"I'll bet you didn't tell him to leave, either."

"You're wrong. He was angry with me because he wanted me to have dinner downstairs with Mrs. Gamble, and I refused."

Sophronia jabbed her finger toward the gown on the bed. "Then why do you want that?"

"Brandon's here, so I've changed my mind."

"Is that why you're getting dressed up? For Mr. Parsell?"

Sophronia's question took her aback. Whom was she getting dressed up for? "Of course it's for Brandon And for Mrs. Gamble. I don't want to look like a country bumpkin in front of her."

Sophronia stiff features softened almost imperceptibly. "You can lie to me, Kit Weston, but just don't lie to yourself. You'd better make certain you're not doing this for the major."

"Don't be ridiculous."

"Leave him to Mrs. Gamble, honey." Sophronia walked over to the bed and pulled the muslin off the gown. At the same time, she repeated the words Magnus had said to her only a few weeks earlier. "He's a hard man with women. There's something as cold as ice inside him. Any woman who tries to get past that ice will only end up with a bad case of frostbite." She settled the gown over Kit's head.

"You don't need to tell me all this."

"When the major looks at a beautiful woman, all he sees is a body to bring him pleasure. If a woman understands that about him, like I expect Mrs. Gamble does, she can enjoy herself and there won't be any hard feelings afterward. But any woman who's fool enough to fall in love with him is only going to end up with a broken heart."

"This has nothing to do with me."

"Doesn't it?" Sophronia did up the fastenings. "The reason the two of you fight so much is because you're just alike."

"I'm not anything like him! You know better than anyone how much I hate him. He's standing in the way of everything I want from life. Risen Glory's mine. It's where I belong. I'll die before I let him keep it. I'm going to marry Brandon Parsell, Sophronia. And as soon as I can, I'm buying this plantation back."

Sophronia took a brush to her tangles. "And what makes you think the major will sell it to you?"

"Oh, he'll sell, all right. It's just a matter of time."

Sophronia began to draw her hair into a neat knot, but Kit shook her head. She'd wear it free tonight, with only the silver combs. Everything about her must be as different from Veronica Gamble as possible.

"You got no way of knowing he'll sell," Sophronia said.

Kit wasn't about to confess her late-night forages through the plantation's calf-bound ledgers, adding and subtracting her way through pages of boldly entered figures. It hadn't taken her long to discover that Cain had overextended himself. He was hanging onto Risen Glory and his spinning mill by the most fragile of threads. The smallest disaster could send him under.

Kit didn't know much about spinning mills, but she did know about cotton. She knew about unexpected hailstorms, about hurricanes and droughts, about insects that fed off the tender bolls until nothing was left. Where cotton was concerned, disaster was bound to strike sooner or later, and when it did, she'd be ready. She'd buy the plantation right out from under him. And she'd buy it at her own price.

Sophronia was staring at her and shaking her head.

"What's wrong?"

"Are you really wearing that dress downstairs for dinner?"

"Isn't it wonderful?"

"It's made for a ball, not for dinner at home."

Kit smiled. "I know."

The gown had been so outrageously expensive that Elsbeth had protested. She'd argued that Kit could put her clothing allowance to better use buying several more modest gowns. Besides, it was too conspicuous, she'd said, so extravagantly beautiful that, even on the most demure female-which Kit certainly was not-it would draw more attention than, perhaps, a well-brought-up young lady should wish to attract.

Such subtleties were lost on Kit. She only knew that it was glorious and she had to have it.

The overskirt of the dress was a billowing cloud of silver organdy caught up over gleaming white satin shot with silver thread. Crystal bugle beads covered the tight-fitting bodice, sparkling like night snow under a starry winter sky. More beads spangled the skirt all the way to the hem.

The neckline was low, falling well off her shoulders. She glanced down and saw that the tops of her exposed breasts were still faintly rosy from Cain's hands. She quickly looked away and put on the necklace that went with the gown, a choker of crystal bugle beads drizzling onto her skin like melting ice chips.

The very air around her seemed to crackle as she moved. She slipped on satin slippers with spool-shaped heels, the ones she'd worn at the Templeton ball. They were eggshell instead of the stark white of the gown, but she didn't care.

"Don't worry, Sophronia. Everything's going to be fine." She gave Sophronia a quick peck on the cheek and made her way downstairs, the gown shimmering around her in a crystalline cloud of ice and snow.

Veronica Gamble's smooth forehead betrayed nothing of her thoughts as Kit swept into the sitting room.

So the little kitten had decided to fight. She wasn't surprised.

The gown was outrageously inappropriate for the occasion and quite wonderful. Its remote ice-maiden perfection served as a perfect foil for the girl's vivid beauty. Mr. Parsell, who'd so blatantly wrangled a dinner invitation, seemed stunned by her appearance. Baron looked like a thundercloud.

The poor man. He would have done better to have left her in that dirty dress.

Veronica wondered what had happened between the two of them in the room upstairs. Kit's face was flushed, and Veronica's observant eyes caught a small red mark on her neck. They hadn't made love, that was certain. Cain was still as tightly coiled as a jungle beast about to spring.

Veronica sat on Cain's right during dinner, with Kit at the foot of the table and Brandon next to her. The meal was delicious: fragrant jambalaya accompanied by oyster patties smothered in a cucumber-curry sauce, green peas flavored with mint, beaten biscuits, and, for dessert, rich slabs of cherry pie. Veronica was certain she was the only one who noticed the food.

