Simply Unforgettable

Had he really been hiding behind his hat like a groveling coward?

He felt decidedly shaken, if the truth were known. He wondered what would have happened if he had been standing up on the street rather than down here in the meadow and they had come face-to-face. He wondered if he would have stuttered and stammered and otherwise made a prize ass of himself or if he would have gazed coolly at her, raised his eyebrows, and pretended to search for her name in his memory.

Lord, he hoped it would have been the latter.

And then, as the girls disappeared into

Marlborough Lane

, he found himself wondering how she would have behaved. Would she have blushed and lost her composure? Would she have raised her eyebrows and pretended to have half forgotten him?

Damnation! Perhaps she had forgotten him.

It was a very good thing they had not come face-to-face. His self-esteem might well have suffered a blow from which it would never recover. His grandfather and Amy and these two ladies would have witnessed his humiliation. So would the crocodile of schoolgirls, their eyes avidly drinking in the scene so that they could titter and giggle over it in their dormitory for the next week or month or so.

There would have been nothing left for him to do but find a gun somewhere and blow his brains out.

He felt suddenly irritated again and intensely annoyed with Miss Frances Allard, almost as if she had seen him and had not recognized him.

Perhaps, he thought, gritting his teeth, she had been brought into his life by a malevolent fate in order to keep him humble—this schoolteacher who had preferred her teaching job to him.

Mrs. Reynolds and Mrs. Abbotsford were taking their leave. Lucius touched the brim of his hat to them and looked closely at his grandfather.

“I think that is definitely enough for one afternoon, sir,” he said. “It is time to go home for tea.”

“Perhaps Amy would like to stay out longer,” the earl suggested.

But Amy smiled cheerfully at him and took one of his arms while her other was still linked through Lucius’s.

“I am very happy to go home for tea with you, Grandpapa,” she said. “It has been a wonderfully exciting afternoon, has it not? We must have spoken with a dozen people or more. And we have been invited to a soiree tomorrow evening. I will have much to say when I write to Mama and Caroline and Emily tonight. I do not know what I am going to wear.”

“I believe,” Lucius said with an exaggerated sigh, “I can predict another shopping expedition to

Milsom Street

tomorrow.”

“You may purchase a ready-made gown with my purse, child,” the earl said. “And all the trimmings to go with it. But do trust to Lucius’s good taste when you make your choices. It is impeccable.”

As they walked, Lucius found himself grappling with a memory of Frances Allard sealing the edges of a beef pie with the pad of her thumb, pricking the lid so that the steam would not blow it off, and then bending over the hot oven to set it inside.

Why he should still feel rather like the beef filling lying beneath the unpricked lid in the middle of the hot oven was a mystery to him—not to mention a severe annoyance.

Why had she chosen today of all days to bring a class up onto the Crescent?

Or, perhaps more to the point, why the devil had he chosen today of all days to stroll there with his grandfather and sister?

It felt damnably unmanly to have had his composure shaken by a one-night lover three months after the event.

“Oh, Luce,” Amy said, squeezing his arm, “is not Bath a wonderful place to be?”

“It is absolutely not fair,” Susanna Osbourne declared, “that I spent only an hour outside playing games with the junior girls and have acquired lobster cheeks and a cherry nose and freckles to boot while Frances spent a whole afternoon walking with the middle class and looks bronze and beautiful. It is not even summer yet.”

“Bronze is not considered any more becoming for a lady than lobster,” Miss Martin said, looking up from the tatting with which she kept her hands busy. “You teach the girls that they must guard their complexions against the sunlight at all costs, do you not, Susanna? I have no sympathy, then, if you were too busy having fun with your class to guard your own—and I could see whenever I glanced out the window at you that you were having fun. You were actually participating in the games yourself. As for Frances—well, she is the exception to all rules as far as looks and complexions are concerned. It is her Italian heritage. We poor English mortals must simply endure the unfairness of it.”

But despite the words themselves, her eyes twinkled as she looked across the room at her youngest teacher, who was sitting forward in her chair, her slippered feet propped on a stool, her slim arms clasped about her knees, her face bright and noticeably sunburned.

“Besides,” Anne Jewell said as she mended a tear down the back of a small boy’s shirt, “you do not look like any lobster I have ever seen, Susanna. You look rosy and youthful and healthy and prettier than ever. Though your nose would shine like a beacon in the dark, I suppose.”

They all laughed at poor Susanna, who touched the offending organ gingerly and wrinkled it as she smiled and then joined in the laughter.

They were sitting, the four of them, in Miss Martin’s sitting room as they often did in the evenings after the girls had been sent to their dormitories under Matron’s care and David had been put to bed.

“Did your walk prove thoroughly educational, Frances?” Miss Martin asked, her eyes still twinkling. “Did the girls acquire as much material for writing assignments as you hoped?”

Frances chuckled. “They were marvelously attentive,” she said. “I do wonder, though, how much detail their minds retained of the architecture of the Circus and the Crescent and the Upper Assembly Rooms. I do not doubt they could describe down to the minutest detail every person of fashion we passed—especially if that person happened to be male and below the age of one-and-twenty. I was very proud of them all when we were crossing the Pulteney Bridge on the way back here, though. There was a group of young bucks swaggering there and making a few pointed remarks. One of them was even impertinent enough to make use of a quizzing glass. The girls all stuck their noses in the air and walked on past as if the young men were invisible.”

Anne and Susanna laughed with her.

“Oh, good girls,” Miss Martin said approvingly, bending her head to her work again.

“Of course,” Frances added, “they did rather spoil the effect after we had crossed

Laura Place

and were safely out of earshot by buzzing and giggling over those very young men the whole length of

Great Pulteney Street

. I suppose that is what they will remember most about the outing.”

“But of course,” Anne said. “Would you expect anything different, Frances? They are all either fourteen or fifteen years old. They were acting their age.”

“Quite right, Anne,” Miss Martin said. “Adults are very foolish when they admonish unruly children to act their age. In nine cases out of ten that is exactly what the children are doing.”

“What are you going to wear tomorrow evening, Frances?” Anne asked.

“My ivory silk, I suppose,” Frances said. “It is the best I have.”

“Oh, but of course.” Susanna grinned mischievously at her as she got to her feet to pour them all a second cup of tea. “Frances has a beau.”

“Frances,” Miss Martin said, looking up from her work once more, “has been invited to Mrs. Reynolds’s soiree quite independently of Mr. Blake, Susanna. She was invited on account of her voice, which is like an angel’s. Betsy Reynolds undoubtedly told her mother about it, and Mrs. Reynolds very wisely added Frances to the list of guests who will entertain the company with their superior talent.”

But Susanna could not resist teasing further.

“It is Mr. Blake who is to escort her, though,” she said. “I think Frances has a beau. What do you think, Anne?”

Anne smiled from one to the other of them, her needle suspended above her work.

“I believe Frances has an admirer and would-be beau,” she said. “I also believe Frances has not yet decided if she will accept him in that latter capacity.”

“I think she had better decide against it,” Miss Martin added. “I have a strong objection to losing my French and music teacher. Though in a good—a very good cause—I suppose I could be persuaded to make the sacrifice.”

Mr. Aubrey Blake was the physician who attended the pupils at Miss Martin’s school whenever one of them needed his medical services. He was a serious, conscientious, handsome man in his middle thirties who had begun to show an interest in Frances during the past month or so. He had met her shopping on Milsom Street one Saturday afternoon and had insisted upon escorting her all the way back to the school and upon carrying her purchases himself, small and lightweight though they were.

Her three friends had collapsed in mirth afterward when Frances had told them how she had almost expired of embarrassment lest he somehow discover that that light bundle contained new stockings.

And then when she had taken one of the day pupils home early one day because the girl had a fever and waited until Mr. Blake had been summoned so that she could carry word of the girl’s condition back with her, he had insisted upon walking her all the way to the school doors.

Now he had got word of the fact that she had been invited to sing at the Reynolds soiree, and since he was an invited guest himself, he had called at the school, had Keeble summon Frances to the visitors’ sitting room after very correctly asking permission of Miss Martin, and asked to be allowed the honor of being her escort for the evening.

She would have had a hard time saying no if she had wished to do so. Actually, though, she had been relieved. Since the outing was to be in the evening, she knew that Claudia would have insisted upon sending one of the maids with her. It would have been a dreadful inconvenience. Besides, walking in on an evening party alone would have required a great deal of fortitude.

“I do not believe a teacher has time for a beau,” she said now. “And even if this teacher did, I am not at all sure she would choose Mr. Blake. He is perhaps a trifle too earnest for her taste. However, he is handsome and he is a perfect gentleman and he has a perfectly respectable profession, and if she decides that she does want him as a beau, she will be sure to inform her dearest friends and warn her employer of her impending departure into the world of idle marital bliss.”

She laughed as she lifted her cup to her lips.

“Well, I would not settle for a mere physician,” Susanna said, sitting down again and clasping her knees as before. “He would have to be a duke or no one at all if he were to attract me. Except a prince, maybe.”

Susanna had come to the school at the age of twelve as a charity pupil. She had lied about her age before that, saying she was fifteen in an attempt to acquire employment as a lady’s maid, but two days after she had been rejected in that capacity she had been found by Mr. Hatchard, Miss Martin’s London agent, and offered a position as pupil at the school. Two years ago Miss Martin had given her employment as a junior teacher. What her background was before the age of twelve Frances did not know.

“Oh, not a duke, Susanna,” Miss Martin said firmly.

Frances and Anne exchanged amused glances. Susanna rested her forehead on her knees to hide her own smile. They all knew about Miss Martin’s aversion to dukes. She had once been employed by the Duke of Bewcastle as governess to his sister, Lady Freyja Bedwyn. Like a string of governesses before her, Miss Martin had resigned after a very short time, having discovered that the job—or rather her pupil—was impossible. But unlike the others, she had refused to accept either the money payment the duke had offered or the recommendation to another post. Instead she had marched down the driveway of Lindsey Hall, taking her triumph and her personal possessions with her.

After she had opened the school and struggled to keep it going, she had been offered the financial assistance of an anonymous benefactor. But before she had accepted, Miss Martin had made Mr. Hatchard swear on a Bible that the benefactor was not the Duke of Bewcastle.

“He will have to be a prince,” she added now. “I flatly refuse to attend your wedding if the groom is a duke.”

Anne had finished her mending. She folded the shirt, picked up her scissors, needle, and thread, and got to her feet.

“It is time I looked in on David,” she said, “to make sure he is still sleeping peacefully. He ought to sleep well, though, after all the running he did in the meadows this afternoon. Thank you for the tea, Claudia. Good night, all.”

But the others had risen too. Days at the school began early and ran late and were extraordinarily busy between times. Very rarely did they talk late into the night.

Frances thought about the following evening as she got ready for bed. The singing was something she looked forward to with eager anticipation, though she had not done any public singing in three years. She would be nervous when the time came, of course, but that would be natural. She would not let it affect her performance.

She was, however, a little nervous about another aspect of the evening. Mr. Blake really would become her suitor with a little encouragement. He had not said so, but her woman’s intuition told her she was not wrong. He was perfectly eligible even though he must be at least ten years older than she. He was also good-looking, intelligent, amiable, and well respected.

Her prospects of marrying were not bountiful. She would be foolish not to encourage him. She enjoyed teaching, and her salary was sufficient to cover all her most basic needs. The school provided her with a home and friendship. But she was only twenty-three years old, and her life had once been very different. She could not pretend to herself that she would be perfectly happy to remain as she was for the rest of her life.

She had needs, basic human needs that were very hard to ignore.

Mr. Blake might be her only chance of attracting a decent husband. Of course, matters were not quite that simple. There would be details from her past to explain to him, some of them not reflecting well on her. He might not be at all willing to pursue his interest in her once all had been told. On the other hand, perhaps he might. She would not know if she did not put the matter to the test.

She blew out her candle when she was ready for bed, drew back the curtains as she always did, and lay on her back, staring out into the darkness and picking out a few stars.

She had wept when she had learned that she was not with child. Tears of relief—of course!—and tears of sadness.

In three months she had not fully recovered her spirits. It was because she had lain with him, she told herself, because she had given him her virginity. Of course it was difficult to recover, to forget him. It would be strange if it were not.

But when she was being strictly truthful with herself, she knew that it was more than that. Most of the time when she remembered Lucius Marshall, it was as much other things about him she recalled as it was that. She thought of him peeling potatoes and shoveling snow and drying dishes and lifting his jug-eared snowman’s head onto the hollowed-out shoulders and waltzing and . . . Well, of course, her thoughts always did come back to what had followed that waltz.

She even remembered him angry and contemptuous and arrogant and standing toe-to-toe with her on a snowy road after hauling her unceremoniously out of her carriage.

Staring out at one particular star and wondering how many thousands or millions of miles away it was, she admitted to herself that if it were not for Lucius Marshall she would be able to see her way more clearly in this matter of Mr. Blake—and of course there would be less to confess. But she was all too painfully aware of the differences between the two men and—more to the point—the differences in her reactions to them.

With Mr. Blake there was no magic.

But then Mr. Blake was a steady, dependable man who could perhaps offer her a decent future. And she did not know for certain that there would never be any magic if he should choose to court her, did she?

She should encourage him, she decided, closing her eyes.

She would encourage him, in fact.

She was going to start being more sensible.

Her eyes opened again and focused on the star.

“Lucius,” she whispered, “you might as well be as far away as that star for all the good pining for you has done me. But this is the end. I am not going to think about you ever again.”

It was an eminently sensible decision.

Frances lay awake half the night contemplating it.

It was Miss Martin herself rather than Keeble who came to Frances’s room the following evening five minutes before Mr. Blake was due, to inform her that he had already arrived.

“Fortunately,” Frances said while Miss Martin looked her over, “I have so few chances to wear the ivory silk that not many people would know it is several years old.”

