"Can you make a place for an old man-an under-butler? I want him out of my sight."

"Of course," she said, and then cautiously she added, "Could you tell me why you want him out of your sight?"

"He was Burleton's butler, and I don't ever want to see anyone or anything that reminds me of her."

Clayton looked up from the papers he was studying as Whitney walked into his study, her face stricken. Alarm brought him quickly to his feet and around his desk. "What's wrong?"

"Stephen was just here," she said in a choked voice. "He looks awful, he sounds awful. He doesn't even want Burleton's servant around because the man reminds him of her. His pride wasn't all that suffered when she left. He loved her," she said vehemently, her green eyes shimmering with frustrated tears. "I knew he did!"

"It's over," Clayton said with soft finality. "She's gone and it's over. Stephen will come around."

"Not at this rate!"

"He has a different woman on his arm every night," he told her. "I can assure you he's a long way from becoming a recluse."

"He has shut himself away, even from me," she argued. "I can feel it, and I'll tell you something else. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Sheridan Bromleigh wasn't playacting about anything, including her feelings for Stephen."

"She was an ambitious schemer, and a gifted one. It would take a miracle to convince me otherwise," he stated flatly, walking back around his desk.

Hodgkin stared at his employer in stricken silence. "I-I am to be dismissed, milord? Was it something I did, or did not do, or-"

"I've arranged for you to work in my brother's home. That's all."

"But was I derelict in any of my duties, or-"

"NO!" Stephen snapped, turning away. "It has nothing to do with anything you've done." Normally he never interfered with the hiring or dismissal or discipline of the household staff, and he should have left this unpleasant task to his secretary, he realized.

The old man's shoulders sagged. Stephen watched him shuffle off, moving like a man who was ten years older than he'd been when he walked in.

44

It was a mistake to seek Stephen out, even from this safe distance, and Sherry knew it, but she couldn't seem to help herself. He'd told her he went to the opera on most Thursdays, and she wanted-needed-to see him just one more time before she left England. She'd written to her aunt three weeks ago, the day after her aborted wedding, explaining everything that had happened and asking Cornelia to send her enough money for passage home. In the meantime, Sherry had secured a position as governess to a large family without the means to hire a more desirable, older woman or the sense to verify the recommendation letter Nicholas DuVille had given her with Charity Thornton's name listed as a secondary reference-a reference that Sherry suspected the elderly lady knew nothing about.

The crowded pit at Covent Garden was occupied by boisterous, restless people who stepped on Sherry's feet and bumped her shoulder constantly, but she scarcely noticed. Her eyes were on the empty box, the seventh from the front, and she stared at it until the gilt flowers and stars on the front of it began to blur and merge. Time ticked past and the ruckus within the opera house rose to a deafening roar. The curtains behind the seventh box suddenly parted and Sherry froze, panicked because she was finally going to see him… and then she was devastated because she did not see him in the group at all.

She must have miscounted, she thought wildly, and began to count each box, searching the aristocratic faces of its occupants. Each box was separated from its neighbor by a slender gold pillar, and from each pillar a cut-glass chandelier was suspended. Sherry counted and recounted them, then she looked at her hands in her lap, clasping them tightly to stop their trembling. He wasn't coming tonight. He'd given his box to others. It would be another week before she could come again, providing she saved enough money to buy another ticket.

The orchestra gave out a blast of sound, the crimson curtains swept open, and Sherry mentally counted the minutes, ignoring the music she had once loved, glancing up compulsively at the two empty seats in the box, willing to see him there, and when she didn't, praying that he would be there when she looked again.

He arrived between the first and second acts, without her seeing him enter the box or take his seat-a dark spectre from the mists of her memory who materialized into the realm of her reality and made her heart thunder. Her eyes clung to his hard, handsome face, memorizing it, worshipping it, as she blinked away the sheen of tears that blurred her vision.

He hadn't loved her, she reminded herself, torturing herself with the sight of him, she'd merely been a responsibility he'd mistakenly assumed. She knew all that, but it didn't stop her from looking at his chiseled lips and remembering how softly they had touched hers, or from gazing at his rugged profile and remembering how his slow dazzling smile could transform his entire face.

Sheridan was not the only woman whose attention wasn't on the performance. On the opposite side of the theatre, in the Duke of Claymore's box, Victoria Fielding, Marchioness of Wakefield, was staring hard at the occupants of the pit, searching for the young woman she'd glimpsed earlier making her way into the opera house. "I know the woman I saw was Charise Lanc-I mean Sheridan Bromleigh," Victoria whispered to Whitney. "She was in the lines going into the pit. Wait-there she is!" she exclaimed in a low voice. "She's wearing a dark blue bonnet."

Oblivious to the curious looks of their husbands, who were seated behind them, the two friends peered hard at the woman in question, their shoulders so close together that Victoria's auburn hair nearly touched the glossy dark strands of Whitney's.

"If only she didn't have that bonnet on, we'd know her in a minute by the color of her hair!"

Whitney didn't need to see the color of her hair. For the next half hour, the woman in question never looked anywhere but at Stephen's box, and it was confirmation enough. "She hasn't stopped looking at him," Victoria said, her voice filled with some of the same confusion and sorrow that Whitney felt about the sudden disappearance and behavior of Stephen's fiancee. "Do you suppose she knew he would be here tonight?"

Whitney nodded, willing the young woman to look in her direction for just a moment, instead of the opposite one. "She knows Stephen comes here on Thursday nights and that he has that box. She was here with him a few days before she… vanished." Vanished was the least damning thing Whitney could say at the moment, which was why she chose the word. Victoria and Jason Fielding, who were also friends of Stephen's, were two of the very few people amongst the ton who were privy to most of the full story because they'd been invited to attend the small celebration that had been planned for after the private affair.

"Do you think she intends to meet him 'accidentally' for some reason?"

"I don't know," Whitney whispered back.

Behind them, their husbands observed the pretty pair who were ignoring a rather excellent performance. "What is that all about?" Clayton murmured to Jason Fielding, tipping his head toward their two wives.

"Someone must have the gown of the century on."