It Happened One Midnight (PG8) by Julie Anne Long

mouth. “Valiant of you to intervene. And you’re still bleeding, by the way.”
    He shrugged. “Or foolish. Choose your adjective. That costermonger was triple the boy’s size.” He dabbed the handkerchief at his mouth corner, pulled it away to inspect it.
    “Ah, very good. Only a drop or two of blood. Just a tiny cut on the inside of my lip, no doubt.. And thank you for the loan of this, by the way. My sister generally keeps me supplied with embroidered handkerchiefs, but I recently gave mine away.”
    She liked the wry way he said “my sister.” Affectionate, proprietary, long suffering. “To someone who was bleeding?”
    He gave a short laugh. Too late she realized he was running his thumb absently over the corner of her handkerchief, where initials should have, or would have, been embroidered.
    He didn’t precisely freeze . He was far too careful for that.
    But he did go appreciably still.
    Because instead of Tommy’s initials, his thumb had encountered pinprick holes where someone else’s initials had been picked out.
    When he finally lifted his gaze to hers, his face was carefully expressionless. But there was something a bit too speculative dawning in his eyes.
    Bloody Hell .
    She’d bought the handkerchief from a certain Mrs. Bandycross in St. Giles, years ago, in different times. Mrs. Bandycross did a brisk trade in stolen linen. A penny per handkerchief. Pickpockets brought them in, and Mrs. Bandycross picked out the stitching and resold them.
    She was certain Jonathan suspected. And it told him a little more about her financial circumstances than she preferred anyone to know.
    “Did you wager anything on the race?” she asked smoothly, quickly. But her heartbeat had quickened. Damn the man for being so bloody observant .
    “I wagered I would be able to speak to the duke. And lost.” He sounded a bit abstracted. He was still watching her thoughtfully. “Why were you spying on him?”
    “I wasn’t.” She said it reflexively, and too late realized she sounded like a child.
    He sighed. “You were. I saw you staring at him rather avidly from beneath that unflattering bonnet. I could feel you staring at him.”
    “You couldn’t —”
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Give up, Miss de Ballesteros.” “At least you’re not holding a weapon this time.”
    It was impossible not to smile at him. The cheek of the man.“That could be because you didn’t creep up behind me, this time.”
    “No, it was rather the other way around this time, wasn’t it? I simply turned, and there you were behind me at the costermonger’s cart. Almost as if you knew exactly where I was. Just as I suspect I saw you because I expected to see you.”
    An ambiguous, interesting, charged little silence followed. It thrummed with the tacit understanding that they had each perhaps made an actual effort to find each other in the crowd. Had in fact been quite aware of each other in the throng.
    Wordlessly, they took each other’s measure, two confident, beautiful people, neither of them giving anything of their thoughts away to the other.
    He wasn’t a blinker, Jonathan Redmond. More’s the pity.
    A woman strolled by, glanced at Jonathan, and then swiveled her head so violently to gawk that she stumbled over her feet and nearly fell.
    Jonathan didn’t appear to notice. It probably happened to him every day. It was probably so commonplace in his world he assumed it happened to everybody.
    “He’s wealthy, the duke,” Jonathan said casually into the short ensuing silence, at last looking away from her toward the track. The crowd was rapidly dispersing, straggling past them. “One of the wealthiest men on this continent . I imagine a man like that can afford anything he wants. Spectacular things. Say, the finest box at the opera. The very best horses and carriages. The very best . . . mistresses. Things of that sort.” He slid a sly sideways look at her.
    She rolled her eyes at his attempt to fish for information, to his