“And it is of such a classic design,” Miss Martin said, looking assessingly at its high waistline and short sleeves and modestly scooped neckline, “that it does not look out of fashion at all. It will do. So will your hair, though you have dressed it as severely as ever. There is no way, of course, that you can hide your great beauty. If I were given to personal vanity, I would be mortally envious. No, jealous.”

Frances laughed and reached for her brown cloak.

“No, no,” Miss Martin said, “you must wear my paisley shawl, Frances. That is why I am carrying it over my arm. And one more thing before you go. I was not serious last evening. Of course, I would hate to lose any of my teachers. We are a good team and I have grown inordinately fond of the three of you who live at the school with me. But if you should really develop an attachment to Mr. Blake—”

“Oh, Claudia,” Frances said, laughing again and catching her up in a quick hug, “what a goose you are. He is accompanying me to a party at which I am not even a full-fledged guest. That is all.”

“Hmm,” Miss Martin said. “You have not yet seen the look in his eye this evening, Frances.”

But Frances did see it a few minutes later when she went downstairs and found him pacing the hall while a darkly frowning Keeble stood guarding his domain with his habitual suspicion for the whole of the male world once it stepped over the threshold. Mr. Blake looked very distinguished indeed in his black evening cloak with his black silk hat in one hand. And when he looked up to watch her descend the stairs, there was a gleam of approval and something more in his eyes.

“As always, Miss Allard,” he said, “you look remarkably elegant.”

“Thank you,” she said.

He had a carriage waiting at the door, and within a very short time they had arrived at the Reynolds house on

Queen Anne Square

. It felt strange to Frances after so long to be going to a party again. She was once more very thankful for the escort of Mr. Blake. The house seemed already to be filled with guests for all that Bath was reputed to be no longer the fashionable place to be. Mrs. Reynolds was very proudly letting each arriving guest know that the Earl of Edgecombe was in attendance with his two grandchildren.

They must be in the card room, Frances concluded after she had been in the drawing room for a short while. There seemed to be no one in here grand enough to invite bowing and scraping from the other guests. More to the point, there was no one she recognized apart from a few Bath acquaintances—and therefore no one to recognize her. She had felt a little anxiety lest she be seen and recognized by some of her former London acquaintances. She would far prefer that no one from that former life of hers ever discover where she had gone.

So far no one had.

The musical entertainment began soon after Frances’s arrival, and she took her seat beside Mr. Blake to enjoy the other performances, though she did assist with the first item on the program, an étude on the pianoforte played by Betsy Reynolds, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the house, who was also a day pupil at Miss Martin’s. Frances was her music teacher and helped her position her music and murmured encouragement to her until the girl’s nerves were sufficiently under control that she could begin.

The recital went well, if not brilliantly, and Frances smiled warmly at Betsy when she had finished, and got to her feet to hug her before Betsy was sent off to bed.

Frances’s own turn came almost an hour after that. She was, in fact, the final performer of the evening. Supper would be served after she had finished.

“I daresay, Miss Allard,” Mr. Blake whispered, leaning closer to her as Mrs. Reynolds was getting to her feet to announce her, “you have been kept until last because it is expected that you will also be the best.”

Mr. Blake had not heard her sing. Neither had anyone else in the room except Mr. Huckerby, the school’s dancing master, who was to accompany her. But Frances smiled her gratitude anyway. The familiar butterflies were fluttering in her stomach.

She had chosen an ambitious and perhaps not quite appropriate piece for the occasion, but “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth” from Handel’s Messiah had always been a great favorite of hers, and Mrs. Reynolds had given her free rein in her choice of music.

Frances stood to a polite smattering of applause and took her place in the middle of the drawing room beside the pianoforte. She took her time, preparing her breath with a number of slow inhalations and exhalations, closing her eyes for a few moments while she thought her way into the music.

Then she nodded to Mr. Huckerby, listened to the opening bars of music, and began to sing.

As soon as she did so, all her nervousness fled and along with it most of her awareness of her audience, her surroundings, and her very self.

The music took on an existence of its own.

Having settled Amy in the drawing room with Mrs. Abbotsford and her daughter, both of whom had welcomed her warmly into their midst, Lucius had spent most of the evening in the card room, though he had sat in for only a hand or two himself. For the rest of the time he had stood watching his grandfather play, conversing with fellow guests who had wandered in from the other room, and trying not to dwell upon how excruciatingly bored he was.

He would have gone into the drawing room when the musical entertainment began since he was partial to music even if that provided at a Bath soiree was sure to be insipid at best. But Mr. Reynolds managed to corner him first and launched into a lengthy, prosy discourse on the virtues of hunting as a thoroughly English and aristocratic sport and the evil natures of those who opposed it, whom Lucius gathered must be deemed unnatural traitors to their very country. He watched his grandfather for signs of weariness and half hoped that he would see some. Although his London self would be nothing short of horrified at the prospect of having to return home so early in the evening, his Bath self could only think longingly of sitting with his feet up in the sitting room on

Brock Street

, reading a book.

Reading a book, for the love of God!

Of course Amy would be bitterly disappointed if such a thing actually happened.

The Earl of Edgecombe, however, appeared to be happily absorbed in the play. His winnings and losses were about evenly balanced. Not that the stakes were high anyway. They rarely were in Bath, where the Masters of Ceremonies had always frowned upon heavy gambling.

The music was clearly audible. It began with a rather plodding étude on the pianoforte, which Reynolds explained was being performed by his daughter, though he made no move to go into the other room to play the role of proud parent—or even to stop talking in order to listen. There followed a violin sonata, a tenor solo, a string quartet, and another recital on the pianoforte, performed by someone with a surer and more skilled touch than Miss Reynolds had displayed.

Lucius gave the music as much of his attention as he could. Fortunately, he realized within a couple of minutes that he needed to bend only half an ear to Reynolds without danger of missing anything significant in what the man had to say.

And then a soprano began to sing. At first—for just a very few moments—Lucius was prepared to turn much of his attention away from her performance. The female soprano voice was not his favorite, its tendency being all too often to shrillness. And this soprano had made the mistake of choosing a sacred piece for a very secular party.

However, in those same few moments he realized that this soprano was very far superior to the norm. And within a few moments more he had focused all of his attention on her and her song, leaving Reynolds to address the air about him.

“I know that my Redeemer liveth,” she sang, “and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.”

Indeed, very soon a number of the other guests in the card room, and even a few of the players lifted their heads and listened. Conversation did not stop entirely, but it decreased considerably in volume.

But all this Lucius did not even notice. The voice had captured his whole being.

It was rich and powerful without being overbearing. It had the full quality of a contralto voice but could soar to the highest notes without effort or even a suggestion of shrillness or strain. It was a voice that was as pure as a bell, and yet it resonated with human passion.

“Yet in my flesh shall I see God.”

It was without all doubt the most glorious voice he had ever heard.

He closed his eyes, a frown of almost pained concentration creasing his brow. And finally Reynolds, perhaps realizing that he had lost his audience, fell silent.

“For now is Christ risen from the dead,” the voice sang on, joyful and triumphant now, carrying Lucius’s soul with it.

He swallowed.

“The first fruits of them that sleep.”

He felt a touch on his sleeve and opened his eyes to see his grandfather beside him. Without exchanging a word, they moved together toward the drawing room.

“For now is Christ risen.” The voice gathered itself for the soaring climax. “For now is Christ ri-sen, from the dead.”

They arrived in the doorway and stood side by side, looking in.

She stood in the middle of the room, tall and dark and slender and majestic, her arms at her sides, her head lifted, classically beautiful but using only her voice with which to captivate her audience.

“The first fruits—” she held the high note, let its sound and triumphant acclamation linger and begin to die away, “of th-em that sleep.”

She stood with lifted head and closed eyes while the pianoforte played the closing measures, and not a person in the audience moved a muscle.

There was a brief silence.

And then enthusiastic applause.

“Dear God,” the earl murmured, joining in.

But Lucius could only gaze as if transfixed.

My God! My God!

Frances Allard.

She opened her eyes, smiled, and inclined her head in acknowledgment of the applause, her cheeks flushed, her eyes glowing, her smooth, dark hair gleaming in the light cast down upon it from the chandelier overhead. Her eyes moved over the audience until they reached the doorway and . . .

And locked upon Lucius standing there gazing back.

Her smile did not falter. Rather, it froze in place.

In that fraction of a moment it seemed that the whole world must have stopped spinning.

And then her eyes moved onward until her smiling face had thanked the whole audience. She then made her way toward an empty chair on the far side of the room, close to where Amy sat with her hands clasped to her bosom. A gentleman rose as Frances approached, bowed to her, and repositioned the chair before she sat down on it. He bent his head close to hers to make some remark to her.

“That was quite, quite splendid, Miss Allard,” Mrs. Reynolds was saying with hearty joviality. “I was well advised to position you last on the program. My dear Betsy was quite right when she said you sing superbly. But I am sure that after sitting for a whole hour everyone must be ready for supper. It will be served immediately in the dining room.”

“Lucius,” his grandfather said, setting a hand on his shoulder as everyone stirred and the room filled with the buzz of conversation, “I have rarely if ever heard a voice that so moved me. Whoever is she? If she is someone famous, I do not recognize the name. Miss Allen, is it?”

“Allard,” Lucius said.

“Let us go and pay our compliments to Miss Allard,” the earl said. “We must invite her to sit with us for supper.”

She was on her feet again. Several of the other guests were crowding about her to speak with her. She had a bright, fixed smile on her face. She was determinedly not looking their way, Lucius saw. Mrs. Reynolds, smiling graciously, had made her way to her side and saw them coming.

“Ah, Lord Edgecombe,” she said in the sort of voice that made everyone else stand back to give them room, “may I have the pleasure of presenting Miss Allard to you? Does she not sing divinely? She teaches music at Miss Martin’s school. It is a very superior academy. We send Betsy there.”

Frances fixed her eyes on the earl and curtsied.

“My lord,” she murmured.

“I have the honor, Miss Allard,” Mrs. Reynolds continued, clearly puffed up with the pride of having such illustrious guests in her own home, “of making known to you the Earl of Edgecombe and his grandson, Viscount Sinclair. And his granddaughter, Miss Amy Marshall.”

Amy had stepped up beside him, Lucius realized, and taken his arm.

Frances turned to him then and her eyes met his once more.

“My lord,” she said.

“Miss Allard.” He bowed to her.

Her eyes moved on to Amy. “Miss Marshall?”

“You brought tears to my eyes, Miss Allard,” Amy said. “I wish I could sing like that.”

Lucius felt as if someone had dealt him a blow to the lower abdomen.

But one thing was perfectly clear. Whatever her feelings toward him might be, she certainly had not forgotten him.

“Miss Martin’s may be a superior school,” his grandfather was saying, “but what on earth are you doing teaching there, Miss Allard, when you should be enthralling the world with your singing voice?”

The color deepened in her cheeks as she turned back to him.

“It is very kind of you to say so, my lord,” she said, “but teaching is my chosen profession. It gives me great satisfaction.”

“It would give me great satisfaction,” the earl said, smiling kindly at her, “if you would take supper with Amy and Sinclair and me, Miss Allard.”

She hesitated for just a moment.

“Thank you,” she said. “That is very obliging of you, but I have already agreed to sit with Mr. Blake and a few of his acquaintances.”

“But, Miss Allard,” Mrs. Reynolds protested, sounding horrified, “I am quite sure Mr. Blake would be more than willing to relinquish your company to the Earl of Edgecombe for half an hour. Would you not, sir?”

The gentleman she addressed frowned but inclined his head to his hostess in an obvious preliminary to agreeing with her demand. However, Frances spoke first.

“But I am unwilling to relinquish his,” she said.

“And quite right too, my dear,” the earl said with a low chuckle. “It has been a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Perhaps you would do me the honor of taking tea with me tomorrow in

Brock Street

. My grandson will be delighted to come and fetch you in the carriage, will you not, Lucius?”

Lucius, who had been standing there staring like a dumb block or a moonstruck halfling, inclined his head. It was, he realized, far too late for either him or Frances to do the sensible thing and admit to a previous acquaintance.

Deuce take it, but why could he not be simply surprised to see her or pleased to see her or displeased to see her? Why the devil had he been knocked so off balance that he still felt as if he were staggering around like a man who had no control over his own world or his own impulses?

But, Lord—that voice!

She drew breath as if to say something but apparently changed her mind.

“Thank you.” She smiled without looking at Lucius. “I would like that, my lord.”

The devil! Lucius frowned ferociously, but no one was paying him any attention.

“Oh, and I shall look forward to it of all things,” Amy cried warmly, clapping her hands. “I shall be able to be hostess since only Grandpapa and Luce live there on

Brock Street

with me.”

And then other people claimed Frances Allard’s attention, and there was nothing left for Lucius to do but remark upon his grandfather’s obvious tiredness, ignore Amy’s look of disappointment, and have the carriage brought around without further delay.

It seemed an age before it came.

“I want to be able to listen to that voice again in my memory,” the earl said as he settled in his carriage seat for the short drive to

Brock Street

. He set his head back against the cushions, sighed deeply, and made no further attempt at conversation.

Amy was either doing the same thing or else she was reliving the whole party, which she had obviously enjoyed enormously even though she had been deprived of the pleasure of partaking of supper before leaving. She sat in silence, looking out into the darkness, a dreamy smile on her lips.

Lucius sat in his corner, quietly seething. It was bad enough that he had sighed over the memory of her like a damned lovelorn poet for at least a month after Christmas. It was worse that after seeing her on the Crescent yesterday he had suffered through a largely sleepless night, though he must have nodded off occasionally or he would not have had such vivid dreams about her. It was worst of all to have discovered her at a party he was attending tonight—and in such a manner.

That voice!

Deuce take it, what a voice it was. It added a whole new dimension to his knowledge of her character, of the talent and beauty of soul that lived within her beautiful body. It made him realize how much more of her there must be that was still unknown to him. It filled him with a yearning to know more.

