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Violet couldn’t have been more thankful for dinner to be over. That brute Alistair Crawford had stared at her all night long.

Part of her was glad he didn’t recognize her.

His eyes, which she’d remembered as warm and passionate, were now stony and cold.

And his lips—the ones she’d dreamed about for three years to her own chagrin—were not sensual and beckoning any longer.

They were set in an angry frown, except for when they were gulping down wine.

And the looks he shot her down the table this evening were definitely not the ones of passion they’d shared before.

Now he looked at her like she was some kind of cretin.

Simply because she wore a dress that was more modest than others and her hair wasn’t piled on top of her head and adorned like some absurd spun sugar creation.

Is being different so much of a crime?

She supposed it was, here in the ton . In this respect, New York society was bad, but London was even worse.

The need for its members, especially its female members, to conform so completely to its set of social niceties and hierarchical rules was one of the reasons she’d been reluctant to return to London.

But Catherine had requested her presence for the season, and Violet knew too well how hard it was to restart one’s life after the shock of a loved one’s sudden death. If Catherine wanted her to be here, she would be.

She supposed, too, that the fact he didn’t recall her ought to be comforting. She was different now. On purpose. And in large part because of him.

Or, more precisely, because of the havoc he had wreaked in her body all those years ago on the balcony.

A havoc she’d so desperately wanted to repeat that she’d searched for him at every ball, salon, and dinner for the rest of her mini season.

And that she’d sought out in New York when her real season began, with disastrous consequences.

And he hadn’t even remembered her!

That much had been clear in the few short sentences he’d deigned to utter before stalking away.

Poor Catherine. Seated next to the cad for the whole of the dinner party, during which he’d said at most one word to her.

She pushed him from her mind and, when dinner concluded, rose with a sigh of relief. She’d follow the other ladies into the salon for tea and a hand of whist, and then she could escort Catherine back to Chester House.

Violet had just turned the corner into the hallway, the last in the line of women departing the dining room, when she felt a hand grip her elbow from a darkened room and tug.

She gasped, startled, as she was pulled into an empty library and the door shut behind her. She stilled in the darkness, her nose twitching at the familiar, virile scent that enveloped her. The base layers were exactly the same as they had been three years ago, balsam, sea wind, and adventure.

How, she wondered, could a man smell of such things?

But the top notes were different. She wrinkled her nose. Now he smelled of whisky and wine, too, and it was all too easy to understand how he had attained that particular scent.

A gas lamp flickered on in the darkness, and she turned to find Alistair Crawford standing behind her, as she knew she would. A tingle shimmied up her spine at his nearness, which she ignored. The man was dissolute, and she shouldn’t be alone with him.

“Lord Alistair,” she said, keeping her voice to a low whisper lest she call unwanted attention to their presence together in the library. “What do you want?”

“I prefer captain to lord,” he said automatically, as if he’d uttered the words a thousand times before, but then paused. “Actually, I don’t. Not anymore.”

Is he foxed?

He wasn’t making sense. She eyed him and sniffed again. He certainly seemed to be foxed from the smell of him.

Violet wondered for a moment if she should be afraid. Was he erratic from the alcohol, or had he lost his wits since she’d last seen him?

Or perhaps he’d always been this way. That would explain the intensity of his attention and then his rapid disappearance from the balcony three years ago. She frowned at the memory, more annoyed than frightened.

“If you’ll excuse me,” she said briskly and took a step toward the door.

It was time for her to leave before they were discovered. Unfortunately, her movements awakened a fluffy white cat from its nap on a nearby settee. The animal jumped down and wound himself around her legs, halting her exit lest she kick the poor thing.

“That’s Raspberry,” Alistair said. “You’ve interrupted his sleep. Be aware, he will demand his remuneration.”

Violet leaned down to pet the fluffball, who had laid on the floor and rolled over, showing her his belly. “I apologize for waking you, Raspberry.”

The cat mewled loudly, an invitation for her to sink her fingers into the offered expanse of white fur and scratch.

“Be careful,” Alistair warned as Violet placed her hand on the cat’s exposed midsection. “He’s definitely an arsehead.”

