But…as Lillian had pointed out, Lord Kendall could either believe or disregard the rumor at will. He was a grown man who could make decisions for himself. All Annabelle had done was to sow the seeds—it was Kendall’s choice either to nurture them, or let them lie fallow.

In the evening, Annabelle dressed in an ice pink gown made of countless floating layers of transparent silk gauze. The waist was tightly cinched with a reinforced silk belt adorned with a huge white rose. Her skirts made a soft swishing sound as she walked, and she fluffed out the top layers, feeling like a princess. Too impatient to wait for Philippa, who was taking forever to dress, Annabelle left the room early, in the hopes of seeing her friends. With any luck, she might even encounter Lord Kendall and find some excuse to slip away with him for a few moments.

Favoring her ankle slightly, Annabelle walked along the hallway that led to the grand staircase. On impulse, she stopped at the Marsden private parlor, the door of which had been left ajar, and she entered it cautiously. The parlor was unlit, but surplus light from the hallway was sufficient to illuminate the shadowy outlines of the chess table in the corner. Drawn to the board, she saw with a flicker of pleasure that her game with Simon Hunt had been restored. Why had he taken the time to arrange the pieces as if they were still in play? Did he expect her to make another move?

Don’t touch anything, she told herself…but the temptation was too great to resist. She squinted in concentration, assessing the situation with a fresh eye. Hunt’s knight was in the perfect position to capture her queen, which meant that she would either have to move the piece or defend it. Suddenly she saw best how to protect her threatened queen—she slid a nearby rook forward to capture Hunt’s knight, thereby eliminating it from the board altogether. Smiling in satisfaction, she set the captured piece to the side and left the room.

Descending the grand staircase, she crossed through the entrance hall and walked along another hallway toward a circuit of public rooms. The carpet beneath her feet muffled all sound…but suddenly she sensed that someone was behind her. She felt a frisson of warning across her exposed upper back. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that Lord Hodgeham was following her, moving with surprising swiftness for such a stocky man. His heavy fingers hooked into the back of her silk belt, forcing her to stop or risk the possibility of having the fragile band snap in two.

It was a sign of how arrogant Hodgeham had become that he would accost her in a place where they could so easily be seen. Gasping in outrage, Annabelle spun to face him. She was confronted by the sight of his portly torso crammed into tight evening clothes, while the oily scent of his cologned hair assaulted her nostrils. “Lovely creature,” Hodgeham muttered, his breath pungent with the scent of brandy. “Recovering nicely, I see. I think perhaps we should resume our conversation of yesterday, before I was so pleasantly diverted by your mother.”

“You revolting—” Annabelle began in fury, but he interrupted the flow of words by clamping his fingers on either side of her jaw and squeezing hard.

“I’ll tell Kendall everything,” he said, his bulbous lips very close to hers. “With sufficient embellishment to ensure that he will look upon you and your family with the purest disgust.” His ponderous body pressed hers against the wall, nearly squeezing the breath from her. “Unless,” he said, his sour respirations striking her face, “you decide to accommodate me in the same manner that your mother has.”

“Then go and tell Kendall,” Annabelle said, her eyes blazing with hatred. “Tell him everything and be done with it. I’d rather starve in the gutter than ‘accommodate’ a repulsive swine like you.”

Hodgeham stared at her in incredulous fury. “You’ll regret it,” he said, flecks of spittle gleaming on his lips.

She smiled with cold contempt. “I don’t think so.”

Before Hodgeham let go of her, Annabelle caught a movement out of the corner of her vision. Turning her head to the side, she saw someone walking toward them—a man who was moving with the stealthy strides of a stalking panther. It must have appeared to him that she and Hodgeham had been caught in an amorous embrace.

“Release me,” she hissed to Hodgeham, and shoved hard at his bulky girth. He stepped back, finally allowing her to take a full breath, and shot her a glance of malevolent promise before walking in the opposite direction of the approaching man.

Rattled, Annabelle stared into the face of Simon Hunt as he took her by the shoulders. He was watching Hodgeham hurry away, with a hard, almost blood-thirsty gaze that made her blood turn cold. Then he looked down at her in a way that caused her breath to catch. Until that moment she had never seen Simon Hunt without his usual nonchalance. No matter how she had insulted or cut or spurned him, he had always reacted with predictable jeering self-assurance. But it seemed that she had finally done something that had provoked genuine fury. He looked ready to strangle her.

“Were you following me?” she asked with forced calmness, wondering how he had managed to appear at that particular moment.

“I saw you walk through the entrance hall,” he said, “and Hodgeham trailing after you. I followed because I wanted to find out what was going on between the two of you.”

Her gaze turned defiant. “And have you found out?”

“I don’t know,” came his dangerously soft reply. “Tell me, Annabelle—when you said that you could do better, was this what you had in mind? Servicing that idiotic lump of lard on the sly, in return for the pitiful recompense he gives you? I wouldn’t have believed you to be that much of a fool.”