He had a bad case of resurrected infatuation—there was no denying it. And he did not appreciate it one little bit. It had taken him long enough to forget her in the first place.

And to cap it all, she had looked even more beautiful tonight than he remembered her. Her naturally olive-hued complexion had looked darker, as if from exposure to the sun. Her eyes had looked a richer brown in contrast, and her teeth whiter. She still wore her hair the same way, but the style that had seemed merely severe after Christmas had looked elegant and richly shining tonight. She was as slender as he remembered her, but the simply styled ivory silk gown she had worn tonight and her almost regal bearing had made her look quite exquisitely feminine.

Was that fellow who had been with her a suitor? A fiancé? He was half bald, for the love of God. And he had been prepared to relinquish her company at supper, albeit reluctantly. If she had promised to sit with him, Lucius thought, and someone had tried to usurp his place, he would have offered fisticuffs or pistols at dawn, not meek compliance, by Jove.

“I have been royally entertained this evening, I must say,” his grandfather said as the carriage rocked to a halt, “and should sleep soundly tonight. I can only wish that I had been sitting in the drawing room as you were, Amy, to watch the whole of that last performance. Miss Allard has a rare talent. And she is a beautiful woman too.”

“Mmm,” Lucius mumbled.

“What a wonderful evening it has been,” Amy said with a sigh of contentment as Lucius handed her down onto the pavement. “And tomorrow I will be Grandpapa’s hostess for tea. Are you not looking forward to Miss Allard’s visit of all things, Luce?”

“Of all things,” he said curtly.

He could not blame her for being there at the Reynolds soiree tonight, of course, though he had been inclined at first to do just that—schoolteachers ought to remain inside the walls of their schools so that castoff lovers did not have to run the risk of running headlong into them when they least expected it.

But he could blame her for accepting the invitation to tea. She had had a clear choice. She could have said yes or she could have said no.

She had said yes, damn her eyes.

He was feeling almost dangerously out of sorts. Yet he could not even retreat to White’s or some other gentlemen’s haunt in London to drown out his sulks in noise and action and alcohol.

“You are home safe and sound, then, miss,” Keeble observed with almost paternal solicitude when he let Frances into the school so soon after her knock that she suspected he must have been standing in the hallway waiting for her. “I worry when any of you ladies are out after dark. Miss Martin has invited you to join her in her sitting room.”

“Thank you,” Frances said, following him up the stairs so that he could open the door for her and even announce her as if she were visiting royalty.

She had suspected that her friends would be awaiting her return, but even so her heart sank. She so wanted to creep off to her room to lick her wounds in private. Was it only last night she had made the bold and liberating decision never to spare another thought for Lucius Marshall, Viscount Sinclair? But how could she have known that by some bizarre twist of fate she would meet him again tonight? She never attended parties in Bath. She had not sung in public outside the school since coming here.

It was not just bizarre. It was cruel. When her eyes had alighted on him, she . . .

“Well?” Susanna jumped to her feet as soon as Frances stepped into the sitting room, and regarded her with eager face and sparkling eyes. “Need we ask if you were a resounding success? How could you not have been?”

“Were you as well received as you deserve to be?” Anne asked, smiling warmly at her. “Did everyone make much of you?”

“Come and tell us all about your performance,” Miss Martin said. “And pour yourself a cup of tea before you sit down.”

“I’ll do that for her,” Susanna said. “Sit, Frances, sit, and allow me to wait on Bath’s newest celebrity. After tonight I daresay you will be a star and invited everywhere.”

“And neglect my duties here?” Frances said, sinking into the nearest chair and taking a cup of tea from Susanna’s hand. “I think not. Tonight was wonderful, but I am very happy being a schoolteacher. I was a little worried about my choice of song, but it was well received. I believe everyone was pleased. Mrs. Reynolds did not appear to be disappointed in me.”

“Disappointed?” Anne laughed. “I should hope not. I expect she is congratulating herself upon having discovered you before anyone else did. I should love to have heard you, Frances. We should all have loved it. We have been thinking about you all evening.”

“And Mr. Blake was the perfect escort, I hope?” Miss Martin asked.

“Absolutely,” Frances said. “He did not leave my side all evening and was very obliging. He waited outside his carriage just now until Mr. Keeble had let me in at the door.”

“He looked very dashing this evening, I must say,” Susanna said, her eyes twinkling. “Anne and I peeped out from her window as you were leaving—just like a couple of schoolgirls.”

“And how was the rest of the soiree?” Anne asked. “Do tell us about it, Frances.”

“Betsy Reynolds played well,” Frances told them. “She was first on the program and was very nervous, poor girl, but she did not play any wrong notes or slow down noticeably as she went along as she usually does. It was a good concert, and there was supper afterward. Everyone was most amiable.”

“Were there many guests?” Susanna asked. She stole a mischievous look at Claudia Martin and winked at the others. “Were there any dukes there? I shall expire of envy if there were.”

“No dukes.” Frances hesitated. “Only an earl. He was very kind. He has invited me to take tea with him tomorrow.”

“Has he?” Claudia Martin said sharply. “In a public place, I hope, Frances?”

“An earl.” Susanna laughed. “I hope he is ravishingly handsome.”

“How splendid for you,” Anne said. “But you do deserve the attention, Frances.”

“On

Brock Street

,” Frances said to Claudia, “with his grandson and granddaughter in attendance, Susanna.”

“I am delighted to hear it,” Claudia said, “provided the grandchildren are not infants.”

“Well.” Susanna pulled a face. “There goes my notion of high romance, though even grandfathers can be handsome—and amorous, I suppose.”

“They are not infants,” Frances said. “Miss Marshall is a pretty young lady, not much older than some of our senior girls—or perhaps not any older at all. The viscount is to bring a carriage to take me to

Brock Street

.”

The very thought was enough to set her hand to trembling, and some of her tea sloshed over into the saucer.

“I suppose with a title like that Viscount Sinclair must be his grandfather’s heir,” Susanna said. “Perhaps my dream may be resurrected after all. Is he ravishingly handsome, Frances?”

“Gracious,” Frances said, forcing the corners of her mouth up into a smile, “I did not notice.”

“Did not notice?” Susanna rolled her eyes at the ceiling. “Where did you leave your eyes when you went out tonight? But I daresay he is. And I daresay he will conceive a grand passion for you, Frances, unless he has already done so, and will sweep you off your feet, and you will end up one day as the countess of . . . where?”

“I have no idea.” Frances surged to her feet and set her cup and wet saucer down on the table beside her. “I cannot remember. I am sorry. It has been a busy evening, and now I am so tired I cannot think straight. And I cannot afford the time to go out to tea tomorrow. I have a whole set of essays coming in during the morning, and I am on homework supervision duty tomorrow evening. I have a French examination to set for the senior class. And there is choir practice. Perhaps I will send a refusal, excusing myself.”

“But you agreed to go?” Anne asked.

Frances looked helplessly at her.

“I did,” she said. “But it would not be too rude to send an excuse if it is genuine, would it? I do not know which house on

Brock Street

to send it to, though.”

That realization sent panic waves galloping and somersaulting through her, and she sat down abruptly again and spread her hands over her face. She fought hysteria.

“Frances,” Susanna said, aghast, “I did not mean to offend. I was merely teasing. Do forgive me.”

“I am sorry,” Frances said, lowering her hands. “I am not annoyed with you, Susanna. I am just tired.”

“You can mark essays and set the exam while you are on homework supervision,” Anne said. “Better yet, I will take the homework duty for you, since Mr. Upton has promised to come in tomorrow just to give David an art lesson. Then you will have time to go for tea and keep up with your work. I am sure Claudia will not object to your missing one choir practice.”

“I will not,” Claudia said. “But there is more to this than weariness and a potentially busy day ahead. You find the invitation overwhelming, Frances? Is there any particular reason?” She leaned across the space between their chairs and laid a sympathetic hand on Frances’s arm.

It was that touch that did it. A whole flood of emotion spilled forth from Frances, translating itself into words as it came.

“I have met Viscount Sinclair before,” she said in a rush, “and would far rather not have met him again.” The rawness of the distress she had been forced to hold deep within herself for the past hour and a half lodged itself in her throat and chest.

“Oh, poor Frances,” Anne said. “He is someone from your past? How unfortunate that he should come to Bath. I suppose he did not know you were here.”

“It was not very long ago,” Frances said. “Do you remember the snowfall after Christmas that delayed my return to school? I did not remain with my great-aunts as I let you all believe at the time. I had already started back here when the snow began. My carriage ended up buried in a snowbank when Viscount Sinclair overtook it and then stopped suddenly because there was a snowdrift ahead of him. He took me on to the closest inn, and we spent the following day in company with each other. He brought me back here as soon as the road was clear. He knew that I lived in Bath, you see.”

But he had come back here anyway. He had not called on her here, though—of course he had not. This evening’s meeting had been quite by chance. His manner, both when she first saw him standing in the drawing room doorway—ghastly moment!—and when he had approached her with the earl, had been stiff and unsmiling. He had been quite displeased, in fact.

He had no business being displeased. He knew she lived in Bath.

“I am sorry,” she said again. “Both for not telling you all then and for telling you now. It was a slight incident at the time, so slight that it did not seem worthy of mention. I was just a little shaken to see him again tonight so unexpectedly, that is all. I am sorry. Did you all have a pleasant evening?”

But they were all looking at her quite solemnly, and she knew that she had not deceived them for a moment. What a foolish thing to say, after all, that about the incident’s having been so slight that she had not even thought it worth mentioning.

“It would have been very quiet,” Anne said, “except that Miriam Fitch and Annabelle Hancock got into a fight again just before bedtime and Matron was obliged to send for Claudia.”

“But no blood was shed,” Miss Martin added, patting Frances briskly on the arm and removing her hand. “So we must not complain. Now, Frances, do you need me to find some task for you that simply must be performed after school tomorrow? Do you wish me to absolutely refuse to reprieve you in order that you might take tea with the earl and his grandchildren? I can be a marvelous tyrant when I wish to be, as you very well know.”

“No.” Frances sighed. “I said I would go, and it would be unfair of me now to expect you to get me out of it, Claudia. I will go. It is really no big thing at all.”

She got to her feet again and bade them all good night. She really did feel mortally tired, though she doubted she would be able to sleep. And now she felt bad at having unburdened herself—or half unburdened herself anyway—to her friends, who must think her a complete ninnyhammer.

An added irritant to her already troubled mind was the fact that Mr. Blake had misinterpreted her insistence upon sitting with him at supper—as well he might. He had caught hold of her hand in the carriage on the way back to the school and raised it to his lips. He had told her that he was proud and gratified to have been her chosen escort for the evening. Fortunately he had not said—or done!—anything more ardent than that, but even that much had seriously discomposed her.

She had never been a tease, but this evening she had come close to being just that, albeit unwittingly.

Anne caught up to her on the stairs and took her arm and squeezed it.

“Poor Frances,” she said. “I can see that you have had a nasty shock this evening. And of course the very fact that you suppressed the truth after Christmas suggests that Viscount Sinclair meant more to you than you care to admit. You do not have to admit it now either. We are your friends to share your secrets when you need to divulge them, and to leave you in peace with those you would prefer to guard. We all have and need secrets. But perhaps tomorrow will help you put some ghosts to rest.”

“Perhaps,” Frances agreed. “Thank you, Anne. One would think I would have learned my lesson more than three years ago—I have not even told you the full story of what happened before I came here, have I? But it seems I did not learn. Why do women tumble so foolishly into love?”

“Because we have so much love to give,” Anne said. “Because it is our nature to love. How could we nurture children if we were not so prone to tumbling headlong into love with even the scrawniest mites to whom we might give birth? Falling in love with men is only a symptom of our general condition, you know. We are sorry creatures, but I do not believe I would be different even if I could. Would you?”

Had Anne loved David’s father? Frances wondered briefly. Was there some terrible tragedy in Anne’s past that she knew nothing about? She supposed there must be.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, laughing in spite of herself. “I have never had a son on whom to lavish my affections as you have, Anne. Sometimes life seems—empty. And how ungrateful that sounds when I have this home and this profession and you and Susanna and Claudia.”

“And Mr. Blake,” Anne said.

“And Mr. Blake.”

They both laughed softly and took their leave of each other for the night.

Frances leaned her head back against the closed door when she was finally inside her room. She closed her eyes, but she could not stop a few hot tears from escaping and rolling down her cheeks.

She had actually been feeling happy—not just contented or gratified or pleased, but happy. Mr. Blake had been attentive but not cloyingly so all evening. He had been an amiable, interesting companion. She had considered him quite seriously as a possible beau and had decided that she really would be foolish to discourage him. It felt good to be in company with a man again and to feel herself liked and even admired. Her decision had pleased her. It meant that she had finally put behind her that slight incident after Christmas as well as everything from years ago. It meant that she was looking to a brighter future.

And she had been singing again. That was what had caused the active happiness. She did not care that perhaps she had chosen the wrong song. The point was that she had chosen what she wanted to sing, and though she had been absorbed in the singing of it, as she always was when she performed, she had also been aware that in fact it had not been the wrong song after all. She had sensed the favorable reaction of her listeners, and she had felt that almost-forgotten excitement of forging with them the strong, joyful, invisible bond that could sometimes unite artist and audience. When she had finished singing and heard the momentary hush that followed the final bars of the music, she had known—ah, yes, that was when she had known happiness.

And then she had opened her eyes and smiled about at her audience and . . .

And had found herself gazing at Lucius Marshall.

At first there had been simple, mindless shock. And then the plunge from happiness to wretchedness had been total. And now she felt mortally weary.

He was back in Bath when she no longer wanted him to be there. Only now would she admit to herself that for days, even weeks, after his departure she had hoped and hoped that he would come back.

How foolish and unreasonable of her!

