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room one more time.
    No, that was the last thing he needed. Harry connected in any fashion to this mystery.
    “My lord?” Miss Murray prodded.
    “Oh, yes, my parents. I was ever so young to have lost them. Both of them. Gone.” Roxley did his best to appear brokenhearted and in need of comforting.
    “Terrible,” she agreed.
    “It brings to mind my family motto,” he said a bit wistfully. He leaned back and looked off into the distance, across the expanse of Lady Knolles’s crowded ballroom, as if he was seeing something lost in time.
    And not as if he was looking for Harriet.
    Which was impossible, he reminded himself. She was safely ensconced back in Kempton. Where she belonged. Far from his ruin.
    “Your family motto?” Miss Murray repeated.
    “ Ad usque fidelis ,” he confided.
    Miss Murray blinked and tried to look like she understood every word.
    “ Ad usque fidelis ,” a lady off to one side repeated, her Latin impeccable. “Unto fidelity. And here I’d always been led to believe, Roxley, your motto meant ‘Marry well and cheat often.’ ”
    Trying to breathe and not look, Roxley stilled his quaking heart—for he knew exactly what he’d see once he did look—a tall, willowy wisp of a lady, with her coal black hair, and those eyes—those demmed green eyes that could look right through a fellow. Grab his heart and never let go.
    Harry!
    Roxley, who had flinched the moment he’d heard her dulcet tones, recovered enough composure to turn to his right, where his great-aunt’s always meddlesome prodigy stood, picking absently at the blades of her fan, the toe of her slipper digging at the dance floor as if seeking out a stone to kick.
    She looked up, her expression a mirror of surprise, as if she’d just noticed him there.
    As. If.
    It struck the earl that Harriet Hathaway’s sole purpose in life was to drive him mad. Had been since the first day they’d met all those years ago.
    And speaking of driving him mad—he glanced around the room, and yes, there she was. Aunt Essex.
    Of course.
    In the meantime, Lady Kipps, taking to heart her self-appointed role as the guardian of Miss Murray, eyed Harriet with all the feral delight of a cat who’d just discovered a pack of lame mice at her dish.
    Oh, Lady Kipps , Roxley mused, sensing an impending disaster, when will you learn?
    Roxley knew all too well it would take more than Lady Kipps’s haughty and murderous disdain to dent Harriet’s pluck.
    He straightened, knowing what must be done and hating himself all the more for having to do it. “Harry, my aunt appears to be looking for you.” He nodded in the lady’s direction—well across the ballroom.
    Her wrinkled nose said she hardly appreciated his use of her family nickname, the one she always shed the moment she set foot in London. Well, she’d always be Harry to him, no matter how hard she tried to appear the perfect miss. “No, she isn’t,” she replied without looking, and continued on. “As we were discussing, isn’t that how the Marshoms translate their family motto, ‘Marry well and cheat often’?” She smiled. “I did get that right, didn’t I, Roxley?”
    “What is this about cheating and marriage?” Lady Kipps demanded, first of Roxley and then of Harriet, whom she had never liked. “Better still, what do you know of these things, Miss Hathaway?” The sneer in her address held every doubt of Harriet’s place in good society.
    Roxley flinched again, for heaven help him, he couldn’t imagine what Harry was going to say next.
    And if he’d known, he would have wisely sought refuge behind the punch bowl.
    “Of cheating and marriage, you ask? Enough, I suppose,” Harriet replied with all the aplomb of a woman with a noble bloodline that ran back for ages. Oh, her father might be only a knight, but the Hathaways had been raised up by Henry V. She tapped her fan onto the palm of her hand, as one might have brandished a halberd, and she turned to face down her adversary as