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the watch.
    In the end, she paid ten sous for the filthy, foul-smelling thing, and if she’d dragged negotiations out much longer, Dain thought, Champtois would have ended by paying her to take it.
    Dain had never before seen the hard-nosed Champtois reduced to such agony, and he couldn’t understand why. Certainly, when Miss Jessica Trent finally left the shop—taking her brother with her, thank heaven—the only agony Lord Dain experienced was a headache, which he ascribed to spending nearly an hour, sober, in Bertie Trent’s company.
     
     
    Later that evening, in a private chamber of his favorite den of iniquity, which went by the innocent name of Vingt-Huit , Lord Dain regaled his companions with a description of the farce, as he called it.
    “Ten sous?” Roland Vawtry said, laughing. “Trent’s sister talked Champtois down from forty to ten? By gad, I wish I’d been there.”
    “Well, it’s plain now what happened, isn’t it?” said Malcolm Goodridge. “She was born first. Since she got all the intelligence, there wasn’t a crumb left for Trent.”
    “Did she get all the looks, too?” Francis Beaumont asked as he refilled Dain’s wineglass.
    “I could not detect the smallest resemblance in coloring, features, or physique.” Dain sipped his wine.
    “That’s all?” Beaumont asked. “Are you going to leave us in suspense? What does she look like?”
    Dain shrugged. “Black hair, grey eyes. Something near five and a half feet, and between seven and eight stone.”
    “Weighed her, did you?” Goodridge asked, grinning. “Would you say the seven to eight stone was well distributed?”
    “How the devil should I know? How could anyone know, with all those corsets and bustles and whatever else females stuff and strap themselves into? It’s all tricks and lies, isn’t it, until they’re naked.” He smiled. “Then it’s other kinds of lies.”
    “Women do not lie, my lord Dain,” came a faintly accented voice from the door. “It merely seems so because they exist in another reality.” The Comte d’Esmond entered, and gently closed the door behind him.
    Though he acknowledged Esmond with a careless nod, Dain was very glad to see him. Beaumont had a sly way of getting out of people precisely what they least wished to reveal. Though Dain was up to his tricks, he resented the concentration needed to deflect the cur.
    With Esmond present, Beaumont would not be able to attend to anyone else. Even Dain found the count distracting at times, albeit not for the same reasons. Esmond was about as beautiful as a man could be without looking remotely like a woman. He was slim, blond, and blue-eyed, with the face of an angel.
    When he’d first introduced them a week earlier, Beaumont had laughingly suggested they ask his wife, who was an artist, to paint them together. “She could title it ‘Heaven and Hell,’” he’d said.
    Beaumont wanted Esmond very badly. Esmond wanted Beaumont’s wife. And she didn’t want anybody.
    Dain found the situation deliciously amusing.
    “You’re just in time, Esmond,” said Goodridge. “Dain had an adventure today. There is a young lady newly arrived in Paris—and of all things, it’s Dain she runs into first. And he talked to her.”
    All the world knew Dain refused to have any dealings whatsoever with respectable women.
    “Bertie Trent’s sister,” Beaumont explained. There was a vacant chair beside him, and everyone knew who it was intended for. But Esmond wandered to Dain’s side and leaned on the back of his chair. To torment Beaumont, of course. Esmond only looked like an angel.
    “Ah, yes,” he said. “She does not at all resemble him. Obviously it is Genevieve she takes after.”
    “I might have known,” Beaumont said, refilling his own glass. “Met her already, have you? And did she take after you, Esmond?”
    “I encountered Trent and his kinswomen a short while ago at Tortoni’s,” Esmond said. “The restaurant was in an uproar.