Potent Pleasures

Charlotte Daicheston encounters a masked stranger in a garden at a masquerade ball and shares an intimate moment with him. He disappears, leaving her with only the memory of the encounter. Years later, after Charlotte has established herself in London society, she meets the man again. She discovers he is not a footman as she believed, but a wealthy, titled earl. He does not remember her. Society is circulating rumors questioning the earl's virility, which surprises Charlotte given what she knows of his passion. Charlotte begins to wonder whether her indiscretion years ago was actually with this man at all, complicating any possibility of a conventional happy ending. The situation sets off a chain of scandals and misunderstandings.