pulled aside the open placket of his shirt, revealing the little red places on his shoulder where her teeth had nipped him.
Contritely Pandora stood on her toes to examine the marks, her color rising. “I’m so sorry. Do you think he would gossip about it?”
“Good God, no. As Oakes likes to say, ‘Discretion is the better part of valets.’ However”—his golden-bronze head lowered over hers—“there are some things I’d rather keep private.”
“Poor man. You look as though you’d been attacked by a wild beast.”
A husky laugh escaped him. “Just a small vixen,” he said, “who grew a bit fierce in her play.”
“You should bite her back,” Pandora said against his chest. “That would teach her to be gentler with you.”
Curving his hand along the side of her face, Gabriel tilted her head upward. After nibbling gently at her lower lip, he whispered, “I want her just the way she is.”
The interior of the Haymarket was luxurious and opulent, with cushioned seats and tiers of boxes decorated with gold moldings of antique lyres and oak wreaths. The domed rose-colored ceiling was covered in gilded ornamentation and hand-painted depictions of Apollo, while cut-glass chandeliers shed rich light on the fashionably dressed crowd below.
Before the performance began, Pandora and Helen sat in the theater box and talked, while their husbands hobnobbed with a group of men in the nearby box-lobby. Helen was in glowing good health and full of news, and seemed determined to persuade Pandora to join a ladies’ fencing class with her.
“You must learn to fence as well,” Helen urged. “It’s very good for posture and breathing, and my friend Garrett—that is, Dr. Gibson—says it’s an exhilarating sport.”
Pandora had no doubt that was all true, but she was fairly certain that putting a woman with balance problems in the proximity of pointy objects would have no good outcome. “I wish I could,” she said, “but I’m too clumsy. You know I don’t dance well.”
“But the fencing-master would teach you how to . . .” Helen’s voice faded as she looked in the direction of the upper dress circle seats, which were on the same level as their box. “My goodness. Why is that woman staring at you so fiercely?”
“Where?”
“On the left side of the dress circle seats. The brunette in the first row. Do you know her?”
Pandora followed her gaze to a dark-haired woman who was affecting interest in her theater program. She was slim and elegant, with classic features, deep-set eyes with extravagant lashes, and a pencil-slim nose angled perfectly over full red lips. “I haven’t a clue who she is,” Pandora said. “She’s quite beautiful, isn’t she?”
“I suppose. All I can see is that dagger-like stare.”
Pandora grinned. “It seems my skill at annoying people has now extended to ones I don’t even know.”
The striking woman was seated next to a stocky older gentleman with prodigious whiskers and a curiously two-toned beard, dark gray on the cheeks and jaw and white on the chin. His posture was military-straight, as if his back had been tied to a cart axle. The woman touched his arm and murmured to him, but he seemed not to notice, his attention fixed on the theater stage as if he were watching some invisible play.
Pandora felt an unpleasant shock as the brunette woman’s gaze met hers directly. No one had ever stared at her with such cold hatred before. She couldn’t think of anyone who would have a reason to look at her that way, except . . .
“I think I might know who she is,” she whispered.
Before Helen could respond, Gabriel came to occupy the empty seat next to Pandora. He turned so that his shoulder partially blocked her from the woman’s lethal stare. “That is Mrs. Black and her husband, the American ambassador,” he said quietly, his features hard. “I had no idea they would be here.”
Comprehending that it was a private matter, Helen hastily turned away to talk with her husband.
“Of course you didn’t,” Pandora murmured, surprised as she saw a tiny muscle jumping in Gabriel’s clenched jaw. Her husband, always so calm and sure of himself, was on the verge of losing his temper right there in the Royal Theatre.
“Would you like to leave?” he asked grimly.
“Not at all, I want to see the play.” Pandora would have rather died before giving his former mistress the satisfaction of making her leave the theater. She peeked around Gabriel’s shoulder and saw that Mrs. Black was still glaring at her as if she’d been