She was excessively attentive to Baron throughout the meal. She leaned close to him and told him her most amusing stories. She laid her fingers lightly on his sleeve and occasionally squeezed his hard-muscled arm with deliberate intimacy.

He gave her his total attention. If she hadn't known better, she would have believed he didn't notice the subdued laughter coming from the other end of the table.

After dinner, Cain suggested the men take their brandy in the sitting room with the women instead of remaining at the dinner table. Brandon agreed with more eagerness than was polite. Throughout the meal.

Cain had barely been able to conceal his boredom with Brandon's stuffiness, while Brandon couldn't quite hide his contempt for Cain.

In the sitting room, Veronica deliberately took a place on the settee next to Kit, even though she knew the girl had taken a dislike to her. Yet Kit was courteous and thoroughly entertaining once they began to talk. She was exceptionally well read for a young woman, and when Veronica suggested that Kit borrow her copy of a scandalous new book by Gustave Flaubert that she'd just finished reading, Brandon sent her a thunderous look of disapproval.

"You don't approve of Kit reading Madame Bovary, Mr. Parsell? Then perhaps we'd better leave it on my shelf for the time being."

Cain regarded Brandon with amusement. "I'm sure Mr. Parsell isn't so stodgy as to object to an intelligent young woman improving her mind. Or are you, Parsell?"

"Of course he's not," Kit said too quickly. "Mr. Parsell is one of the most progressive men I know."

Veronica smiled. A most entertaining evening, indeed.

Cain crossed the hall and let himself into the library. Without bothering to light the lamp on his desk, he pulled off his coat and opened the window. The guests had left some time ago, and Kit had excused herself immediately afterward. Cain had to get up at dawn tomorrow, and he knew he should go to bed, but too many old memories had come back to nag at him tonight.

He gazed out into the darkness with unseeing eyes. Gradually the nighttime rasp of crickets and the soft, wheezy cry of a distant barn owl became less real than the bitter voices of the past.

His father, Nathaniel Cain, was the only son of a wealthy Philadelphia merchant. He lived in the same brownstone mansion in which he'd been born and was a competent, if unexceptional, businessman. He was nearly thirty-five when he married sixteen-year-old Rosemary Simpson. She was too young, but her parents had been anxious to rid themselves of their troublesome daughter, especially to such a well-heeled bachelor.

From the beginning, it was a marriage made in hell. She hated her pregnancy, had no interest in the son who was born exactly nine months after her wedding night, and grew to regard her adoring husband with contempt. Over the years she embarrassed him in public and cuckolded him in private, but he never stopped loving her.

He blamed himself for her restlessness. If only he hadn't forced a child on her so soon, she might have been more content. As time passed, however, he ceased blaming himself for her misdeeds and blamed only the child.

It took her nearly ten years to run through his fortune. She left him for a man who had been one of his employees.

Baron had observed it all, a bewildered, lonely child. In the months after his mother's departure, he stood by helplessly, watching his father being consumed by his unhealthy obsession for his faithless wife. Filthy, unshaven, drowning in alcohol, Nathaniel Cain sealed himself inside the lonely, decaying mansion and constructed elaborate fantasies of everything his wife had not been.

Only once had the boy rebelled. In a fit of anger, he'd spewed out all his resentment against the mother who'd abandoned them both. Nathaniel Cain had beaten him until his nose streamed with blood and his eyes had swollen shut. Afterward, he didn't seem to remember what had happened.

The lesson Cain had learned from his parents had been a hard one, and he'd never forgotten it. He'd learned that love was a weakness that twists and perverts.

Hard-earned lessons were the best-remembered. He gave away books when he finished them, traded horses before he could grow too fond of them, and stood by the window of the library at Risen Glory staring out at the hot, still night thinking about his father, his mother… and Kit Weston.

He found little comfort in the fact that so many of the emotions she aroused in him were angry ones. It bothered him that she made him feel anything at all. But since the afternoon she'd invaded his house, veiled, mysterious, and wildly beautiful, he hadn't been able to get her off his mind. And today, when he'd touched her breasts, he'd known there'd never been a woman he'd wanted more.

He glanced over at his desk. His papers didn't seem to have been disturbed tonight, so she hadn't slipped in when he'd gone out to the stable to check on the horses. He probably should have locked up the ledgers and bankbooks after he'd found evidence of her snooping, but he'd felt a perverse sense of satisfaction in witnessing her dishonesty.

Her month was almost up. If tonight was any indication, she'd be marrying that idiot Parsell soon. Before that happened, he had to find a way to free himself from the mysterious hold she had on him.

If only he knew how.

He heard a soft sound in the hallway. She was roaming again, and tonight he was in no mood for it. He stalked across the carpet and twisted the doorknob.

Kit spun around as the library door crashed open. Cain stood on the other side. He looked rough, elegant, and thoroughly untamed.

She wore only a thin nightdress. It covered her from neck to toe, but after what had passed between them in her bedroom earlier, she felt too exposed.

"Insomnia?" he drawled.

Her bare feet and unbound hair made her feel like a hoyden, especially after spending the evening with Veronica Gamble. She wished she'd at least put on her slippers before she'd come downstairs "I-I didn't eat much at dinner. I was hungry, and I wanted to see if there was any cherry pie left."

"I wouldn't mind a piece myself. We'll look together." Even though he spoke casually, she sensed something calculating in his expression, and she wished she could keep him from following her to the kitchen. She should have stayed in her room, but she'd barely eaten anything for dinner, and she'd hoped a late-night snack would fill her stomach enough so she could sleep.