Now he had come back, but he had made no attempt to call upon her. He would no doubt have left again without her ever knowing he had been here if there had not been the accident of tonight’s meeting.

It hurt that he had made no attempt to see her.

There was no such thing as common sense, it seemed, in affairs of the heart.

When Lucius knocked on the door of Miss Martin’s school the following afternoon he was admitted by an elderly, stoop-shouldered porter, who wore a black coat shiny with age, boots that squeaked with every step he took, and a shrewd squint that said as clearly as words that every man who stepped over the threshold was to be considered an enemy to be watched closely.

Lucius cocked an eloquent eyebrow at the man as he was shown into a not-quite-shabby visitors’ parlor and shut firmly inside while the porter went to inform Miss Allard of his lordship’s arrival. But it was not she who was first to come. It was another lady—of medium height and ramrod-straight posture and severe demeanor. Even before she introduced herself, Lucius realized that this must be Miss Martin herself, despite the fact that she was younger than he might have expected, surely no more than a year or two older than himself.

“Miss Allard will be another five minutes yet,” she explained after introducing herself. “She is conducting a practice with the senior choir.”

“Is she indeed, ma’am?” he said briskly. “You are fortunate to have such an accomplished musician as a teacher here.”

It had bothered him—or his pride anyway—for a whole month before he put her from his mind that Frances had chosen to teach at a girls’ school rather than go away with him. But since last evening he had found himself even more bothered that anyone with such a truly glorious voice could have chosen a teaching career when an illustrious career as a singer could have been hers with the mere snap of her fingers. It made no sense to him. She made no sense to him. And the fact that he did not know her, did not understand her, had kept him awake and irritable through much of the night. He scarcely knew her at all, he realized, and yet he was allowing her to haunt him again as no other woman had come close to doing.

“And no one is more sensible of that fact than I, Lord Sinclair,” Miss Martin said, folding her hands at her waist. “It is gratifying to have her talent recognized by no less a person than the earl, your grandfather, and I am pleased that he has seen fit to invite her to take tea with him. However, Miss Allard has duties at this school and will need to be back here by half past five.”

By the time this headmistress grew into an old battle-ax, Lucius thought, she would have had much practice. No doubt her girls—and her teachers—were all terrified of her. Good lord, it was almost a quarter to four now.

“I shall return her here not even one second past the half hour, ma’am,” he said, raising his eyebrows and regarding her with cool hauteur. But if she felt in any way intimidated, she did not show it.

“I wish I could spare a maid to accompany her,” she said, “but I cannot.”

Good Lord!

“You must trust to my gentleman’s honor, then, ma’am,” he told her curtly.

She did not like him—or trust him. That was perfectly clear. The reason was less so. Did she know about that episode after Christmas? Or did she just distrust all men? He would wager that it was the latter.

And this was what Frances had chosen over him? It was enough to make a man turn to some serious drinking. But then this was what she must have chosen over a singing career too.

And then the door opened and Frances herself stepped into the room. She was dressed as she had been up on the

Royal Crescent

, in a fawn-colored dress with a short brown spencer over it and an unadorned brown bonnet. She also wore a tight, set expression on her face, as if she had steeled herself for a dreadful ordeal. She looked, in fact, remarkably like the prunish shrew whom he had hauled out of an overset carriage just after Christmas and dumped on a snowy road—except that her nose was not red-tipped today or her mouth spewing fire and brimstone.

He would have left her there knee deep in snow to fend for herself if he had known half the trouble she was going to cause him.

“Miss Allard?” He swept her his most elegant bow.

“Lord Sinclair.” She curtsied, her eyes as cool and indifferent as if he had been a fly on the wall.

“I have informed Viscount Sinclair,” Miss Martin said, “that he is to have you back here at precisely half past five, Frances.”

Her eyes flickered, perhaps with surprise.

“I will not be late,” she promised, and turned to leave the room without waiting to see if Lucius was ready to follow her.

A minute or two later they were seated side by side in his carriage, and it was turning onto Sutton Street before swinging around in a great arc onto Great Pulteney Street. She was clinging to the leather strap above her head, presumably so that she would not sway sideways and inadvertently brush against his arm.

He was deeply irritated.

“I have taken to devouring lady teachers when I cannot wait for my tea,” he said.

She turned an uncomprehending face toward him.

“And what,” she asked, “is that supposed to mean?”

“You cannot sit much farther away from me,” he said, “without putting a dent in the side of the carriage, and I warn you I would be somewhat displeased if that were to happen. If I should decide to attack, though, you may scream and Peters will come running to your rescue even if only to stop you from murdering his eardrums.”

She let go of the strap, though she turned her face away and looked out through the window on her side.

“Of all the places in England where you might have gone to enjoy yourself,” she said, “why did you have to choose Bath?”

“I did not,” he said. “My grandfather chose it for his health. He is a very sick man and fancies that the waters agree with him. I came to keep an eye on him. Did you think I had come deliberately to see you, Frances? To renew my addresses, perhaps? To stand beneath your bedchamber window and serenade you with lovelorn ballads? You flatter yourself.”

“You make very free with my name,” she said.

“With your—? You might at least try not to be ridiculous—ma’am,” he retorted.

He watched her profile—or what he could see of it around the brim of her bonnet—as they proceeded along the long, straight stretch of

Great Pulteney Street

, and wondered why she was angry. She surely could not seriously believe that he had come to Bath to torment her. He was not even the one who had invited her to tea this afternoon—or the one who had accepted the invitation. He was not the one who had abandoned her after Christmas either. It had been the other way around.

Like Miss Martin’s, her posture was stiff and straight as any ramrod. She continued to gaze out the window like a queen looking for subjects on whom to confer a royal wave.

“Why are you angry?” he asked her.

“Angry?” She turned to look at him again, her nostrils flared, her eyes flashing. “I am not angry. Why should I be? You are a mere courier, are you not, Lord Sinclair, sent to bring me to the Earl of Edgecombe’s house? It was kind of him to invite me and I am pleased to come.”

She sounded it!

“Despite all the women I have known,” he said, “I have never yet come close to fathoming the female mind. You were given the chance to prolong and advance our relationship three months ago, but you rejected it—quite emphatically, if memory serves me correctly. And yet now, Frances, your whole demeanor tells me that you think you have a grievance against me. Is it possible that I somehow hurt you?”

Color flamed in her cheeks and light flashed from her dark eyes—and she grabbed for the strap again as the carriage passed through the diamond-shaped Laura Place and circled the fountain in the middle of the road.

“What absurdity is this?” she cried. “How could you possibly have hurt me?”

“I do believe men and women sometimes react differently to the sort of . . . liaison in which you and I became involved,” he said. “Men are able to enjoy the moment and let it go, while women are more inclined to find their hearts engaged. It was certainly never my intention to hurt you.”

But, devil take it, he thought irritably, he had not exactly let the moment go, had he?

“And you most certainly did not,” she said with hot indignation as the carriage rumbled onto the shop-lined Pulteney Bridge to cross the river. “How presumptuous of you, Lord Sinclair! How . . . arrogant of you to imagine that you broke my heart!”

“Frances,” he said, “we shared a bed and a great deal more for one whole night. You make yourself ridiculous when you call me Lord Sinclair in that prim schoolteacher’s voice as if I were some distant stranger.”

“With the exception of that one night, which ought not to have happened and which I have regretted ever since,” she said, “I am prim. And I am a schoolteacher and proud of it. It is what I choose to be—for the rest of my life.”

She turned her head sharply away again.

“That balding gentleman who would have relinquished you to my grandfather and me without a fight last evening is not your betrothed, then?” he asked.

He heard her draw in a sharp, indignant breath.

“What Mr. Blake is—or is not—to me is absolutely none of your business, my lord,” she said.

He glowered at the back of her bonnet. She really was prim and shrewish and prickly and a mass of contradictions. He did not know why the devil she had stuck in his memory and in his emotions the way she had. The sooner he removed her from both the happier he would be.

Perhaps if he tried very hard he could contrive to fall in love with Portia Hunt this spring. But, good Lord, even if it were possible—and he very much doubted it was—Portia would be horrified!

“Why the devil do you choose to be a teacher when you ought to be singing professionally?” he asked abruptly. Because he had arrived in the drawing room doorway only as she was finishing her song last evening, it was still difficult to believe that Frances and that singer could be one and the same person.

“I would ask you to watch your language, Lord Sinclair,” she said.

He surprised himself—and her, it seemed—by emitting a short bark of laughter.

“I believe,” he said, “you may have just provided the answer to my question. You did not tell me after Christmas that you could sing like that.”

“Why would I have told you such a thing?” she asked, looking around at him. “Ought I to have said, ‘Oh, by the way, Mr. Marshall, I sing in a way that might just impress you a little.’ Or ought I to have woken you up one morning with a particularly strident aria?”

He chuckled at the mental image of her waking him thus on the second morning, as she lay tucked up in his arms in her bed.

He did not know if she was having the same thought, but however it was, her eyes suddenly lit with merriment, her lips twitched, and she could not prevent a gurgle of laughter from escaping them.

“I wonder,” he said, “if I would have found it arousing.”

The prim schoolteacher made an instant reappearance, and she sat back on her seat and directed her eyes forward.

For a moment—damnation!—he had been entranced by her all over again.

“My grandfather has been very much looking forward to meeting you again,” he said after a few moments of silence. “And my sister is beside herself with excitement. She is not yet out, you see, and does not often have a chance to entertain and even play hostess.”

“Then she may play it for me,” she said. “I am accustomed to young ladies and their uncertainties and exuberances. I will be a very undemanding guest.”

Conversation lapsed between them then as the carriage began its slow climb uphill.

She set her hand in his when he offered it to help her alight from the carriage after it had stopped on Brock Street—their first touch since he had pressed his card into her palm outside the school three months ago. He felt again the slenderness of her hand, the long, slim artist’s fingers. Even through her glove and his own he felt the shock of familiarity.

She preceded him inside the house while his grandfather’s butler held the door open.

Lucius glowered at her back and went after her.

The carriage ride had been a horrible ordeal for Frances, bringing to mind as it did the last time she had ridden in the same vehicle with Lucius Marshall, Viscount Sinclair. He had held her hand then. For a large part of the journey he had had his arms right about her. They had kissed. They had dozed in each other’s arms.

Today she had been horribly aware of him physically. She had been very careful not to touch him—until she could no longer avoid doing so when he offered a hand to help her alight outside the house on

Brock Street

.

As they entered the house and were preceded upstairs by the butler after he had taken her bonnet and gloves and spencer, she felt bruised and humiliated.

Is it possible that I somehow hurt you?

She still seethed at the arrogance of it.

Men are able to enjoy the moment and let it go, while women are more inclined to find their hearts engaged.

How mortifyingly true that seemed to be! His whole manner and conversation had demonstrated that he had not suffered one iota as a result of what had happened between them.

He had enjoyed the moment and let it go.

She had been battling a bruised heart ever since.

Despite all the women I have known . . .

Of which number she was one insignificant unit. If she had gone with him to London when he had asked, how soon would he have tired of her? Long before now, she was sure.

But, she thought, her coming here this afternoon had nothing whatsoever to do with him. She squared her shoulders and donned her best social manner as she was ushered into a cozy sitting room at the front of the house. The Earl of Edgecombe was rising from a chair by the fire, a welcoming smile on his thin, rather wan face, and Miss Marshall was hurrying toward her, both hands outstretched, her cheeks flushed, her face eagerly smiling.

“Miss Allard,” she said when Frances set her hands in hers, “I am so delighted that you were able to come. Do take the seat beside Grandpapa if you will. The tea tray will be sent up immediately.”

“Thank you.” Frances smiled warmly at the girl, who was clearly on her best behavior and half elated, half anxious lest she make some mistake. She was pretty, with her brother’s brown hair and hazel eyes, though her face was heart-shaped, with rounded cheeks and a pointed little chin.

The earl smiled kindly at Frances and reached out his right hand for hers as she approached. He carried it to his lips.

“Miss Allard,” he said, “you do us a great honor. I hope I have not taken you away from anything very important at your school.”

“I am sure,” she said, taking the chair next to his, “that the junior choir was quite delighted to discover that there was to be no practice this afternoon, my lord.”

“And so,” he said, “you conduct a choir and you teach music, including pianoforte lessons. But how much do you sing, Miss Allard?”

“Last evening,” she told him as he took his seat again and Viscount Sinclair took another chair and Miss Marshall fluttered about while the tea things were brought in by a maid and the butler, “was the first time I have performed outside a school setting in several years. It was a good thing for my nerves that the audience was not larger.”

“And it was a tragedy for the musical world,” he said, “that the audience was so small. You do not only have a good voice, Miss Allard, or even a superior voice. You have a great voice, definitely one of the loveliest I have ever heard in almost eighty years of listening. No—not one of. It is the loveliest.”

Frances would not have been human if she had not felt a glow of pleasure at such lavish and apparently sincere praise.

“Thank you, my lord.” She could feel herself flushing.

A plate of dainty sandwiches was set on a table close to where Miss Marshall sat behind the tea tray, together with scones spread with clotted cream and strawberry jam. There was also a plate of fancy cakes. The girl poured the tea into exquisitely fine china cups and brought one to each of them before offering the sandwiches.

“But you must have been told all this before,” the earl said. “Many times, I suppose.”

Yes. Sometimes by people whose opinion she could respect. Ultimately, after her father’s death, by people who had promised fame and fortune while caring not one iota for her artist’s soul. But—for a variety of reasons of which youthful vanity was not the least—she had believed them and allowed them to act for her and almost ruined herself in the process. And then she had lost Charles because of her singing and finally had behaved very badly. Much really had been ruined—all her girlhood dreams, for example. Sometimes, even though only three years had passed since she had seen the advertisement for the teaching position at Miss Martin’s and applied for it and been sent to Bath by Mr. Hatchard for an interview with Claudia—sometimes it was hard to believe that all those things had happened to her and not someone else. Until last night she had not sung in public for three long years.

