Free Star Crossed Seduction by Jenny Brown Page A

him.
    But no sooner had he resolved to give up all thought of finding her again than it struck him that if the hint the under secretary had given him about tidying his affairs meant what he thought it did, his return to India might come sooner than expected. If that were so, he would have to turn all too soon to finding the gently raised bride he’d promised his mother. So while he was still free, why not attend the masquerade? If the pickpocket didn’t show up, he would find others there who could scratch the itch she’d roused in him.
    Which was why he found himself at midnight Thursday at the edge of the large assembly room at the Opera House, searching for the pickpocket’s slim form among the costumed revelers who stepped their way through the figures of the quadrille.
    He could no longer fool himself that he didn’t care whether she appeared or not. He cared too much. But even if she had responded to his summons, how would he find her among the hundreds who crowded the floor?
    It was true, as Major Stanley had suggested, that nowhere else in England did the classes mix with such careless abandon as they did here. With their features hidden behind thin silk masks, the more reckless members of Society could mix freely with the more presentable denizens of the London underworld. But it was their anonymity that made such promiscuity possible. So if Temperance was here, her face, too, would also be hidden behind a mask or a figure-concealing domino. How, then, was he to find her among the hundreds of women who filled the ballroom?
    He’d done what he could to signal his identity to her by wearing the garb of a sultan. It had been an easy costume to assemble from his belongings, and, of course, it alluded to that brief conversation they had shared before they had moved past words. But now, as he mingled with the crowd, he felt faintly ridiculous.
    What costume had she chosen? As the dancers swept by, he eliminated the shepherdesses and milkmaids. Temperance wouldn’t choose so pedestrian a disguise. Nor was she likely to display her charms as flagrantly as those Bacchae, dressed in transparent muslin drapes, whose well-rouged lips suggested they were professionals.
    Perhaps she was hanging back in the shadows, looking for him among the dancers. If so, he must make it easier for her to find him. He made his way toward two women dressed as nuns whose posture told him they were open to solicitation for a dance, and possibly more.
    As he did, he brushed against a young man dressed as a highwayman who stood in earnest conversation with a tigress. When Trev jostled against him, the youth bristled, and his body language made Trev instinctively reach for the pommel of his sword, only to remember that since he was out of uniform, he’d left it behind.
    Backing away, Trev muttered an apology and asked one of the nuns for a dance. She offered him the tips of her mittened fingers and allowed him to lead her out onto the floor, where he danced with energy, wanting to put on a good show in case his Scheherazade was watching. His partner matched him step for step, and when the figure brought them together, he exchanged polite trifles with her, hearing in her voice the tones that suggested breeding. When their hands met, her touch hinted subtly at an invitation that might have intrigued him had he not come determined to find another woman.
    But he had, and with every measure of the dance, his desire to find her grew—along with his conviction that he wouldn’t. No woman in the crowd had her regal carriage or her graceful neck, nor did any of them betray the tiny mole at the junction of neck and shoulder he remembered from that moment of heightened perception in the alleyway. Perhaps it was hidden by veil. More likely, she hadn’t come.
    As the all-too-familiar pang of disappointment radiated through him, he couldn’t help but laugh at himself. How like him to find himself surrounded by acquiescent women and yearn only for the one