Chapter One

      The Folkestone town house, London

      May 1835, 8:00 p.m.

      Jamie Burke would rather be anywhere but here. “Here” being the annual Folkestone Starry Night Gala, his mother’s own ball, considered by the best of London society as the gateway to the first great events of the season.

      He respectfully disagreed.

      Jamie leaned on the stone balustrade of the Folkestone town house, a champagne flute precariously dangling over the edge from one negligent hand, and surveyed the lantern-festooned garden with a jaded eye. The garden, like the ballroom inside, was turned out to perfection; elegant with no pretensions toward gaudiness; a vision to entice the eye and entrap the unwary. Not unlike the brilliantly colored Indian red sand boa he’d read about recently. More than one gentleman had had his freedom strangled from an unwise venture into lantern-lit gardens.

      He should go back inside and play the good host. He was expected to be the supportive son. That meant dancing with a multitude of white-gowned girls his mother deemed likely aspirants to be his wife, the next Viscountess Knole.

      Jamie dreaded the prospect. He’d be thirty-one in four weeks. It was time to marry. He’d known this day would come, yet he could muster little excitement for either it or his mother’s pattern-card candidates: all young, all polite, all passably pretty and every last one of them blank slates for their future husbands to write on. He knew men who preferred their wives that way. He was not among their number. He liked a woman who knew her own mind.

      Jamie sighed. Indoors, the ball was just getting under way. He could hear the musicians in the gallery tuning their instruments. He really should go in. Outside lay a lingering illusion of freedom. Inside lay his future, and a fairly stagnant one at that. He knew what his mother expected; he was to marry one of them, one of those innocent, empty girls from good families. It was a daunting prospect to think his wife was only feet away beyond the bank of French doors and yet he had no idea who she was.

      Jamie drew a fortifying breath and halted, his return to the ballroom arrested by movement a little farther down the veranda. A slim blue-gowned figure slipped outside, casting a furtive glance behind her. Intriguing. Perhaps she was a refugee like himself.

      She threw a look to her left, then to her right, revealing her face. The ethereal beauty of her invoked an entirely manly response in him. She was lovely, her pale gold hair already coming down from an elaborate coiffure, framing indigo eyes with its errant spill; a wayward angel who’d strayed from heaven. Such an image conjured up a host of reactions; some protective—such a creature should not be left to wander ballroom verandas alone; some primal—such a creature was not for just any man. She was for this man, for him. For the first time in a long while, Jamie Burke felt the stirrings of longing, the stirrings of life.

      The angel in blue saw him and started in surprise, something akin to hope crumpling briefly in her expression at the sight of another. Disappointment was not the usual response women had when they saw him. Had she expected to be alone? His intrigue ratcheted up another notch. Jamie smiled congenially and raised his glass in a toasting salute. “Welcome to the veranda. Hiding from someone?”

      He moved toward her, not wanting to converse at a fourteen-foot distance. She pasted on a smile he was certain was forced. “I felt a headache coming on and decided to get some fresh air.”

      He heard the briefest of hesitations in her voice, saw the quickly veiled anxiety in her eyes and knew that wasn’t the whole of it, or even the half. “You’re not very good at dissembling,” he said lightly, hoping his tone would help her relax. He had no interest in betraying her secrets, whatever they might be.

      She looked affronted. “Are you suggesting I am not telling the truth?”

      Jamie smiled, enjoying himself thoroughly. “A gentleman would never put it so bluntly. However, I’d bet five quid you don’t have a headache.”

      She huffed a bit and tossed her pale gold hair, her dark blue eyes flashing with indignation over having been found out. “All right, I’m hiding.” Her confession pleased him. She’d decided to trust him, at least a little. Jamie considered that progress.

      “Isn’t it a little early for that? The dancing hasn’t even started.” He looked past her to see if a hulking brute of a suitor had followed her out.

      She shot a pointed glance at the flute in his hand. “Isn’t it a little early for that?”

      “It’s never too early for champagne, especially when it’s Veuve Clicquot.” Jamie offered her the glass. “I haven’t touched it. It’s still cold even, and I think you need it more than I do.”

      She smiled and sipped, her eyes holding his over the rim of the flute. Jamie thought the sacrifice well worth it, watching the gold liquid slide past pink lips and down the slender column of her throat.

      “I’m hiding from my mother if you must know,” she said