“People have always been kind,” she said.

“Kind.” He laughed gruffly as he took one small sandwich from the plate. “It is not kindness to be in the presence of greatness and pay homage to it, Miss Allard. I wish we were in London. I would invite the ton to spend an evening at my home and have you sing to them. I am not a renowned patron of the arts, but I would not need to be. Your talent would speak for itself, and your career as a singer would be assured. I am convinced of it. You could travel the world and enthrall audiences wherever you went.”

Frances licked her lips and toyed with the food on her plate.

“But we are not in London, sir,” Viscount Sinclair said, “and Miss Allard appears to be quite contented with her life as it is. Am I not right, ma’am?”

She lifted her eyes to his and realized how like his grandfather he was. He had the same square-jawed face, though the earl’s had slackened with age and was characterized by a smiling kindliness, whereas the viscount’s looked arrogant and stubborn and even harsh. He was gazing at her with intense eyes and one raised eyebrow. And his tone of voice had been clipped, though perhaps she was the only one who noticed.

“I like to sing for my own pleasure,” she said, “and for the pleasure of others. But I do not crave fame. When one is a teacher, one owes good service, of course, to one’s employer and to the parents of one’s pupils as well as to the pupils themselves, but one nevertheless has a great deal of professional freedom. I am not sure the same could be said of a singer—or any other type of performer, for that matter. One would need a manager, to whom one would be no more than a marketable commodity. All that would be important would be money and fame and image and exposure to the right people and . . . Well, I believe it would be hard to hang on to one’s integrity and one’s own vision of what art is under such circumstances.”

She spoke from bitter experience.

They were both looking attentively at her, Viscount Sinclair with mockery in every line of his body.

He had called her prim. It was foolish to allow such a description to hurt. She was prim. It was nothing to be ashamed of. It was something she had deliberately cultivated. His hand, she noticed, was playing with the edge of his plate—that strong, capable-looking hand that had chopped wood and peeled potatoes and sculpted a snowman’s head and rested against the small of her back as they waltzed and caressed her body . . .

Miss Marshall got up to offer the scones.

“Not, surely,” the earl said, “if one had a manager who shared one’s artistic vision, Miss Allard. But what of your family? Did they never encourage you? Who are they, if I might be permitted to ask? I have never heard of any Allards.”

“My father was French,” she said. “He escaped the Reign of Terror when I was still a baby and brought me to England. My mother was already deceased. He died five years ago.”

“I am sorry to hear that,” he replied. “You must have been very young to be left alone. Did you have other family here in England?”

“Only my two great-aunts have ever had anything to do with me,” she said. “They are my grandmother’s sisters, daughters of a former Baron Clifton.”

“Of Wimford Grange?” He raised his eyebrows. “And one of these ladies is Mrs. Melford, is she? She was once a particular friend of my late wife’s. They made their come-out together. And so you are her great-niece. Wimford Grange is no farther than twenty miles from my home at

Barclay Court

. Both are in Somerset.”

And that fact, of course, would explain why she and Lucius Marshall had been traveling the same road after Christmas. She did not look at him, and he made no comment.

“I have not seen Mrs. Melford for a few years,” the earl said. “But I wonder why the present Clifton has not helped you to a career in singing.”

“He is really quite a distant cousin, my lord,” Frances said. She had not even set eyes on him last Christmas.

“I suppose so,” he agreed. “But I probably embarrass you with all this talk of your family and your talent. Let us talk of something different. The concept of a school for girls is an interesting one when most people would have us believe that education is wasted on the female half of our population or that the little education girls require can best be learned from private governesses. You would disagree with both opinions, I assume?”

His eyes were twinkling beneath his white brows. He was effectively changing the subject and choosing one that was sure to provoke some response in her. It did, of course, and they had a lively discussion of the merits of sending girls away from home to be educated, and of instructing them in such subjects as mathematics and history. It was a topic too in which Miss Marshall was pleased to participate. She had always thought it would be great fun to go to school, she told Frances, but she had inherited her sisters’ governess and remained at home instead.

“Not that I did not have a good education from her, Miss Allard,” she said, “but I do think it would have been marvelous to have had pianoforte lessons from you and to have sung in one of your choirs. The girls at your school are very fortunate.”

Frances could almost feel mockery emanating from the direction of Viscount Sinclair’s chair even though she kept her eyes away from him and he did not participate a great deal in the conversation.

“Well, thank you,” Frances said, smiling at the girl. “But they are fortunate in their other teachers too. Miss Martin makes a point of choosing only the best. Though I suppose I aggrandize myself by saying that, do I not?”

“I would have liked it,” Miss Marshall said, “and to have had friends among girls my own age.”

The conversation came back to music eventually but no longer concerned Frances personally. They compared favorite composers and pieces of music and favorite solo instruments. The earl told them of performances by famed musicians he had heard years ago, in Vienna and Paris and Rome.

“The Continent was still open to young bucks making the Grand Tour in my day,” he said. “And, ah, we had a time of it, Miss Allard. The French, and particularly Napoléon Bonaparte, have much to answer for. Lucius was deprived of that treat, as was his father before him.”

“You need to get my grandfather onto this topic when you have an hour or three to spare, Miss Allard,” Viscount Sinclair said. They were mocking words, and yet it seemed to her that they were affectionately spoken. Perhaps he had some finer feelings.

“You saw Paris?” she asked the earl. “What was it like?”

The Earl of Edgecombe was indeed only too ready to talk about the past. He entertained them so well with stories of his travels and the places and people he had seen that Frances looked up in surprise when Viscount Sinclair got to his feet and announced that it was time to return Miss Allard to the school.

At some time during the past hour she had relaxed and started actively to enjoy herself. Perhaps Anne had been right last evening. Perhaps she was setting to rest a few ghosts today. She had seen the other side of Viscount Sinclair’s nature today—the arrogant, mocking, less pleasant side that she had seen when she first met him and had largely forgotten the next day and the next. It was as well to be reminded of what exactly she had walked away from.

She could not have been happy with such a man. Though he was also, of course, a man who had come to Bath in order to care for his grandfather and who had brought his young sister with him.

Ah, life was confusing sometimes. People would be so much easier to like or dislike if there were only one facet to their natures.

The earl and Miss Marshall rose with her. The earl took her hand in his and raised it to his lips once more.

“This has been an honor and a pleasure, Miss Allard,” he said. “I do hope I have the chance of hearing you sing again before I die. I believe it will become one of my dearest wishes, in fact.”

“Thank you. You are very kind.” She smiled at him with something bordering on affection.

Miss Marshall actually hugged her.

“This has been such fun,” she said, revealing all her youthfulness in the exuberance of her farewell.

“It has indeed.” Frances smiled warmly at her. “And I have been treated royally by my hostess. Thank you for entertaining me so well.”

But the girl turned impulsively to her brother just as Frances would have stepped out of the room ahead of him.

“Luce,” she said, “you have been saying that if I am to be allowed to go with you and Grandpapa to the assembly in the Upper Rooms three evenings from tonight, we must find an older lady to accompany me. May we invite Miss Allard. Oh, please, may we?”

As Frances looked at her in dismay, the girl gazed at her brother, her eyes imploring, her hands clasped to her bosom.

How dreadfully gauche of the girl to ask in her hearing!

“Older?” Viscount Sinclair cocked one eyebrow.

“Well, she is,” the girl said. “I did not say old, Luce, only older. And she is a teacher.”

“It is a splendid suggestion, Amy,” the earl said. “I wish I had thought of it for myself. Miss Allard, will you so honor us? Though perhaps since you live in Bath, attending one of the assemblies will be no great treat for you.”

“Oh, but I have never attended one,” she said.

“What? Never? Then do please agree to attend this one as our special guest,” the earl said.

“Please, please do, Miss Allard,” Miss Marshall cried. “Caroline and Emily—my sisters—will expire of envy if I write and tell them I am to go after all.”

Frances was terribly aware of the silent figure of Viscount Sinclair standing beside her. She turned and glanced up at him, her teeth sinking into her lower lip. How could she refuse without hurting Miss Marshall, who obviously was desperate to be allowed to attend an assembly before she was officially out?

He did not help her. But how could he without appearing churlish in front of his relatives?

“I wish you would, Miss Allard,” he said curtly. “You would oblige all of us.”

The trouble was that she had always thought it would be wonderful to actually dance in the Upper Rooms, which she had seen, but only with a party of girls one day when she took them sightseeing. She had once attended balls in London and had always enjoyed them exceedingly.

But how could she go to this one?

How could she not, though? Now the invitation had been extended by all three of them.

“Thank you,” she said. “That would be delightful.”

Miss Marshall clapped her hands, the earl bowed, and Viscount Sinclair ushered her out of the room without another word, one of his hands firm against the small of her back and feeling as if it burned a hole there.

They rode side by side in the carriage back to the school without exchanging a word. It was most disconcerting. At one moment Frances almost asked him if he really minded her going to the assembly, but of course he minded—as did she. She thought of asking him if he wished her to send back a refusal with him after all. But why should she? She had been properly invited, even if it had been impulsive of Miss Marshall to speak out as she had without consulting her brother privately first.

Besides, if he minded or if he wished for her to change her mind, he had a tongue in his head just as she did. Let him be the first to speak.

And yet her heart, she realized, was in a very fragile condition, and she would certainly do it no good by seeing him again after today. Even now she would suffer some sleepless hours in the nights to come, she did not doubt. Good heavens, she had actually made love with this silent man beside her. She could recall every detail of that night of intimacy with great clarity.

And of their wretched parting the next day.

The carriage drew to a halt outside the school at precisely half past five. Peters opened the carriage door and set down the steps, and Viscount Sinclair descended and handed Frances down onto the pavement. He escorted her to the door of the school, which Keeble was already holding open.

“I shall come to escort you to the Upper Assembly Rooms three evenings from tonight, then,” Viscount Sinclair said.

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Perhaps,” he said, and it seemed to her that his eyes burned into hers, “we will get to dance together again, Miss Allard.”

“Yes.” She turned and hurried inside and up to her room, where she hoped to be able to gather her scattered thoughts sufficiently to get a few of her essays marked before dinner.

I shall come to escort you. . . .

Perhaps we will get to dance together again . . .

Life was so terribly unfair. Just last evening she had been feeling happy again. And now . . .

Now it seemed that everything about her—every part of her body, her head, her emotions—was in a seething turmoil.

She read attentively through one four-page essay before realizing that she had not absorbed a single word.

It would be well, she told herself severely, to remember that she was a teacher. It was her primary and only really important role in life.

She was a teacher.

She started to read from the beginning again.

Lucius frowned at his image in the looking glass a few moments after he had dismissed his valet. He always took pains to look his best. It was, after all, part of being a gentleman always to look fashionable and well groomed, especially when one was known as something of a Corinthian. But why the devil had he made poor Jeffreys discard three perfectly respectably tied neckcloths before he had been satisfied with the fourth?

Was he turning into some sort of dandy?

He was going to an assembly in Bath, for the love of God, not to a ball at Carlton House! He would be fortunate if there were a dozen people below the age of fifty there. It was very probably going to be one long snore of an evening. And yet here he was, going to more than usual trouble over his appearance.

He could hardly believe that he, Lucius Marshall, Viscount Sinclair, was actually going to attend such an insipid gathering. He rarely attended balls or routs even in London, though he would have to do so this spring, of course. He could treat this evening as something in the nature of a rehearsal for things to come.

His frown became a grimace, and he turned away from the glass.

Amy was already dressed and pacing the sitting room floor, he found when he went downstairs, even though she and their grandfather were not scheduled to walk across to the Upper Rooms for half an hour yet. She had been in a fever of excitement all day, quite unable to settle to anything.

“Well, you look remarkably pretty this evening,” he said after she had caught up the sides of her skirt and pirouetted before him and he had looked her over critically from head to toe. He approved of her pale blue muslin dress—he had helped pick it out two days ago—and her carefully curled and coifed hair. Her maid had had the good sense not to try to make her look older than her years. Although she did not have either Caroline’s height and elegance or Emily’s dimples and natural curls, she might yet turn out to be the prettiest of the three, he thought. Margaret, of course, had been a beauty in her day and was still handsome now that she was in her thirties and the mother of three.

“Will I do, then?” Amy looked at him, flushed and bright-eyed.

“Very well indeed,” he said. “If you are mobbed by all the gentlemen tonight, I shall have to beat them off with my quizzing glass.”

“Oh, Luce.” She laughed in obvious delight. “I hope you will not look quite so fierce when you stand beside me or no one will muster the courage to ask me to dance at all. You do look splendid, though.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” He made her a mock bow. “You will walk slowly when you leave the house with Grandpapa, Amy? You will not gallop along in your excitement and force him to keep up with you?”

She sobered instantly. “Of course I will not,” she said. “I think the waters really must be doing him some good, do not you, Luce? He has looked quite well lately.”

“He has,” he agreed, though they both knew that he would never actually be well again.

“I just can’t wait to go,” she said, clasping her hands to her bosom, “or to see Miss Allard again. She is exceedingly amiable and treats me like a grown-up. And she is lovely too, even though she does not dress in the first stare of fashion. I admire her lovely dark hair and eyes. Oh, when will Grandpapa be ready?”

“At exactly the time he said he would be,” Lucius told her, striding over to the window. “You know how punctual he always is. And if I am to be punctual, I must be on my way. I see Peters has the carriage outside.”

A couple of minutes later he was on his way to Miss Martin’s school again.

There had been letters from his mother and Caroline this morning. Prominent in the news they had both been eager to impart was the fact that the Marquess of Godsworthy had arrived in town for the Season with Lord and Lady Balderston—and with Portia, of course. His mother had called upon the two ladies with Caroline and Emily. Miss Hunt was in good looks, they had reported. Lady Balderston had asked about him and said she looked forward to seeing him in the near future.

