“Not what I read,” Josie said with a burst of reckless honesty. “I like to read books published by the Minerva Press.”

He laughed at that.

“They’re really very good.”

“Adventures, escapes, damsels in peril—why Josie, I hardly know you! Aren’t you the one who’s afraid of riding, even though you love horses?”

“It’s impolite of you to mention it.”

“Well, I’m about to get even more impolite,” he said, with just the faintest slur in his words. “You need to take off that blasted corset. Don’t slay me, but you never looked like that before.”

“Like what before?”

“Now you sound like my mother,” he told her. “My mother could—”

“What did I not look like before?” she interrupted. “You might as well finish. I am ready for a grossly uncomplimentary remark.” She wasn’t, really, but it sounded courageous.

“When we were on the way to Scotland, I noticed several times that you had developed a really lovely figure,” he said, waving his glass in the air.

“Oh,” she said, taken aback.

“When I first met all four Essex sisters, you understand, you had a perfectly charming little figure for a girl of your age—damn it all, what is your age?”

“I was fifteen when you first met me,” Josie said with dignity.

“Bit lumpy, back then,” Mayne said, “but all girls are. On the way to Scotland, I remember telling myself several times that you were developing the kind of figure that was going to break men’s hearts and make them grovel in your wake. You didn’t quite have it yet, and you certainly didn’t know how to walk.”

“Then I got fatter.”

“No! Then you showed up wearing this contraption that makes you look—you look—well, you look stuffed.”

“Like a stuffed sausage.”

“Take the damned thing off.”

“What are you talking about?” Her blood was pounding through her veins.

“Take it off,” he said. He stood up, and to his credit, he wasn’t even unsteady. “I’ll help.”

“You must be drunk,” she said with horror. His face didn’t appear to have the cruel ravishing power of the heroes in her favorite novels, but how would she know? He was standing before her looking helpful and just slightly drunk.

“For God’s sake, Josie,” he roared, “I don’t want to seduce you! How can you think such a thing. I’m thirty-four, in God’s name. Thirty-five in two days. And you’re what? Eighteen?”

“Almost nineteen,” she said, tight-lipped.

“Well I am almost thirty-five. And in the course of my long and misspent life, I have never yet taken up cradle-robbing. Finally, as I think you are quite aware, I am in love with Sylvie!”

“Then what—what do you want?”

“If you won’t talk to Sylvie, and your own sisters colluded in stuffing you into this despicable garment, then I’ll have to show you myself.”

“Show me what?”

“Show you how to walk so that you make a man slaver at your feet, of course. Isn’t that what you want?”

“Of course that’s what I want!” she cried. “But I can’t—I can’t unclothe myself.”

“Not all the way,” he said, pained. “You just need to take off that cravat thing and put your gown back on.”

“It’s not a cravat, it’s a corset! And you’re drunk.”

“So are you,” he said, laughing a little now. “We are both drunk in the starlight room. That’s what my aunt used to call this: the starlight room. When she was very ill, toward the end of her life, she would lie on this couch all night and watch the stars on the ceiling, and the stars through the window. Sometimes my father would stay with her through the night.”

“It must have broken his heart when she died,” Josie whispered.

“He always said that without her, he wouldn’t have known how to love. My grandparents were as stiff as if they’d been carved from wood.”

Josie’s eyes filled with tears. “That’s so lovely. My sisters taught me how to love, because my mother died before I was born.”

His eyebrow shot up. “Before?”

“Well, on the same day. But she never even held me, so I think of it as if she was gone before I arrived.”

“I suspect that Lady Godwin taught me how to love,” Mayne said. “Damned annoying that is.”

“Annoying why?”

“Because she dismissed me without a second’s thought. But I couldn’t stop thinking of her.” He shrugged.

“You love your sister,” Josie pointed out.

“Of course I do. But I meant a truly passionate love.” He shook himself and suddenly his eyes snapped into focus, staring down at her, and before she knew what had happened, he’d pulled her to her feet and nimbly turned her about. Then he was unbuttoning her gown down the back.

Josie felt as if the champagne had dulled her responses. This particular impropriety had never been covered by her governess, Miss Flecknoe. Mayne didn’t want to seduce her. He thought she looked like a stuffed sausage. So did it matter that he was about to see her corset?

“God almighty,” he whispered as the dress fell open.

He’d seen her corset.

“What in the hell is this thing?” He sounded almost angry. “It looks like the underpinning of a ship.”

“It’s a special corset they sell in Paris for larger ladies,” Josie explained, feeling a burning flush rise up her neck. “Would you please button my gown back up?”

But he was pulling at the strings.

“You can’t just pull at me,” Josie said, breathless. “You have to unhook at the top and bottom. And then you can start to unlace, but you have to do it slowly. Very slowly.”

“Why?” he asked, and she heard the sound of a little hook being torn apart.

“Don’t do that!” she cried, agonized. And then: “Because I might faint if it opens too quickly.”

“Damn.” He said it flatly.

She didn’t faint, even though the pressure released so quickly that she swayed forward. He grabbed her, large hands holding her shoulders. He steadied her, and then pushed her gown forward over her arms. As it fell to the floor, the corset followed. Of course it didn’t fall with a gentle swish, the way her gown did. It clanked because the whalebones were capped with special little tips of lead, so they wouldn’t dig into her skin.

The tighter, the better, Madame Badeau had said, showing her how her maid should brace herself against the bed and force the lacings closed. And then she’d said the magic words: You won’t be able to eat while wearing this, of course.

In Josie’s mind, that had been the moment when The Corset, as she thought of it, moved to sacred status. The Corset would give her a successful season. The Corset would stop her from eating, and give her a slender, refined shape, and give her a husband.

It hadn’t worked out that way. And besides, Josie found herself perfectly able to eat while wearing it.

Mayne was staring at the ground, where the corset had fallen. “It looks like a bizarre kind of chrysalis that hatched a butterfly,” he said, picking it up by one of its many straps. “What in the devil were you wearing this for, Josie?”