from the moment he arrived to pick her up that she was going to like Harry. He was that kind of man—solid, dependable, reassuring, as comfortable as a familiar solid armchair, with the kind of down-to-earth, healthy good looks that typified a certain type of very English male. Just having him standing there beside her made her feel not merely remarkably better about the scheme which Dee had dreamt up but somehow extraordinarily feminine and protected. It was rather a novel sensation for Kelly, who had never been the type of woman to feel that she needed a man to lean on in any shape or form.
    ‘That colour really suits you,’ Harry told her earnestly as he arched his neck a little uncomfortably, as though he longed to be free of the restriction of his formal dinner suit.
    ‘Dee chose it,’ Kelly informed him, adding truthfully, ‘I feel rather like Cinderella being equipped for the ball by her fairy godmother... Although...’ She paused and then stopped. There was no point in discussing with Harry her doubts about what she was doing.
    They had reached the line-up of dignitaries now. Kelly smiled mischievously as she caught the discreetly admiring second look the Lord Lieutenant of the county gave her before he shook her hand.
    It’s all right, it’s not me, it’s the dress, she wanted to reassure his rather austere-looking wife, but then, remembering her new role as a femme fatale, instead she gave him a demure little smile plus a wickedly sultry look from beneath lowered lashes. It worked... His Lordship might be close on sixty, but there was no doubt that he was still a very virile man—at least if the look he was giving her was anything to go by.
    Perhaps the evening wasn’t going to be so much of a challenge to her thespian talents as she had originally believed, Kelly mused as they passed down the line and then turned to accept a glass of champagne from one of the hovering waiters.
    As Kelly already knew, the tickets for the ball had been unbelievably expensive, with only a relatively small number available, but, as she glanced appreciatively at her surroundings, she could well understand why.
    Instead of more conventionally attaching a large marquee to the house to accommodate the event, guests were allowed to wander at will through the elegant antique-furnished reception rooms. Her own Regency-inspired dress couldn’t have been more felicitously in keeping with the decor, Kelly recognised, her attention caught by a pretty inlaid Chinese lacquered cabinet in one corner of the room, its shelves filled with what she suspected were Sèvres figurines.
    Touching Harry’s arm, she pointed it out to him.
    ‘I’d like to go over and have a closer look,’ she told him. Nodding, Harry gallantly forged ahead to make a pathway through the throng of people now filling the hallway.
    Kelly had almost reached her destination when abruptly she stopped dead. There, not a dozen feet away from her, stood Julian Cox. He hadn’t seen her as yet. He was busy talking with a pretty fair-haired young woman standing with him. In looks she was very similar to Beth, Kelly recognised, and she looked somehow as though she too possessed the same gentleness of nature that so characterised her best friend.
    She doubted very much that that same description could be applied to the man standing on the opposite side of her. Tall, with incredibly powerful shoulders and frowning heavily, he looked extremely formidable and extremely masculine, Kelly recognised as her heart gave a sudden unsteady lurch against her ribs and her breathing quickened idiotically.
    As