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mutter.
    Politeness bade her ask him to sit down. He accepted and sat beside her in silence, also most unlike him. Surely etiquette demanded he make some comment on the weather.
    “A charming notion of Lady Fitzmonroe’s,” she said, doing her duty. She sipped the champagne and managed not to make a face. Accustomed by now to the bubbles and the drying effect on her mouth, she was still striving to get used to the taste.
    “All this?” he asked, pushing aside a stray sprig of jasmine that seemed to want to tickle his face. “It seems a lot of effort for something that will fade by tomorrow afternoon.”
    “But surely any effort is worthwhile if it creates such beauty. It reminds me of the late queen of France’s Petite Trianon. Not that I ever saw it. But my father did, a few years before the Revolution.”
    “So did mine. A pretty piece of make-believe. Lady Fitzmonroe has done very well, considering she hasn’t the entire resources of France at her disposal. We might be deep in the middle of the country, no one around for miles.”
    “Except for the orchestra,” Rose reminded him. She had never seen Sir Niles in a sportive mood. She wondered if anyone ever had. She also wondered if that was his first glass of champagne. But surely so famed a gamester couldn’t be fuddled by any amount of champagne.
    “Played by talented sheep, perhaps? Bows held in their little black hooves?”
    “And harps plucked by their curly little horns,” Rose said, entranced by the image.
    “With a dog for conductor.”
    “Using a shepherd’s crook to beat the time!”
    Rose smiled into Sir Niles’s eyes. But his expression did not match the lightness of his tone. On the contrary, his gaze seemed to burn with an intensity of purpose, in strange contrast to his usual languid manner. Deliberately, he took the cold champagne flute from her hand and put it, together with his, on the floor.
    Rose felt a peculiar jumpy sensation in her breast, as though all the champagne bubbles had gathered in one spot and were lifting her heart.
    He turned more fully toward her, his hand falling to the seat of the rustic bench they shared. Had he moved it even slightly, he could have touched her knee. She was aware of it as she might be aware of a box of poisoned bonbons. It would be fatally easy to be tempted into doing what would only rebound poorly tomorrow. “Miss Spenser ... Rose. I wonder if you have ever felt...”
    Rose opened her eyes wide. “Ever felt... what?” she prompted.
    But his former cool manner returned. He straightened his back and looked past her ear. Then Rose heard what his quicker senses had already caught.
    The sound of feminine laughter, laughter Rose recognized, though with an added flirtatious lilt.
    “La, General! How you military men ever have time for battles!”
    With a whisk and whirl of her sheer silk scarf, Aunt Paige arrived at the bench and slid to a stop, surprise lifting her eyebrows as she spied her niece. “Rose?”
    A large, middle-aged officer, his thinning rust-colored, hair out of harmony with his scarlet uniform, peered at her through slightly protuberant eyes. ‘This your little niece, eh? A pleasure.” Then he saw Sir Miles. “Alardyce, isn’t it?”
    “How do you do, sir?”
    “By Saint Pat, it’s good to see you again, my boy.” The general let a hint of Irish brogue slip into his otherwise cultured tone. He was shaking Sir Niles’s hand as though assuring himself it was securely attached.
    “And you, sir,” Sir Niles said, but his voice was swallowed up by the general’s emphatic announcement.
    “I haven’t seen Alardyce since ... let me see. You rode up, gave us the order to advance, and rode off. I made sure you were lost in the next volley.”
    “Not lost, sir. Temporarily mislaid.”
    “Eh? Oh, Frenchies got you?”
    “Only for half a day, sir. When they were routed, they left their prisoners behind.”
    “Ah, yes. In all m’life, I’ve never seen a prettier sight than the