Chapter One

"You're quite mad to suggest such a thing. And madder yet to think I would consider it. You do realize that, don't you?" Evelyn Hadley-Attwater, the Countess of Waterston, rose to her feet and glared down at the man behind the desk. The man she had once thought of with the affection one felt for an annoying brother. The man she'd planned never again to see under these circumstances. "I won't do it. And I cannot believe you have the nerve to ask me in the first place."

Sir Maxwell Osgood studied her over the rim of a pipe, the smoke drifting about his head like a veil of accusation. It was most annoying.

"When did you start smoking a pipe?"

"I thought you preferred a pipe to cigars," he said mildly.

"You look ridiculous." She reached over his desk, plucked the pipe from his mouth, and dropped it into a saucer obviously being used for ashes. "And I prefer to breathe air that hasn't been previously inhaled."

"Doesn't your husband smoke cigars?"

"Never in my presence." She narrowed her eyes. "You do understand there is nothing you can say to change my mind?"

He smiled, a slow seductive smile that had no doubt made any number of women swoon at his feet and fall into his bed. Evelyn had never been among them. She heaved a reluctant sigh and sank back into her chair. "If you're trying to charm me, it will not work."

His smile widened to a grin. "To my eternal regret."

"I fully intended never to see you again."

"Allow me to point out we have seen one another."

"Oh, certainly at the occasi