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“The whisky is doing an excellent job of distracting me,” he said, even though it was patently untrue.

“Doesn’t look like it,” Mal observed.

“Then I’ll just have to bloody well drink more of it, won’t I?” Apollo returned with grim cheer before tossing back the remnants in his tumbler.

“You’re going to feel vile for the trip back to London if you don’t take care.”

“Thank you, Mother.” He cast a glare in Mal’s direction. “Whatever would I do without you?”

“You’re in a particularly unpleasant mood,” his friend said without heat.

And well Apollo knew it.

“I don’t look anything like your sainted mater,” Mal added, frowning as he made a show of glancing down at himself. “For one thing, I would look perfectly awful in a dress.”

“I second that sentiment.”

The dance came to an end, and Apollo’s gaze returned to the dance floor, looking for any hint of a masked beauty with fiery hair and a golden gown that clung to her delicious curves in just the right ways. But he didn’t see her. The crowd of couples had thickened, obscuring his view of the back half of the revelers.

She wouldn’t have stolen away with her partner, would she have? Surely not so soon after the night she had shared with Apollo. It wasn’t like her to dally. But then, this was the last night of the house party. Perhaps the pleasures he had awakened her to had made her curious.

The notion made Apollo ill, a sick clenching in his gut causing his stomach to roil.

He started off, his feet moving before his brain comprehended his intention.

“Where are you going?” Mal called after him. “Surely you’re not going to do anything foolish.”

He’d been about to storm through the couples and find Phee. But Mal was right. To do so would be incredibly foolish. It would also draw unwanted attention to both Phee and himself. And even if he was furious with her and hurt to his marrow, Apollo would throw himself onto the tracks of an incoming locomotive before he would stop protecting Phee.

“Naturally not,” he told his friend with a light air he hardly felt. “I’m going in search of more whisky.”

With that, he fled the ballroom and the sight of the woman he loved dancing in the arms of one man after the next.

The hour was late by the time the ball was finally over.

As she swept upstairs to the hall where most of the guest rooms were located, Ophelia’s feet ached, her back hurt, and she was weary to her bones.

But more than anything, it was her heart that hurt the most.

She’d spent the last few hours studiously avoiding so much as looking in Apollo’s direction. And it had been nothing short of utter torment, feigning a smile, dancing with any gentleman who requested her hand, never once looking to where Apollo’s blue-blue gaze burned into her from the periphery of the ballroom.

Well, that was a lie. She had looked. More than once. But by that time, he had no longer been standing where she had seen him out of the corner of her eye. She’d felt his hooded gaze like a touch. Until it had been gone, and he had been gone too.

Had he found someone else?

The agonizing question refused to be silent, churning in her mind with stubborn insistence.

And if he had indeed found another woman, who was she? Had he taken her to his chamber? Was she there with him, even now?

Ophelia knew she didn’t have the right to entertain these questions. But that didn’t stop them from proliferating in her mind. It didn’t stop her from agonizing, from wondering.

A feminine giggle stole her attention as she reached the top of the staircase, and she hastened her pace, thinking that perhaps it was Apollo with a lover, that she had summoned him with her misery and her desperate fears. But the gentleman accompanying the masked lady had dark hair shot through with gray strands. He spun her against a wall and pressed his face into her throat, oblivious to Ophelia’s presence.

Or perhaps they were aware, and they merely didn’t care. Either way, she hastened her steps as she passed, not wanting to hear the other woman’s breathy moans or find out what happened when the man finished lifting the skirts in which his hands were presently burrowed.

As she rounded a bend in the maze of halls, it occurred to her that she had taken a wrong turn and she was going to have to pass Apollo’s room to reach her own for the night. Her breath caught in her lungs at the realization. What if lamplight shone beneath his door? What if it didn’t?

Was he within? Was he alone?