Portia Hunt was always in good looks, and so that was no news. He could not remember ever seeing her with the proverbial hair out of place—not even when she was a child.

The carriage drew to a halt outside the school doors, and Lucius descended to the pavement, feeling rather as if he were up to something clandestine—he was about to escort another woman to a ball.

A strange scene met his eyes when the porter answered the door to his knock. Frances Allard was standing in the middle of the hallway, wearing a dress of silver-shot gray muslin with a silver silk sash beneath her bosom and two rows of the same silk ribbon about the hem. Another lady was kneeling on the floor beside her, a needle and thread in her hand while she stitched up a part of the ribbon that must have pulled loose from the dress. A third lady was bending toward the second, a few pins cupped in the open palm of her hand. Miss Martin was draping a paisley shawl about Frances’s shoulders and smoothing it into place.

The two seamstresses turned identically flushed and laughing faces his way as he stepped inside. Frances bit into her lower lip, looking faintly embarrassed, but then she laughed too.

“Oh, dear,” she said.

The vivid loveliness of her merry expression smote him like a fist to the abdomen and fairly robbed him of breath for a moment.

“Another gentleman who chooses to arrive five minutes before his appointed time,” Miss Martin said severely.

“I do beg your pardon.” Lucius raised his eyebrows. “Should I perhaps go back outside and wait on the pavement until the five minutes have expired?”

They all dissolved into laughter again—even Miss Martin smirked.

“No, no, I am ready,” Frances said as the thread was snapped free and the ribbon about her hem pulled into place. “You have met Miss Martin, Lord Sinclair. May I present my fellow teachers, Miss Jewell and Miss Osbourne?”

She indicated the two seamstresses, both of whom were young and pretty. They were both looking at him with frank interest.

“Miss Jewell?” He bowed to the fair-haired, blue-eyed teacher. “Miss Osbourne?” He bowed to the auburn-haired little beauty.

They both curtsied in return.

A night out for one of their number, he suddenly realized, must be a momentous occasion for all of them. He felt that he was being given an unwilling glimpse into another, alien world, in which life for women was not a constant and idle round of parties and balls and routs. Yet these teachers were all young and all personable. Even the stiff-mannered, dour Miss Martin was not an antidote.

But why the devil had Frances chosen to be one of them? She did not need to be.

The porter, silent and glowering, as if he resented the intrusion of any male except himself into this hallowed female domain, held the door open, and Lucius followed Frances out onto the pavement and handed her into the carriage.

“The weather has stayed fine for the occasion,” she said brightly as the carriage rocked into motion.

“Would you have canceled if it had rained, then?” he asked.

“No, of course not.” She clung with both hands to the ends of her shawl.

“You were, then,” he said, “merely making polite conversation?”

“I am sorry if I bore you,” she said, an edge of annoyance in her voice. “Perhaps I ought to have remained silent. I shall do so for the rest of the journey.”

“What do you usually do for entertainment?” he asked her after she had suited action—or rather inaction—to words for a minute or so. “You and those other teachers? You live in Bath yet you have never been to an assembly. Do you put the girls to bed each night and then sit together conversing over the clacking of your knitting needles?”

“If we do, Lord Sinclair,” she said, “you need not concern yourself about us. We are quite happy.”

“You said that once before,” he told her. “And then you changed the word to contented. Is contentment enough, then, Frances?”

He thought she was not going to answer him. He watched her in the faint light of dusk. She was not wearing a bonnet tonight. Her dark hair was sleek over her head and dressed in curls at the back of her neck. They were not elaborate curls, but they were certainly more becoming than the usual knot. She looked elegant and lovely. She was going to make every other woman in the Upper Rooms look overfussy.

“Yes, it is,” she said. “Happiness must always find its balance in unhappiness and excitement in depression. Contentment is more easily maintained and brings with it tranquillity of mind and peace of soul.”

“Good Lord!” he said. “Could anything be more of a complete bore? I think you are a coward, Frances.”

She turned wide, indignant eyes on him.

“A coward?” she said. “I suppose it was cowardly of me not to throw away my career, my security, my future, and my friends and go off to London with you.”

“Very cowardly,” he said.

“If cowardliness means being sane,” she said, “then, yes, by your definition I am a coward, Lord Sinclair, and make no apology for the fact.”

“You might have been happy,” he said. “You might have taken a chance on life. And I would soon enough have discovered your talent, you know. You might have sung for larger audiences than you will ever find here. You cannot tell me that with your voice you have never dreamed of fame.”

“And fortune,” she said sharply. “The two inevitably go together, I believe, Lord Sinclair. I suppose you would have made me happy. I suppose you would have sponsored my singing career and have made sure that I met all the right people.”

“Why not?” he asked. “I would not have chosen to keep your talent all to myself.”

“And so,” she said, her voice trembling with some emotion that he thought must be anger, “a woman is quite incapable of knowing her own mind and finding the contentment, even happiness, she wants of life without the aid and intervention of some man. Is that what you are saying, Lord Sinclair?”

“I was unaware,” he said, “that we were speaking of men and women in general. I was speaking of you. And I know you quite well enough to understand that you were not made for contentment. How absurd of you to believe that you were. You are fairly bursting at the seams with passion, Frances—not all of it sexual, I might add.”

“How dare you!” she cried. “You do not know me at all.”

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I certainly know you in the biblical sense—and one night was quite enough for me to draw certain conclusions about your capacity for sexual passion. I have spoken with you—and quarreled with you—on several occasions, this evening included. I have laughed and played with you. And, perhaps most significant of all, I have heard you sing. I know you quite well.”

“Singing has nothing to do with—”

“Ah, but it does,” he said. “Anyone who uses an extraordinary talent to the full, forgetting very self in the process, has no choice but to pour out himself or herself. There is no hiding on such occasions, whether the product is a painting or a poem or a song. When you sang at the Reynolds soiree, you revealed far more than just a lovely voice, Frances. You revealed yourself, and only a dolt would have failed to see you for the deeply passionate woman that you are.”

It was strange. He had not consciously thought these things before. But he knew that he spoke the truth.

“I am quite contented as I am,” she said stubbornly, setting her hands palm down on her lap and staring down at her spread fingers.

“Ah, yes,” he said, “very much the coward, Frances. You give up the discussion and fall back upon platitudes because your case is unarguable. And you lie through your teeth.”

“You become offensive,” she said. “I have given you no permission to speak so freely to me, Lord Sinclair.”

“Perhaps that is so,” he said. “You have given me only your body.”

She inhaled sharply. But she let the breath out slowly again and refrained from answering him.

He had not noticed the passing landmarks of the journey. He realized suddenly, though, that they were approaching the Upper Assembly Rooms. It was just as well. Good Lord, he had not intended to quarrel with her. He might not have done so if she had not irritated him by opening the conversation with her bright, inane comment on the weather.

As if they were no more than polite strangers.

The sooner he left Bath and got back to the serious business of getting himself married, the better it would be for everyone. And Portia Hunt was in London waiting for him. So were her mama and his and all their family members.

Bath, London. London, Bath . . . Devil take it, it was like the choice between the devil and the deep blue sea!

Where had the familiar life gone that had given him perfect contentment for the past ten years or so?

But as he descended from the carriage and turned to hand Frances down, he did catch himself out.

Contentment?

He had been contented for the past ten years?

Contented?

A dozen times during the past three days Frances had been on the brink of writing to Miss Amy Marshall with some excuse not to attend the assembly. There was too much schoolwork to be done—classes to prepare and papers to mark—and there were extra music lessons with individual girls to be fitted in, and practices with the junior and senior choirs and the madrigal group.

Her life as a teacher occupied most of her waking hours.

But her friends, who ought to have supported such a responsible attitude, had not cooperated on this occasion.

“You must go and enjoy yourself for Miss Marshall’s sake,” Claudia had said. “You said she needed a female chaperone, and it may be too late to find another. And you must go for the Earl of Edgecombe’s sake too. He sounds like a courtly gentleman even if he is an aristocrat.”

“And you must go and enjoy yourself for our sakes,” Anne had said with a sigh. “You are actually going to attend one of the assemblies at the Upper Rooms, Frances—as the invited guest of an earl and a viscount. We will want to enjoy it vicariously through you. We will want to hear every single detail the morning after.”

“And perhaps,” Susanna had added, the usual twinkle of mischief in her eyes, “Viscount Sinclair will realize that he ought not to have let you go after Christmas, Frances, and will begin a determined courtship of you. Perhaps he will sweep you off your feet and put poor Mr. Blake to rout.” But she had also rushed up to hug Frances, all teasing at an end. “Do enjoy yourself. Just enjoy yourself.”

Anne had come to Frances’s room, though, while she was getting ready for the evening and asked her if it really was going to be painful for her to be in company with Viscount Sinclair for a whole evening.

“Perhaps,” she had said, “I ought not to have said that about your going to enjoy the evening for our sakes. How selfish of me!”

But by then it had been too late to avoid going, and Frances had assured her that going to tea at Brock Street really had cured her of any foolish infatuation she may have felt for the man after Christmas.

That had been just before Susanna and Claudia had also come to her room and just before Viscount Sinclair was due to arrive, and they had all gone downstairs with her to wait in the visitors’ sitting room. And then, of course, Anne had noticed that part of the ribbon at her hem had come unstitched and Susanna had dashed upstairs for needle and thread and pins, and all had been laughing panic while Anne had stitched.

It had not occurred to any of them to move from the hallway into the sitting room or to Mr. Keeble not to open the door when the viscount had knocked on it.

It had all been rather embarrassing and rather funny. And then he had offered to go back outside to wait and the situation had seemed funnier still. And, of course, it really was rather exciting to be going to an assembly. Perhaps even to dance there.

Perhaps with him.

He had mentioned their dancing together when he had brought her home after tea that afternoon.

But she was no longer feeling so cheerful as she descended from the carriage outside the Upper Rooms. Gracious heavens, he had called her a coward. And a passionate woman.

You are fairly bursting at the seams with passion, Frances—not all of it sexual, I might add.

He had referred openly to the night they had spent together. He had reminded her that he knew her in the biblical sense.

He had accused her of hiding behind her contentment, too cowardly to reach for happiness.

It was not cowardice. It was a hard-won good sense.

If only, she thought as she stepped ahead of him through the doors into the Upper Rooms, he did not look so devastatingly handsome tonight in his black tailed evening coat and pantaloons with a silver embroidered waistcoat and white linen and expertly tied neckcloth. Or so suffocatingly male with his square-jawed, handsome face and intense hazel eyes.

And then she forgot some of her agitation at the realization that she was actually here. She was attending a ball at the Upper Assembly Rooms. At least part of her reason for deciding to come after all, she realized, was her desire to be part of such a gathering again. She had missed society. She had not been actively unhappy without it, but she had missed it. Fellow guests moved about the high-ceilinged entry hall and she felt an unexpected welling of excitement.

Viscount Sinclair set a hand at the small of her back in order to move her forward. But before she could feel more than a shiver of awareness at his touch, Miss Marshall came hurrying toward them—she must have been watching for them from the ballroom doorway. She looked fresh and pretty and youthful and quite exuberant.

“Miss Allard,” she said, stretching out both hands, as she had done on

Brock Street

, clasping Frances’s, and kissing her cheek, “how very prompt you are. Grandpapa and I arrived barely five minutes ago—and yes, Luce, we fairly crawled here, I swear. How lovely you look in silver, Miss Allard. Your gown perfectly complements Luce’s colors.” She laughed lightly.

Oh, gracious, what an unfortunate remark! Frances moved away from his hand and smiled brightly as the girl took her arm and they moved off in the direction of the ballroom. Lord Sinclair came along behind.

“Oh, my!” Frances said when they paused in the doorway. “I have only ever seen the room in daylight. It looks very much more splendid with all the candles lit, does it not?”

There were several chandeliers overhead, each filled with lit candles. The orchestra members on the dais were tuning their instruments. A number of people stood or sat in conversational groups or promenaded about the perimeter of the dance floor.

She must notice every single detail, she thought, so that she could give a faithful account of it all to her friends tomorrow.

“This is the first assembly you have attended in a while, is it, Miss Allard?” Viscount Sinclair asked.

She had told him and his grandfather at tea the other day that she had never attended an assembly here. But she understood his meaning in a flash. And when she turned to look at him, she found the expected almost satanic gleam in his eye.

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

“It looks as if it will be well enough attended,” he said, “though we are only in Bath and cannot therefore expect a great squeeze. An assembly can, of course, be perfectly enjoyable with very few guests. Even two are enough, provided one is a man and the other a woman so that they can dance together. Even an orchestra is not indispensable.”

“How absurd, Luce!” His sister laughed merrily.

But Viscount Sinclair kept his eyes on Frances and his eyebrows raised.

“Would you not agree with me, Miss Allard?” he asked.

She would not blush, she thought. She would not.

“But then it would not really be an assembly, would it?” she said.

“And the man and woman concerned,” he added, “might soon tire of dancing and look for some other diversion. You are quite right. I suppose we should be thankful that there is a tolerable crowd here this evening.”

Why was he doing this? Frances wondered. He had not seemed pleased to see her at any of their three meetings since his return to Bath.

Fortunately, the Earl of Edgecombe came up to them at that moment. He had remained in the ballroom with his granddaughter while she was alone, he explained after greeting Frances and bowing over her hand, but now he would remove to the card room if they would all excuse him.

“I have danced at a few informal assemblies at home,” Miss Marshall confided to Frances while Viscount Sinclair took his grandfather through into the other room, “but never at anything this grand. Caroline and Emily will be envious when I write and tell them about it tomorrow.”

There were not a great many young people present, Frances noticed. And though she had been dazzled at first glance by the finery of the guests, she could see on closer inspection that very few were dressed in quite the style one would expect to see at a ton ball. She was glad of it, though. She had been afraid that she would feel conspicuous in her less than fashionable gown.

