He recognized her instantly.

He had certainly not been mistaken about one thing, he thought. She was quite breathtakingly beautiful, with hair the color of warm honey and blue eyes made smoky by long lashes, and regular, perfect features. And now that she was no longer wearing a cloak, it was obvious that she had a figure to do justice to the face.

So his first guess had been correct, he thought. She was one of the Bedwyn wives.

He felt a curious, quite unreasonable bitterness.

“No apology is necessary,” the duchess assured him. “May I make you known to Miss Jewell, a particular friend of Freyja and Joshua’s? Mr. Butler is Wulfric’s steward at Glandwr,” she explained for the lady’s benefit.

Sydnam bowed and she curtsied. Miss Jewell. Her name suited her well. And she was not one of the wives. But he felt no kindness toward her.

He remembered suddenly that he had dreamed of her last night. She had stood on that path waiting for him, and he had walked close enough to touch her cheek-with the fingertips of his right hand. And he had looked into her lovely blue eyes-with both his own. He had asked her please not to pinch him as it was important never to wake up, and she had told him that they needed to wake up without delay so that they could go searching for his arm, which had fallen over the cliff, before the tide came in and washed it away. It had been one of those strange, bizarre dreams that sometimes have one hovering between reality and fantasy, dreaming but knowing that one dreams.

“Miss Jewell,” he said now.

“Mr. Butler,” she murmured in return.

The duchess took him about the room then, without Miss Jewell’s company, and introduced him to the people he did not know.

He still disliked meeting strangers, though he was long past the stage of trying to keep the right side of his body out of sight. His ugliness had been hard to accept. He had been accustomed to seeing nothing but admiration in the eyes of others-and even adoration in some female eyes. Not that he had taken a great deal of advantage of the latter. He had still been very young when everything changed. And he had never been conceited about his good looks. He had taken them for granted-until they were destroyed forever.

Everyone here had known about him in advance, he realized as he made his way to the dining room a short while later with Miss Eleanor Thompson, the duchess’s sister, on his arm. None of them had openly flinched.

But she had not known-Miss Jewell, that was. She had run from him last night as if he were the devil himself. He found himself resenting her incredible beauty even though he recognized that it was somewhat childish to do so. Some people just had an easy path through life.

He turned his head to note that Morgan was seated on his blind side and set himself to making conversation with her as well as with Miss Thompson. At least, he thought, the kitchen staff here knew him and understood that they must not place anything before him that could not be cut one-handed, preferably with the edge of a fork.

Miss Jewell, he could see, was smiling warmly at Baron Weston beside her and saying something to him that brought an answering smile to his face. She was charming him, enslaving him.

No, he would not dislike her, he decided. Or resent her. Or envy Weston or Alleyne on her other side.

Good Lord, he was not a man normally given to petty jealousies.

Or to spite. Or resentment.

He picked up his soup spoon with his left hand and tackled the first course.

The evening turned out to be slightly less of an ordeal than Anne had anticipated. Not all the guests were aristocrats or the offspring of aristocrats.

Mrs. Pritchard, near whom Anne sat at the dining table, had once earned her living down a Welsh coal mine, and her niece, Lady Aidan Bedwyn, had been brought up as a lady only because her father had made his fortune in coal and then set up as a gentleman on an English estate he had purchased. Lady Rannulf Bedwyn, Anne discovered in the drawing room later, was the daughter of a country clergyman-and the granddaughter of a London actress, she mentioned as something of which she seemed proud. The duchess herself was of the lower gentry class, as she had freely admitted during the morning. Her brother-in-law was a clergyman in a small country parish. Her mother and sister lived together in a cottage in the same parish.

Yet here they all were, as fully accepted by the Bedwyns as if they had all been born with the bluest blood.

It was true, of course, that no one else here at Glandwr had an illegitimate child, but no one treated Anne as if she were a pariah-or as if she had no business being among present company. Indeed, Lady Aidan asked her particularly about her son and laughed when Anne told her how he had been spoiled by teachers and girls alike at Miss Martin’s school.

“Though for his sake I must send him to a boys’ school when he is a little older,” Anne said. “It will be hard-for me if not for him.”

“It will,” Lady Aidan agreed. “We will be sending Davy to school next year when he is twelve, and already I am feeling bereft.”

They exchanged a smile, just two concerned mothers commiserating with each other.

“That poor man,” Mrs. Pritchard said softly in her musical Welsh accent as the gentlemen joined the ladies. “It is a good thing he is not of the working classes. He would never have found employment after the wars were over. He would have become a beggar and starved as so many of those soldiers did.”

“Oh, I am not so sure of that, Aunt Mari,” Lady Aidan said. “There is a thread of steel in him despite his quiet manners. I believe he would have overcome any adversity, even poverty.”

They were talking, Anne realized, of Mr. Butler, about whom she had been feeling horribly guilty all evening and whom she had consequently avoided even looking at-though she had been aware of him almost every moment.

“What happened to him?” she asked.

“War,” Lady Aidan said. “He followed his brother, Viscount Ravensberg, to the Peninsula against everyone’s wishes but his own. His brother brought him home not long after, more dead than alive. But he recovered, and eventually he offered his services to Wulfric and came here. That all happened before I met Aidan, who was still a cavalry colonel in the Peninsula at the time, the superior officer of my brother, who never came home. How glad I am that the wars are over at last.”

It was some time later when Anne noticed that Mr. Butler was seated alone in a far corner of the room after all the groups had just rearranged themselves with the setting up of some card tables. She herself was with Miss Thompson and the Earl and Countess of Rosthorn, all of whom had declined a place at the tables. But Anne stood and excused herself before she could lose her courage. She could not allow the whole evening to go by without speaking to Mr. Butler, though she doubted he would have any wish to speak with her.

He looked up sharply when he saw her approach and then got to his feet.

“Miss Jewell,” he said.

Something in his manner and voice told her that indeed he would have preferred to remain alone, that he did not like her-but she could hardly blame him for that, could she?

She looked into his face and quite deliberately adjusted her focus so that she looked at both sides. He wore a black patch over his right eye-or perhaps over where his right eye had been. The rest of that side of his face was covered from brow to jaw and on down his neck with purplish burn marks. His empty right sleeve was pinned to the side of his evening coat.

He was, she noticed, half a head taller than she-and she had not been mistaken about his broad chest and shoulders. He was clearly not a man who had wallowed in his disabilities.