Two days later, Camellia still hadn’t managed to put Lord X from her mind even for a moment. She missed their long, candid talks about anything and everything. She missed the warmth of his embrace and the heat of his passionate kisses.

She missed him. And she was running out of time.

The future loomed before her, inexorable and empty. There was only one masquerade left before Mr. Bost returned to London to sign the wedding contract and submit their names to the banns. Her mouth went sour with dread.

Three weeks after the banns were read, she would be wed to a stranger. And spend the rest of her life hundreds of miles from home, alienated from her family. From everything and everyone she had ever loved.

Yet it was the right thing to do. For her parents. For her sisters. Even for herself, she supposed.

Despite Camellia’s recent attempts to make the most of London’s society events while she still had the opportunity to do so, there were no other marriage offers on the horizon, from strangers or otherwise. Her shoulders slumped.

Was it any wonder her mind preferred to focus on the upcoming masquerade, and the last chance she would ever have to spend a few final moments with Lord X?

Anticipation brightened her mood. The new emerald gown she had commissioned in honor of the occasion was nearly ready. Camellia and her sisters had spent the entirety of the previous day scouring shops from Saville Row to Cavendish Square in search of the perfect accessories to accompany the new gown.

All three sisters had pooled their resources to ensure one last magical evening. The perfect mask, the perfect feathers. Bryony had been the one to discover the crowning jewel for Camellia’s final night of freedom—delicate teardrop earrings made of intricately cut glass and trimmed with gold.

Now it was merely a matter of surviving the five remaining days until the masquerade—and the five decades of Northumberland isolation to follow. Far from everything she loved.

Rather than wallow in what she could not change, Camellia was determined to keep a smile on her face for as long as she could. For the past two weeks, she had accepted every invitation that crossed the Grenville threshold and intended to keep doing so until it was no longer an option.

She adjusted her bonnet. Today, she and her sisters were en route to Bullock’s Museum of Natural Curiosities, where Napoleon Bonaparte’s carriage was currently on display. The attraction was already the talk of the town. Camellia would be right in the thick of it.

At the prospect, her body hummed with excitement. She was discovering far too late that she preferred the tumult of the ton to her previous staid existence as a wallflower.

Or perhaps her change of heart was due to the buoyant chaos of the masquerades.

In any case, her brief time intermingling with the ton had thus far been more fun than she would have dared to hope. And ever since her run-in with Lord Wainwright at the circus, she had added a new game to the list: catching the rakehell in scandalous behavior.

She was not a vindictive enough person to go so far as to tattle to the Cloven Hoof in order to ensure the earl lost his ridiculous wager… but she was protective enough of her sisters to take private pleasure when his inevitable failure finally came. Dahlia would survive. The girls who depended on her school might not be so fortunate.

Lord Wainwright needed to learn that his actions had consequences. She lifted her chin. And that not everyone found him as charming as portrayed in the etchings.

To her surprise, however, she had thus far failed to witness the earl doing anything scandalous at all. Instead, she’d caught him admiring flowers at the botanical garden and enjoying a biscuit at Lady Sheffield’s tea. Hardly the stuff of social ruin. If one didn’t know better, one might believe him to be shockingly… normal. Respectable, in fact.

She did know better, of course. All of society did. As angelic as he might seem during the light of day, the man was infamously devilish by night.

His ridiculous wager would never have come about in the first place had his legendary amorous influence on the heaving bosoms and disappearing purity of impressionable young ladies not been the truth most universally acknowledged in all of London.

When the hackney rolled to a stop in front of Bullock’s Museum of Natural Curiosities, Camellia and her sisters alighted from the cab and melded with an impressive queue of sightseers eager to take a peek at Boney’s traveling chariot. It had been captured at Waterloo and brought to the Egyptian Hall, where one of its first visitors has been the Prince Regent himself.

Camellia could hardly wait. According to the papers, the spoils encountered inside the carriage’s dark blue walls included a gold teapot, a gold coffeepot, gold cups, saucers, sugar basins and candlesticks. All embossed with the Imperial arms and engraved with an ornate N.

“Are you here to see the liquor case, the writing desk, or the solid gold breakfast plates?” asked a droll voice from just behind her shoulder.

Camellia’s heart leapt, then fell. Although she had hoped she recognized the low male voice, it did not belong to the gentleman she wished. It did not belong to a gentleman at all.

“Lord Wainwright,” she gritted out in reluctant acknowledgment before returning her attention back to the queue. Six-and-twenty years of politesse prevented her from giving him the cut direct, but no maiden was obliged to be friendly to a rake. Especially not the one who had endangered the future of dozens of schoolgirls.

“I would bow,” he said after an extended pause, “but there’s little point when you can’t even see it.”

She sighed and turned around. “Don’t you receive enough fawning attention?”

Surprise flicked across his handsome face. “More than enough. I didn’t greet you in the hope you would swoon into my cravat. You have the singular distinction of being one of the few who do not.”

She stared back at him without responding.

He smiled. “Contrary to the apparently prevailing wisdom, it is significantly more difficult to carry on a conversation with someone in the throes of maidenly vapors than it is with a woman in full possession of her faculties.”

“Witness the poor rakehell,” Camellia murmured. “Reduced to mere conversations until his forty days are through and he can return to philandering.”

To her surprise, a touch of pink graced the earl’s chiseled cheekbones.

“The wager,” he said, his mouth grim. “Of course.”

She made no reply. Sharp words would cause a scene neither of them would want.

Fortunately, her sisters’ bonnets were bent together in hushed whispers a few feet ahead, and they had not yet noticed the unwanted interloper in their midst.

“Would you believe the wager had slipped my mind entirely?” he asked.

“No,” she said flatly as the crowd inched forward.

“Perhaps not entirely,” Lord Wainwright admitted. “But it hasn’t been at the forefront of my thoughts in days.”

She arched a skeptical brow. “Then how have you been staying out of scandal columns?”

“By accident, I suppose. A product of having something else on my mind.” His gaze softened, focused not on her but some pleasant memory. A happy sigh escaped his lips.

Camellia tilted her head in surprise. His dreamy expression made her believe he was thinking about someone rather than something. And if there was a woman out there who could put a look that smitten on the face of a rakehell that heartless…

She stared at him in wonder. Perhaps people could change. Perhaps she could change. Hope stirred within her. Beautiful, rebellious hope.

Her lips parted. She wanted more from life than to watch from the wainscoting. Perhaps she was now strong enough to tell her unwanted suitor she would not be entering into a betrothal. How could she? Life was too important to spend it with the wrong person.

In fact, when next she saw Lord X, if he teased her again about slipping off into the shadows for a passionate embrace…

This time, she would not tell him no.