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way. No kiss was worth losing the security of her current situation.
    He surprised her. “Don’t say no to me yet,” he said. “Say no to me in the park, when I ask you if you would like to go to the opera with me the following night.”
    Octavia laughed in spite of herself. “If we are both so enamored as we claimed, this is not a wise liaison to encourage. And I should see to my other guests.”
    He stood, holding his still-full glass of brandy. And then he surprised her again by extending his other hand. She offered hers, instinctively, and he bowed over it. “It was a pleasure to renew our acquaintance, Madame Octavia.”
    Then he brushed his lips over her knuckles. It was entirely proper, entirely unremarkable.
    And yet….
    She wore gloves, but she suddenly wished that she could strip them off. Or perhaps that he would strip them off — let her feel his skin against hers as her fingers curled within his grip. He kissed her hand, but he looked into her eyes.
    She knew he was charming. Charm like that could hide all sorts of secrets. But in that single moment, she thought she saw something more than charm. Not love — she wasn’t stupid enough to believe it was love. And not exactly lust, either. She’d seen that often enough. He didn’t look at her the way a man looked at a woman whom he believed would fall easily into his bed.
    No — it was curiosity, and intrigue, and some moment of shared connection. Nothing stronger than that — and yet, was there anything better than a moment when the rest of the world fell away and the only two people left within it were entranced by each other?
    Her breath caught.
    He dropped her hand, slowly, and gave her a rueful smile. “You were right. This may not be wise.”
    It wasn’t wise. Her life with Somerville was safe.
    Lord Rafael couldn’t replace that.
    But she had never wanted to make a mistake more than she wanted to make this one.
    “I cannot go riding with you, my lord,” she said. “But you may call on me next week and try to convince me.”
    For one swift moment, so fast that she later told herself she hadn’t seen it, she thought she saw triumph in his gaze. But then that rueful smile was back. “I shall have to think of something better than opera tickets to tempt you with. Until then, Madame Octavia.”
    She nodded. He left, and she forced herself not to watch as he walked toward the card room. She smiled instead at the men who hovered beyond him, inviting them into her circle again. Somerville wanted her to gauge the reaction his peers were having to his latest speeches in Parliament. She couldn’t do that while talking to someone like Lord Rafael, who didn’t have a vote and so wasn’t there to hear them.
    But that didn’t mean she forgot about him. She had lost Maidenstone. She had lost Lucy. She had lost Julian, and her grandfather, and her parents, and everyone else who had ever mattered. She perhaps should have been more concerned about losing Somerville as well — there wasn’t any passion between them, but he gave her everything else that she needed.
    Money and security should have been enough. But when another man kissed her hand later in the evening, she wished he hadn’t, so that the memory of Lord Rafael’s lips wasn’t overlaid by his. And when Somerville smiled at her from across the room, with that distant, vaguely worried air he’d been giving her for weeks, she sighed.
    Money and security should have been enough.
    But nothing was ever enough. She was still Octavia Briarley, still ruined. The ruin she'd brought upon herself, in a single misjudged moment, with a single kiss, was something she couldn't escape. No one in England would ever forget it.
    They might have forgiven her, eventually. If she had done what they expected her to do — if she had gone to the country, and worn her shame like a cloak around her — they might have let her marry. Someone desperate, of course — some man who needed a wife with a decent dowry