Undercover Sir. Carolyn Faulkner

and Taffy were both ready and waiting in the living room by five o'clock. Neither of them was sitting down, though.

      She didn't know about Taffy, but Ia had spent the afternoon trying to come to grips with everything that had happened in the space of such a short time. The last thing she knew before she had fallen asleep on the couch at about three in the morning, was that they were having a great party and he wasn't anywhere near to coming home, or they definitely wouldn't have been doing that.

      Now she'd been rudely awakened, harshly scolded, paraded half naked in front of a stranger, to whom she was introduced after he heard a lot of very embarrassing things about her. Then she was strapped until she could barely stand it any longer, only to be informed that she wasn't allowed to leave her room after cleaning up her mess until he expected her to give some kind of command performance at dinner that evening.

      She didn't resent having to clean up in the least—they'd already discussed that last night—and had each agreed that they'd put their back into setting the place to rights after the excesses of their party.

      And the fact that she had been intending to sulk in her room all day anyway after her punishment did nothing to negate her resentment about having to be there because he'd said she had to.

      The thing that she had been mulling over from eleven to four, when she sighed in resignation and began to get ready—besides the intriguing stranger's presence in the house—was what her brother had said to her before he'd left.

      It tugged at her heartstrings that he would say something like that, especially in that forlorn tone. Daniel had never been that way around her. He met the world head on, took the bull by the horns and got stuff done.

      But she'd been nursing that grudge against him for a long time, and she'd never really considered how it made him feel. Frankly, what he'd done to her today should have made her even less inclined to let him off the hook, but, for some reason, it wasn't working out that way.

      And even though she'd been giving him the cold shoulder, she didn't hate him by any means, and it made her sad that he'd come to that conclusion, through no one's fault but her own.

      As she pondered that while standing there, waiting for the men, Taffy met her eyes across the living room and gave her a sympathetic smile, and Ia returned it with one of her own.

      The men came in through the back door to the kitchen, talking and laughing. Apparently, Daniel had been showing Douglas around.

      Daniel walked directly up to Taffy and took her hands, saying with sincere affection, "You look very beautiful." He kissed her on the cheek. "And I am a very lucky man." With that, he tucked her hand into his elbow, saying, "Shall we go?"