“It is rather grand,” she said. “But next year, Miss Marshall, when you make your come-out, you will be delighted to find that there is something even grander than this to experience.”

“Oh, you must call me Amy, please,” the girl said. And then her expression brightened further and she raised her fan to wave to someone across the dance floor. “There is Rose Abbotsford with her mama. And that must be the brother she spoke of. He is exceedingly handsome, is he not?” She unfurled her fan as her brother came up to them again.

“Before you set your cap at all the young blades in the room, Amy,” he said, “do remember that you are to dance the opening set with me. As it is, Mama will probably have my head for allowing you to come here at all.”

And then a gentleman was bowing before Frances, and she saw that he was Mr. Blake.

“Miss Allard,” he said. “I did not dare hope to see you here this evening. But I am, of course, delighted to do so.”

He glanced at her two companions as she curtsied to him, and she introduced him to them, though he had of course seen them at the Reynolds soiree.

“It was exceedingly kind of you, my lord,” he said to Viscount Sinclair, “to invite Miss Allard here as your guest.”

“Oh,” Frances said, embarrassed, “I am here more in the nature of a chaperone than a guest, Mr. Blake.”

“No, indeed, you are not,” Amy cried, tapping Frances sharply on the arm with her fan. “The very idea!”

“Thank you, sir,” Viscount Sinclair said in such a stiff, haughty voice that Frances looked sharply at him. He held a quizzing glass almost but not quite to his eye. “But Miss Allard is the personal guest of the Earl of Edgecombe.”

Mr. Blake bowed, and looking at him, Frances was not sure he had understood that he had just been dealt a frosty setdown. She felt indignant on his behalf. Did Viscount Sinclair feel that he had been imposed upon by having a mere physician presented to him? Good heavens, she was a schoolteacher.

“Is it now too much to hope,” Mr. Blake asked her, “that you are free to dance the second set with me, Miss Allard? I had already spoken for the opening set with Miss Jones before I saw you.”

“Miss Allard is to dance the second set with me,” Viscount Sinclair said.

Frances had a brief moment in which to decide whether she would brawl openly with him or let the matter go. She glanced at him and saw that one of his eyebrows was cocked. Perhaps, she thought during that one moment, he would be quite happy if she took the first course. There was an open challenge in that eyebrow.

“Yes.” She smiled into his eyes. “Lord Sinclair most particularly asked for it while escorting me here in the carriage.”

“Ah,” Mr. Blake said. “The third set, then, perhaps, Miss Allard?”

“I shall look forward to it,” she told him.

The first set was being announced, she realized then, by the Master of Ceremonies, and the orchestra sat poised to play. All annoyance, all embarrassment, fled as she turned her attention to the dance floor. She was excited even though she did not expect to dance much herself. She would at least be dancing the second and third sets, and that was more than she had expected.

But she was not to miss the opening set of vigorous country dances after all. Mr. Blake had gone to claim his partner and Viscount Sinclair had led his sister onto the floor and Frances had found a vacant seat. But Mr. Gillray, Mr. Huckerby’s brother-in-law, to whom she had been introduced after the Christmas concert at school, came and asked her if she would dance with him, and so she had all the pleasure of participating in the ball right from the first moment.

And a very definite pleasure it was too. She found herself smiling and then laughing through some of the more intricate turns and twirls, the steps fresh in her memory as she was always the one who partnered Mr. Huckerby when he taught the girls. Amy Marshall, farther down the line, was openly enjoying herself too. Viscount Sinclair watched her with an indulgent smile on his face though he once caught Frances’s eye and held it for a long moment.

And she was to dance the next set with him. She did not know whether to be glad or sorry. He was easily the most handsome and distinguished gentleman present, and just the thought of dancing with him again made her want to swoon. But the farther she stayed away from him, the better for her peace of mind, she knew. Her precious peace.

Her contentment.

But, heaven help her, that old magic was weaving its web about her again with every passing moment.

She did want to dance with him again—she desperately wanted it.

Just one more time.

Mr. Algernon Abbotsford was presented to Amy after the first set was over, and he very properly asked Lucius’s permission to lead her out into the second set. Having granted that permission, Lucius was free to turn his attention to his own partner, who was conversing with a lady he did not know.

Truth to tell, his attention had not been far from her ever since their arrival. And if he had ever deceived himself into thinking that he had not been looking forward to this evening with almost as much eagerness as Amy and that he had not taken pains with his appearance because he was to see Frances Allard again, then he was finally being forced into facing the rather lowering truth.

Damnation!

And if she truly believed that she was a woman made for placid contentment, then she was even more given to self-deceit than he. A woman less designed to dwindle into old age as a spinster schoolteacher he could not imagine. Her cheeks, her eyes, her whole demeanor, glowed with a passionate enjoyment of the occasion even though this was a mere Bath assembly.

He knew, as no one else did, how easily and totally her love of dancing could be converted to sexual passion.

Not that he intended to effect quite that conversion tonight!

“Ma’am?” he said now, bowing before her. “This is my dance, I believe?”

Her eyes swept up to meet his, and he knew she remembered that they were the exact words he had used in that cold, dingy Assembly Room at the inn before they waltzed and then made love.

He was not really sure why he felt compelled tonight to remind her of that occasion. Sheer devilry, perhaps? Or perhaps he felt the need to confront her, to force her out into the open, to . . . Well, he did not know what it was he was up to. He rarely thought about the motives for what he did and said. He had always been a man of impulse and action.

“I believe it is, my lord,” she said, setting her hand in his. “Thank you.”

“It is not, alas, a waltz,” he told her as he led her onto the floor. “There are to be none tonight. I have inquired.”

“I have heard,” she said, “that the waltz is not often danced in Bath.”

“It is a damnable crime of omission,” he said. “But if it were to be danced here, Frances, we would dance it together.”

“Yes,” she agreed, and turned her head to look into his eyes.

Something fleeting and wordless passed between them at that moment. Desire, yearning, knowledge—he was not sure which. Perhaps all three. Certainly there was full carnal awareness there.

They were a severe annoyance to each other, he and Frances Allard. They were as much inclined to quarrel as to be civil with each other. But there was a spark of something, which had been ignited during the day preceding their waltz three months ago and fanned to full flame during and after their waltz. That spark had still not quite been extinguished even three months later.

And, by Jove, he would no longer pretend to himself that he regretted having seen her again, that he ought to have avoided her, that he wished her to the devil. He was not good at this game of self-deception, even if she was.

He was deuced happy to be with her once more.

This was to be another country dance, but it was slower and more stately than the first. He escorted her to the long line of ladies and took his place opposite her in the line of gentlemen. She looked startlingly foreign in comparison with the other ladies, he thought—dark and vivid and lovely. A rose among thorns. No—unfair. More like a rare orchid among roses.

And roses suddenly seemed bland.

He could not remember the last time he had danced two sets in a row at any ball. Even one set was often more than he could stomach. Whoever had decreed that dancing was to be a favored mode of enjoyment for an evening ought to have been deported to the colonies as a mortal threat to the sanity of the male of the species, he had always thought. If he wanted to get close to a woman—and he frequently did—there were far more direct ways of going about it than cavorting with her about a ballroom floor in company with a large gathering of other persons similarly inclined.

But waltzing with Frances Allard after Christmas had been a sexual experience in itself. More than that, it had been exciting and exhilarating. And now he was to dance with her again, and everything in his being was focused upon her, tall and very slender in her silver muslin, her sleek, dark hair gleaming in the light of the candles overhead, her eyes glowing with the anticipation of pleasure.

Tomorrow or the next day or the next he was going to have to get back to London and turn his mind to duty, he supposed—perish the thought. But first there was tonight, and by God he was going to enjoy every passing moment for what it was worth.

The music began, the gentlemen bowed, and the ladies curtsied. The lines advanced toward each other, each gentleman clasped his partner’s right hand just above the level of their heads, and turned once about with her before the lines returned to their places.

The orchestra played on, and the dancers tramped out the stately measures of the set, their dancing shoes beating out a rhythmic tattoo on the polished floor. They moved about each other, Lucius and Frances, sometimes face-to-face, sometimes back-to-back. They clasped hands, advanced down the room and back with the lines, wove in and out about other couples, came together again, twirled down between the lines from the head of the set to its foot when their turn came, their arms linked, their hands joined between them.

They did it all without exchanging another word with each other, though there were frequent opportunities for snatches of conversation. Yet he scarcely removed his eyes from hers the whole time, and he held her gaze with the power of his will. His senses were raw with his awareness of her—the sheen of silver ribbon and dark hair as they caught the light, the whisper of muslin as she moved, the slender warmth of her hand in his, the familiar fragrance of her that must come from soap rather than a heavier perfume, he believed.

But one thing more than any other became blazingly clear to him as they danced. She might have rejected him three months ago, but it was not because of indifference, by Jove. He supposed he had known it even at the time, but he was certain of it now.

Frances Allard was nothing short of a coward.

And if there was one thing he was determined to accomplish before the school door closed behind her tonight, it was to force her out of her complacency, to force her to understand that she had lost more than she had gained by choosing the old comfortable security over him. To force her to admit her mistake.

He totally forgot that he had already admitted to himself that it had not been a mistake at all.

The air between them fairly crackled.

By the time the set came to an end the sheen of perspiration on her face and bosom made her lovelier yet—and even more desirable. So did the slight heaving of her bosom, caused by her exertions. Her lips were parted, her eyes shining.

“Thank you,” she said as he held out his right arm to take her hand on his sleeve. “That was very pleasant.”

“That word again.” He speared her with a hard glance. “Sometimes I could shake you, Frances.”

“I beg your pardon?” She looked back at him in some surprise.

“I hope,” he said, “you never praise your choirs or your musicians by telling them their performances were pleasant. It would be enough to make them renounce music forever. If I had my way, I would have the word banished from the English language.”

“I wonder you danced with me at all, Lord Sinclair,” she said. “You appear not to like me a great deal.”

“Sometimes,” he said, “it seems that liking has little to do with what is between us, Frances.”

“There is nothing between us,” she told him.

“Even animosity is something,” he said. “But there is more than just that.”

He directed her toward where Amy was standing with the Abbotsfords, looking even more animated than she had when they arrived, if that were possible.

“You will join Amy and my grandfather and me for tea in the tearoom after the next set,” he told Frances. He had suddenly remembered that she was to dance next with Blake, the physician, who clearly had designs on her, though he must be proceeding at the devil of a snail’s pace if he had not contrived some way of inviting her to attend the assembly with him this evening. The man was not going to bear her off for tea as he had done at the Reynolds soiree, though.

“Is that a request, Lord Sinclair?” she asked. “Or a command?”

“I will go down on bended knee if you wish,” he said. “But I warn you that my doing so will occasion considerable gossip.”

She laughed.

His heart never failed to beat faster when she did so. Laughter transformed her even when she was already flushed and glowing. She must surely have been created for laughter. It made her real—whatever the devil he meant by that.

“I will come quietly, then,” she promised.

Her swain came for her soon after and led her away, his half-bald head shining in the light of the candles. The Master of Ceremonies brought an earnest, bespectacled young man to introduce to Amy, and the youth bore her off to dance the quadrille.

Lucius slipped into the card room before the Master of Ceremonies could take it into his head to present him with another partner too. His grandfather, he could see, was absorbed in play.

He felt out of sorts and irritable again—rather familiar feelings these days and not likely to go away during the coming weeks and months, he supposed. He tried to remember what life had been like before he went down to

Barclay Court

just before Christmas. Surely he was not normally surly and irritable but the most placid and genial of souls.

Surely he was not normally inclined to being besotted with lady schoolteachers either.

Why the devil could his grandfather not live forever?

Or why could he not have had a dozen brothers—all older than himself?

The quadrille seemed to go on forever. He was ready for tea.

Tea, for God’s sake!

Mr. Blake was a tolerably accomplished dancer. He was also an amiable partner and complimented Frances on both her appearance and her dancing skills. He expressed again his pleasure at seeing her at the assembly.

“If I had known you were able to attend such events, Miss Allard,” he said, “I would have invited you myself, since I have come with my sister and brother-in-law. Perhaps you would care to join us at the theater one evening?”

“That would be very agreeable, sir.” She smiled. “If I can be excused from my evening duties at the school as I have been this evening, that is. It is kind of you to think of me.”

“It is certainly no hard task to think of you, Miss Allard,” he assured her, bending his head a little closer to hers. “Indeed, I find myself doing so rather frequently these days.”

She was glad the figures of the dance separated them at that moment. All sorts of emotions were still churning around inside her after the last set, and she felt quite inadequate to the task of dealing with an ardor she was not yet ready to entertain. She concentrated instead upon enjoying the quadrille that they danced together. She tried briefly to recapture the pleasure she had felt in Mr. Blake’s interest just a week ago but just could not seem to do it. Viscount Sinclair was right, she realized suddenly—the words pleasant and pleasure really were rather bland.

She noticed the viscount’s absence from the ballroom far more than she noticed Mr. Blake’s presence—not a promising sign at all. The whole atmosphere of the ball had suddenly fallen flat.

Why could one’s heart not be commanded as easily as one’s head? she wondered. Why could one not choose which man to love—though love was not quite the appropriate word for the emotions that churned about inside her head and her body. But whatever the right word was, one ought to be able to choose which man would stir one’s blood and quicken one’s heartbeat and fill one’s world with the power of his presence.

She was going to have to try harder after this evening was over, she decided—after she had seen Viscount Sinclair for the last time.

She so wished to form an attachment to Mr. Blake. His interest in her really ought to be a blessing in her life.

“I am sorry,” she said when the set ended and he asked her if she would do him the honor of taking refreshments with him and his relatives, “but I have already agreed to join the Earl of Edgecombe’s party for tea. He really did invite me here tonight because he felt Miss Marshall needed an older lady as a chaperone—or companion, if you like.”

