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Her mouth dried. “Surely you are gentleman enough to respect a lady’s discretion?” she pressed.
    “I wouldn’t depend on it,” Rothbury said. “It feels like a pistol,” he added. “You must like playing dangerous games with your lovers.” His tone was dry.
    “I only shoot the ones who fail to satisfy me,” Tess said, smiling sweetly.
    She saw Rothbury smile in response, the warmth spilling into those green eyes like sunlight, a long crease denting his cheek. The smile did strange things to Tess’s equilibrium. Rothbury placed the reticule gently in her outstretched hand. Tess’s fingers closed about the silk and brocade and she felt the relief flood through her, so powerful that her knees almost weakened. Then she realised that there was no rustle of paper, no folded sheets beneath her touch. She grippeda little tighter, desperately trying to make out the outline of the papers. Her stomach hollowed with shock.
    They were not there.

CHAPTER TWO
    S HE HAD THE PRETTIEST FEET he had ever seen.
    It might not have been the first thing about Teresa Darent that most men would have noticed, but Owen Purchase, Viscount Rothbury, was never attracted to the obvious.
    He handed Tess up into a hackney carriage and watched as she kicked off the lavender silk slippers and tucked her feet up under the gauzy skirts of the gown. The slippers were far too small for her—Owen had noticed that fact when he had held one of them for her to put on earlier. The gown also could not belong to her. Owen was no expert on feminine attire other than in the removal of it but he had a certain amount of experience of the female form and he knew that a woman with Tess Darent’s opulent curves—and Tess Darent’s flamboyant reputation—would not wear a gown that was two sizes too large. So the outfit was borrowed, which raised the intriguing question of what Lady Darent had been wearing when first she had arrived at the Temple of Venus and why she had needed to change her clothes.
    Tess Darent interested Owen. She had from the first time they had met. It was not merely that she had theface of an angel and the reputation of a sinner. Public opinion held that she was as shallow as a puddle, mercenary, amoral, extravagant. She was an arbiter of fashion who had turned spending money into an art form. She simultaneously outraged and fascinated the ton with her profligate marriages and her decadent behaviour, and she was generally considered an utter featherbrain. There was no reason on earth he would find her interesting. Except that some stubborn instinct told him that she was not at all what she seemed…?.
    “Thank you, Lord Rothbury.” Tess smiled at him prettily from the depths of the darkened carriage. The lavender silk gown shone ethereally in the faint light. Taken with the cloud of bright hair tumbling over her shoulders, it made her look impossibly alluring. Owen’s body reacted with an unexpected stab of desire. He wanted to peel that gown from her shoulders, to see it tumble to the floor as it had done before, to reveal the impossible curves and luscious, sensual plumpness of the body beneath. He remembered the pure line of her throat and collarbone when the gown had slid off her, so true and pale and tempting. He wanted to press his mouth to the hollow of her throat and taste her skin.
    Which was not the matter on which he was supposed to be concentrating his attention.
    “We’re hunting dangerous criminals here, Rothbury,” Lord Sidmouth had warned him when he had offered Owen the role of special investigator for the Home Office. “No bloody respect for law and order.”He had tapped a rather fine caricature that was lying on his desk, a drawing that had evidently been crumpled by Sidmouth’s angry and impatient hand. “Treason,” the Home Secretary had grumbled. “Sedition. Stirring up trouble, inciting the masses to riot. I’ll see them all hang.” His brows had snapped down. “You’re a British peer now,