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stupidity.”
    â€œNo.” He grinned apologetically down at her. “It’s just that at the time I wanted to be able to concentrate my attention and my fists on Fairhaven. I set Faber and Jones to spiriting you off to Edmund’s so that I would know you were safe. I couldn’t find them in the garden after my talk with Fairhaven. They doubtless took themselves off when they did not find you there. But I thought I had better warn you anyway.”
    â€œYou set those two to…to kidnap me!” Madeline’s voice had risen almost to a squeak. “I suppose they were to bind me hand and foot and gag and blindfold me?”
    Her twin looked uncomfortable. “I don’t think all that would have been necessary,” he said. “But you know yourself that you would not have gone willingly, Mad. Especially if you had had your heart set on an elopement. I had to arrange it all hastily in the past hour. I did tell them to, ah, insist that you go with them.”
    â€œOh, Dom,” Madeline said, smiling dazzlingly at one of her favorite admirers, who was standing close by, watching her, “you have had a narrow escape, brother mine. I would have had your head on a platter for breakfast if your friends had laid one fingernail on my person. And I would wager that Edmund would have done the ax work for me.”
    â€œYes, well,” he said, “I thought I should warn you, Mad, to have an eye open for those two. I needn’t have said anything to you, you know. I could have taken the chance of keeping quiet. This is all pretty embarrassing, as you might imagine.”
    â€œPamela thought you were coming to ask her to waltz,” she said. “I know she did, Dom. She blushed in that way she has whenever she sees you coming. And she always thinks that you are going to notice her. She really does have a painful
tendre
for you. You will dance the next set with her?”
    â€œThis is my punishment?” he asked, grinning ruefully down at her.
    â€œPamela is my friend,” she said. “I do not consider it punishment for a gentleman to dance with her, Dom. She dotes on you, you know. And you really are very handsome. I see the way all the girls look at you. And so many of them this year are years younger than you and I.”
    â€œWe will have to dust off a spinster cap for you soon,” he said. “You are getting very close to your dotage, Mad. No, don’t look at me like that. The next set it is for Lady Pamela. You see how contrite I am?”
    Lord Eden duly danced with his sister’s friend and unconsciously enslaved her even further with his charm and his sunny smile. There was nothing to keep him at the ball once the set was over. Miss Pope had proved a disappointment, perhaps because his attention had been taken by Fairhaven when he was kissing her. And Miss Carstairs had not appeared at all that evening, having contracted a cold in the head at Vauxhall Gardens a few evenings before. And since he was currently in love with Miss Carstairs, her absence made even the most glittering of social occasions dreary.
    Besides, he was still feeling decidedly foolish over the Fairhaven affair. He had gone out to that carriage all fire and brimstone and brotherly outrage, ready to challenge the man to meet him at dawn on a foggy heath with pistols and seconds. He was fortunate to have got away without being challenged himself, but Fairhaven had appeared to have other matters on his mind, most notably, the little female who was lurking in the shadows obviously waiting for her lover’s visitor to take himself off.
    Lord Eden sallied forth from the ball to one of his clubs in the hope of finding some diversion to take his mind off the night’s
faux pas
. If he were fortunate, too, perhaps he would run into Faber and Jones and persuade them that it would be as well to keep their mouths shut about the night’s dealings or lack thereof.
    He did not believe