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“Shouldn’t dawdle if I was you,” Bertie warned “If Gwen catches us hanging about, she’ll take a fit, which I’d rather she didn’t, seeing as how she took one already and ht We wasn’t listening proper, e?”

He grasped Dorian’s arot that right, too, by gad You look like what the cat dragged in, andno offense, but you smell like I don’t knohat”

“I told you she drove me into a mire,” Dorian said “What do you expect a ?”

Unwilling to be dragged up the stairs by his overanxious friend, Dorian shook off the helping hand and started up on his own

Bertie followed “Well, she wouldn’t’ve had to chase you, would she, if you hadn’t gone and bolted,” he said “Couldn’t think why you’d do it I told you she wasn’t like Jess, didn’t I? I told you Gas a good sort of girl Did you think I’d let them shackle you to any beastly female?

Ain’t we friends? Don’t we look out for each other? Well, I should think so, or at least I did, but then you ay a long time and never told me where you was But you never was’eured you didn’t hear yet I was back from Paris”

They had reached the landing He gave Dorian a worried look “But it’s all right now, ain’t it? Mean to say, if you was looking at her over the breakfast table, you wouldn’t cast up your accounts, would you?”

If he were looking at her over the breakfast table, he would probably leap on her and devour her, Dorian thought Even now, he wondered how he’dthe soft, dazed expression in her eyes when he’d helped her disazed at him in that way Under that look, reason, conscience, and will had si with longing Even now, ment of common sense

“I like hereyes,” he told Bertie “And her voice is not disagreeable She does not seeirl,” he added, recollecting the terrifying efficiency hich she’d extricated him from the mire

Bertie’s worried expression vanished, and he broke into the arin that had softened Dorian’s heart toward hio

“There, I knew you’d see it, Cat,” he said “Sensible’s the word Tells you what’s to be done and says it plain so you always kno to go about it And when she says she’ll do it, Gwen goes and does it Said she was going after you, and as to stay put and keep our ht and stay out of her way And she did it and you come back and said you’d have her, and noe’re all in order, ain’t we?”

He’d had his life in order before, Dorian thought: everything in hand, his short future so carefully planned Kneebones had proain: laudanum, as much as Dorian needed to keep him quiet, to let him die in peace

Now there was no telling ould happen He could tell his bride what he wanted, but he could not make her do it He could exact pro, he would have no power over her

But he could not keep his mind on the future because he could not drive out the recollection of the reen eyes All he could think of was the night to come and the little witch in his arms

Oh, Lord, and if his mind failed and he hurt her—what then?

For Bertie’s sake, he manufactured a smile

“As you say, Bertie,” he answered lightly “All in order and everyone happy”

SOME HOURS LATER, Gwendolyn was sitting on a stone bench in the Earl of Rawnsley’s garden, watching the blood-red sun’s slow descent over a distant hill The store another part of Dart the air cool and clean

She was clean and neatly dressed in the green silk gown Genevieve had brought her from Paris, and her unruly hair had been temporarily tamed into a relatively tidy heap of curls atop her head She hoped it would still be tidy by the ti with the lawyers

Gwendolyn’s hair was the bane of her existence The Powers that Be, with their usual perverse idea of a joke, had given her Papa’s hair instead of Mama’s

She did not —but there was so e of twists and bends and corkscrews, each of which had a mind of its own, and all of them demented

Her hair, which was the complete antithesis of her level, steady, and orderly personality, made it very difficult for people to take her seriously—as though being a feh already Thanks to the crazed mass of red curls and corkscrews, every new person she met represented yet another uphill battle to prove herself

She wished wimples would come back into fashion

She wondered what Rawnsley’s raven mane was like when it was clean and coe of him

She wondered why the earl kept his hair long, whether it was ainst convention in general or, randfather in particular She could certainly understand that

Rebellion did not explain, however, why the earl so little resembled his tiny portrait The puffy face in theto a rather corpulent man The one Gwendolyn had met hadn’t an ounce of excess flesh upon his six-foot fra like a second skin, not to rippling rolls of fat, but to lean, taut muscle

Whatever rong with him was obviously confined to the contents of his skull