Violet rubbed the tempting belly anyway, and out of nowhere, Raspberry’s four paws encircled her wrist and scratched. Hard.

“Ow!” Violet pulled her hand back to examine her wounds. “He did that on purpose!”

“I told you to watch out.” Alistair held out his hand for her scratched wrist. “He always demands his payment in blood. Let me see.”

“No,” Violet turned her hand over to examine the wound herself. “No need to concern yourself. Although some whisky to clean it off and a strip of linen to cover it would be appreciated. It’s no bullet wound, but we must be vigilant against infection.”

Alistair looked at her curiously, which she didn’t care for. “You’re staring, my lord.”

“I apologize.”

“Fine.” She gave a short, curt nod. “The linen and whisky, then, if you please.”

Alistair went to the sidebar and poured a glass of whisky, then reached up and removed his cravat, giving Violet a glimpse of his bronzed neck and chest where the material had just been. An untoward heat rushed through her at the sight.

“What are you doing?” she asked, averting her eyes and trying to suppress her body’s reaction to him. She knew the reaction for what it was—purely biological and nothing more.

Nothing I can’t handle.

Alistair held up one hand with his cravat in it and the other with the whisky bottle. “Linen and whisky, as my lady requested. Or rather silk and whisky. It will do, I presume?”

Violet harrumphed at him, still rather unnerved by his sudden state of undress.

He cocked that eyebrow at her. “Would you rather I wander out into the hallway and let them know we’ve been in here for several minutes alone and unchaperoned before I ask for a strip of linen?”

“I am one and twenty,” Violet said. “And here as a companion. I don’t need a chaperone.”

“I’m not so sure about that, Miss Goodwin. Left to your own devices, you have a way of finding yourself alone with me.”

Violet let loose another irritated huff of breath. “I may remind you, sir, that it is you who has endeavored to be alone with me and not the other way around.”

He gazed at her with those intense, dark eyes for a beat too long. “Perhaps I cannot help myself,” he said, causing Violet to shake her head.

The drink was obviously making him erratic. Ignoring her one moment, flirting the next. But then she realized he couldn’t really be flirting with her. He was making fun of her. Because of her dress and her hair and her comments about infection.

She’d recognized the strange look he’d given her; it was the same she’d encountered from countless numbers of New York’s society when she broached the subject of medicine.

“Come, let me help you,” he said, interrupting her thoughts. “It will be easier with two hands.”

Violet walked toward him, telling herself it was only pragmatic that she did. No matter how much of a boor he was, it would be easier for him to clean and bind her wound than for her to do it herself.

That thought lasted precisely until the moment he gently cradled her scratched wrist in his warm fingers and brushed his thumb against the back of her hand.

“Damn that cat,” he said, and she felt herself lean closer to him. “I’m afraid this will hurt.”

He pressed the whisky-soaked cravat to her scratches, and she winced. It hurt like the devil, but he kept her hand held tightly in his so she couldn’t pull away. And then he leaned forward and blew a gentle breeze of air onto her wrist. “Is that better?” he asked.

“Better,” she managed, feeling her knees quake from the dual sensation of his soft, cool breath on her skin and the stinging fire of the scratches.

“Good.” He still held her hand in his. “Don’t take it too hard, all of us have been caught in Raspberry’s trap at one time or another. He enjoys it.”

At the sound of his name, the cat jumped up on the desk beside Alistair and head-butted him for attention.

“See?” Alistair ran his thumb absentmindedly across her palm. “Nothing but a trickster and an arsehead.” He grinned. “Or should I say asshead?”

His thumb kept moving back and forth across her skin until it reached the hard ridges of her calluses. As soon as he felt them, he stopped abruptly. And then he re-traced his movement in a slow caress. As if to be sure they were what he thought they were.

He said nothing as he dropped her hand and reached over to idly scratch the cat’s chin.

“Where are your gloves?” he asked. “They’ll hold the linen in place.”

“In my reticule.”

She turned to get them, trying to ignore the sinking sensation in her stomach.

It shouldn’t bother her that he’d dropped her hands as if they were hot coals the moment he felt her calluses. She really shouldn’t care at all. Yet she did.

Those rough patches were the physical vestiges of her life’s work and purpose, and they had revolted him. And no scratching of that arsehead cat, to use his silly English word, would cover his reaction.

Oh–

She turned back to him.

“You do remember,” she said, and her traitorous heart gave a little jump at the notion. “I thought you’d forgotten me.”

“I remember.” He leaned against the desk, crossing his long legs at the ankle just as he had on that balcony railing so many years ago.

“So, you were just pretending at dinner not to know who I was?”

“I am not a man who pretends.” His voice dropped down several notches. “I wouldn’t see the point.”

“It can only be one or the other. You remembered and pretended you had not. Or you didn’t remember. Which would mean you forgot.”

She took her gloves from her reticule and held out her hand for the cravat. “Silk, please,” she said. She could bind her wrist herself.

“It’s true I did not place you at first.” He approached her but instead of handing her the cravat, he paused just a hair’s breadth away, so close their chests were nearly touching.

“By the time I did, we were seated, and it was too late to catch your attention. You must have noticed that I tried. You refused to look at me.”

He was so close she could see his pulse thumping at the base of his neck, inside the little golden vee where his cravat should be.

He reached for her chin and turned it up to him. “Look at me now, Violet.”

She turned her face to his and tried to keep her heart from pounding.

His eyes had gone hooded and so dark they were black, the way she remembered them from those moments together so many years ago.

When their lips had been inches apart, as they were now, and their hearts had been beating with the same sense of shared anticipation.

The same desire she’d felt when she’d placed her hand on his chest.

Her fingers itched to do it again, just as the muscles in his arms and shoulders flexed.

She could see the ripple of movement through his evening coat, and it called to her.

All he had to do was dip his head a little further and press his lips to hers.

She wanted him to do it, despite the promises she’d made to herself to leave such foolishness behind her.

She closed her eyes and held her breath, waiting.

But the dratted man made some kind of coughing noise and stepped away from her instead.

Violet’s eyes flew open, and they stared at each other for a long, charged moment before he took hold of his cravat in both hands and ripped it. The sound of the rending fabric was startling in the quiet of the library.

“Silk,” he said brusquely and held the torn piece out to her, before moving back to the desk all the way across the room and resuming his lean.

“Tell me, Miss Goodwin,” he said out of nowhere. “What do you know of bullet wounds?”

“My lord?” She was thoroughly discombobulated by the sudden shift in his mood. He was too close one moment and too far away the next. She felt like a plaything, a mouse Raspberry might toy with for his own amusement.

“You said earlier that your scratch was not a bullet wound. Was it a manner of speech, or do you know something about bullet wounds?”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

Not this conversation again .

“I am a nurse,” she said and waited for the response she knew was coming. Confusion at first, then perhaps a jest, as if she couldn’t be serious, followed by thinly veiled derision, or sometimes anger.

“Why nursing?”

“Why not? Because my family is wealthy? Or because women should not practice medicine?” Her short laugh was cold and hard. “I’ve heard all the reasons, my lord. None of them signify.”

Alistair arched that single eyebrow at her. “I was asking what appeals to you about nursing. It’s not something you have to do. Ergo, it’s something you want to do. And I’d like to know why.”

“Is this an interrogation?”

He shook his head again. “No.” For a moment he looked chagrined. “Forgive me. My manners have fallen into disrepair.”

Violet felt as if her mind had been thoroughly tousled, tossed around like a heap of laundry. She couldn’t understand how he switched from hot to cold so quickly, a different man with a different meaning from one sentence to the next. From one moment to the next.

She needed to put an end to this conversation, and fortunately, she knew exactly how to do that.

“I want to be a nurse because someone I loved died. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get back before I am missed.”

“Violet,” he said softly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“How could you? You would need a constancy of attention, my lord, to learn anything about another human being. And if there is any descriptor for you, constancy is not it.”

“No,” he admitted, and she would have sworn hurt flashed in his eyes. “It certainly is not.” But then he gave a hearty laugh as if the whole interlude had been nothing but a joke.

“If you’ll excuse me,” she muttered and left the room.