“Oh, but not very much older, Miss Allard,” he said gallantly, bowing over her hand. “I understand perfectly, though, and honor you for putting a perceived obligation before what might be your personal inclination. I shall do myself the honor of calling upon you at Miss Martin’s school one day soon, then, if I may.”

“Thank you.” She smiled at him again. And yet for some unfathomable reason she felt she had been dishonest with him—or maybe it was not so unfathomable. She was going to have to be very careful not simply to use him in the coming days in order to hide from her bruised heart.

How foolish beyond words that she was allowing her heart to be bruised again!

She enjoyed the half hour spent in the tearoom. It was because the Earl of Edgecombe and Amy Marshall again treated her as a favored guest, she told herself, and because the conversation was lively and full of laughter and her surroundings were a feast for the senses. She was going to have much with which to regale her friends tomorrow. And she would, she knew, always remember tonight.

But deep down she knew that she would not have felt half the exhilaration she did feel if Lucius Marshall, Viscount Sinclair, had not been there at the table too. He might be horribly annoying at times, and he had a habit of saying things deliberately to discompose her—or of remaining silent with the same motive—but he was always exciting company, and being in his presence again brought back memories of an episode in her life that she had tried hard to forget but now admitted she would not have missed for all the consideration in the world.

Those days had brought her vividly alive.

And she felt vividly alive again this evening.

She was going to suffer again after tonight was over, she knew, perhaps almost as much as she had suffered back then, but there was nothing she could do to prevent that now, was there? Life just had a habit of doing such things to people. There was no hiding from suffering, no matter how hard one tried to cultivate a tranquil life in which the highs and lows of emotion were leveled off.

The highs would insist upon forcing their way into one’s life when one least expected them. Who, after all, could have predicted such a severe snowstorm on just the day she had chosen for travel? Who could have predicted its glorious aftermath?

And who could have predicted that her seemingly innocent decision to accept the invitation to sing at the Reynolds soiree three evenings ago would lead her to meet Lucius again, and that doing so would bring her to this moment?

And because the highs insisted upon invading one’s life, then so did the lows. It was inevitable—the two were inextricably bound together.

There was no point in anticipating the latter, though, since they were inevitable anyway. And so she allowed herself openly to enjoy what remained of the evening and anticipated the pleasure she would have in telling Claudia, Anne, and Susanna all about it tomorrow—though the pain would be with her by then.

She danced every remaining set after tea, including one more country dance—the last of the evening—with Viscount Sinclair. She was sorry when the assembly ended, but all good things did end. There was no holding back time.

The low to follow the high began far sooner than she had expected, though.

The Earl of Edgecombe did not need a carriage to take him back home as his house on

Brock Street

was very close. And since there was such a press of carriages about the Upper Rooms, Viscount Sinclair had directed his own to wait outside the house. Frances strolled back there with Amy, the girl’s arm linked through her own, while the two gentlemen came some distance behind.

“I have never had a more wonderful time in my life,” Amy said with a heartfelt sigh as they walked down onto the Circus. “Have you, Miss Allard?”

“Indeed,” Frances said, “I do not believe I have.”

“Everyone wanted to dance with me,” the girl said naively. “And with you too. You did not miss a single set, did you? I was delighted to see Luce dancing with you a second time. He drives Mama to distraction because he never dances.”

“Then I must consider myself honored,” Frances said.

“Of course,” Amy continued, “he will have to dance any number of times this Season, I daresay. He promised Grandpapa at Christmas that he would take a bride this year, and I suppose she will be Miss Hunt, who has been waiting for him forever. She is in town already with her mama and papa and the Marquess of Godsworthy, her grandfather, a particular friend of my grandpapa. But I will not be able to dance again until next year, when I am to make my come-out. It is most provoking.”

Frances’s heart was hammering against her ribs. She had very sensibly sent him on his way after Christmas, and she certainly had not been foolish enough during the last few days to expect any renewal of his attentions. She did not want their renewal. But of course knowing that he was about to marry, that he had already chosen his bride, in fact, did hurt. Quite unreasonably so. But then reason had nothing to say to affairs of the heart. She had once spent the night with him. He was the only man with whom she had had sexual relations. It was understandable, then, that she should feel hurt—or if not hurt, then . . . depressed.

“Having to wait for something one desires greatly is provoking,” Frances said. “But your come-out will be glorious when the time finally comes, and it will be even more so because you have waited so long. But those are sensible words you have doubtless heard a dozen times. In your place, I would be very inclined to throw a noisy tantrum.”

Amy laughed with delight and squeezed her arm.

“Oh, I do like you,” she said. “And when I return to Bath—though I do not know when that will be—I shall write and tell you so and come to the school to see you. I wish we did not have to leave Bath so soon as I feel just like a grown-up here, away from my sisters. But Luce says we must return to London tomorrow or the next day.”

Ah! Another blow. Though in reality it was no such thing, of course. She must not make any grand tragedy out of the events of the past four days. She had not expected to see any of them after tonight—at least, with her intellect she had not expected it.

“I shall look forward to seeing you again at some time in the future, then,” Frances said as they came to a stop outside the house on

Brock Street

. Viscount Sinclair’s carriage waited there, Peters up on the box. She wondered if she could suggest riding alone back to the school, but she knew it would not be allowed. Besides . . .

Well, besides, she could not deprive herself of the last few minutes of agony in his company, could she?

Agony?

What sentimental drivel!

She drew her borrowed shawl more tightly about her shoulders. It was still only springtime and the air was cool.

Amy hugged her as the gentlemen came up to them. The earl held out his right hand and, when Frances set her own in it, covered it with his other hand.

“Miss Allard,” he said, “I thank you most sincerely for coming with us tonight. Your company has meant a great deal to Amy, I know. I will be going to London with my grandchildren within the next day or two. But when I return, I shall invite you to sing for me. I hope you will agree to do it.”

“I would be delighted, my lord,” she said.

“Lucius will take you home now,” he said. “Good night, Miss Allard.”

“Good night, my lord,” she said. “Good night, Amy.”

She was back inside the carriage with Viscount Sinclair again a minute later, and it was proceeding on its way. The journey would take ten minutes, she estimated. She had ten minutes left.

How foolish to feel panic at the thought.

“Tell me you enjoyed yourself tonight,” he said abruptly after the first minute or so had passed in silence.

“Oh, I did,” she assured him. “It was very—”

“If you say pleasant,” he said, “I shall throttle you, Frances.”

“—delightful,” she said, and smiled in the darkness.

“Tell me you found it delightful because I was there,” he said. “Tell me you would not have enjoyed it nearly as much if I had not been.”

The inside of the carriage was very dark. She could not see his face when she turned her head to look at him.

“I will tell you no such thing,” she said indignantly. “The very idea! The arrogance of it! Of course I would have enjoyed the evening just as much—better!—if you had not been there.”

“Liar!” he said softly.

“You appear to be under the delusion, Lord Sinclair,” she said, “that you are God’s gift to women.”

“A cliché unworthy of you,” he said. “Tell me you have regretted rejecting me after Christmas.”

“I have not!” she cried.

“Not even one tiny little bit?” he asked.

“Not even half that much,” she said.

“A quarter, then?” He laughed softly. “You are a terrible liar, Frances.”

“And you,” she said, “are more conceited than any man I have ever met in my life.”

“Is it conceited of me,” he asked her, “to have met someone and felt an overwhelming attraction to her, to have felt her equal attraction to me, to have consummated that attraction, and then to believe that she must have felt some twinge of regret at saying good-bye to me, especially when she did not need to do so?”

“It was better to suffer that little twinge,” she said tartly, “than to become your mistress.”

“Aha!” he said. “So you do admit to some twinge, do you?”

She bit her lip but did not answer him.

“I never did say that making you my mistress was my intention,” he said.

“But you would not say that your intention was marriage either,” she said. “Pardon me, Lord Sinclair, but I am unaware of any other relationship that would have been possible between us if I had gone away with you.”

“Courtship?” he suggested. “We needed more time together, Frances. We were not nearly finished with each other.”

“You speak from the perspective of the idle rich,” she said. “I need to work for my living. And my work is here.”

“I offered to stay here,” he reminded her, “but you would have none of it. And I offered to take you to London with me and find you somewhere to live and some decent female to stay with you for respectability.”

“And you would have paid all the expenses, I suppose,” she said.

“Yes, of course.” She knew from the tone of his voice that his eyebrows had arched arrogantly above his eyes.

“I would have been a kept woman,” she cried. “Can you not see that? I would have been your mistress no matter what other name you might have attempted to put upon our connection.”

“Lord!” he exclaimed. “You would argue that black is white, Frances, if I dared to suggest otherwise. But arguing gives me a headache, and I avoid headaches at all costs. There is no discussing any matter sensibly with you, is there? You must always have the last word.”

She turned toward him again to make some retort, but he turned to her first, set one arm about her shoulders, held her chin firm with the other hand, and kissed her hard on the mouth.

The shock of it caused her mind to shatter into incoherence.

“Mmm.” Her hand came up to his shoulder to push him away.

“Don’t fight me,” he murmured fiercely against her lips. “Don’t fight me, Frances.”

And because his very touch had destroyed all rational thought processes for the moment, she gave up her instinctive resistance to his embrace. She slid her fingers up into his hair instead and kissed him back with all the ardor she had been suppressing for three long months.

He parted her lips with his own, and his tongue came deep into her mouth, filling her with warmth and longing and raw need. For a while she gave in to pure sensation and turned in order to set both arms about him and press her bosom to his chest.

Ah, it had been so long.

It had been forever.

She had missed him so much.

His hands roamed over her and then strained her to him.

But powerful as physical passion could be, it could not entirely obliterate thought for longer than a few moments. She was not free to give in to his ardor as she had been after Christmas because she knew that he was not free. He had promised to marry, and he was going to London tomorrow or the next day to do just that. Actually, he had made that promise even before he met her in the snowstorm.

That realization caused her stomach to somersault.

She lowered her hand and pushed against his shoulder.

“No!” she said against his lips.

“Damn it, Frances,” he said, lifting his head a few inches from hers. “Goddamn it all to hell!”

She did not reprove him for the shockingly blasphemous language. She bit her lip instead and blinked her eyes in the darkness so that she would not openly weep.

He tried to renew the interrupted embrace, but she turned her face sharply away.

“Miss Hunt might not approve,” she said.

“Miss—? Who the devil told you about Portia?” he asked.

Ah, so she was Portia to him, was she?

“Amy, I suppose.” He answered his own question.

“Yes, Amy,” she admitted. “I wish you joy, Lord Sinclair.”

“If you Lord Sinclair me one more time,” he said, “I might well have to do violence to your person, Frances. I am not yet betrothed to Portia Hunt.”

“Not yet,” she said. “But you soon will be. Take your arm from about my shoulders if you please.”

He obeyed abruptly, leaving her feeling so bereft that even dragging air into her lungs seemed like a physical effort almost beyond her power to perform.

They rode side by side in silence for the rest of the way. When the carriage made its big turn from

Great Pulteney Street

onto

Sydney Place

and then

Sutton Road

, they both reached for the leather straps over their heads so that they would not touch each other. When the carriage rocked to a halt outside the school, there was suddenly total silence except for the snorting and stamping of the horses.

The door opened and the steps were set down.

Viscount Sinclair sat where he was. So did Frances.

“Some people,” Peters muttered from outside on the pavement, “would like to get to their beds sometime tonight.”

“Damn your impudence!” Viscount Sinclair exploded with what sounded like genuine wrath and was out of the carriage in a flash. “If I choose to keep you up past your bedtime, Peters, you may choose at any time to quit my service and good riddance.”

“Right you are, guv,” the coachman said, sounding quite uncowed. “I’ll let you know when that time comes.”

Viscount Sinclair turned to hand Frances down. He led her to the door of the school, which opened as they approached it. Keeble stood peering out like a suspicious parent, a frown on his face.

“Well, Frances,” Viscount Sinclair said, his hands clasped at his back. “It would seem that this is good-bye—again.”

“Yes.” She fought panic.

They gazed at each other for a long moment in the faint light of the lamp burning in the hall. He looked very grim and square-jawed. Then he nodded his head twice, turned abruptly, and strode away back to his carriage.

Frances stepped inside the hall without looking back, and the door closed behind her.

It was over.

Again.

But it was over.

It was an enormous relief to Frances to find the school in darkness apart from the single lamp burning in the hall and a candle at the top of the stairs. She had half expected to find her friends waiting for her in the hallway as they had been when she left for the assembly.

Keeble made some comment to the effect that he had been just about to lock up for the night and go to bed. But instead of laughing at his little joke, as she normally would have done, she dashed past him with no more than a hasty thank-you and good night and hurried upstairs before he could say anything more.

She was almost safely past Miss Martin’s sitting room on the way to her own room before the door opened.

“Not now, Claudia,” she said. “I hope I have not kept you up. Good night.”

As soon as she was in her room, she cast herself across the narrow bed, facedown, and covered her head with both arms as if she could thereby shut out everything that threatened her, even thought.

He promised Grandpapa at Christmas that he would take a bride this year, and I suppose she will be Miss Hunt, who has been waiting for him forever.

How foolish—how utterly ridiculous of her to have been so upset by those words.

I am not yet betrothed to Portia Hunt.

Not yet.

And between the two—between hearing of his impending engagement and marriage from Amy and his own admission of it in the carriage, she had let him kiss her. She had even kissed him back.

Though a kiss was a very mild way of describing their hot embrace.

She half heard the tap on her door and ignored it. But a few moments later she was aware that someone had come into the room and was sitting quietly on the chair beside her bed. Someone touched her arm, rubbed it lightly, patted it.

“I suppose,” Frances said, removing her arms from over her head though she did not turn her face, “if I said I had a wonderful time and am now so tired that I am too weary even to undress for bed, you would not believe me.”

“Not for a single moment,” Claudia said.

“I did not think so.” Frances turned her head without lifting it. Claudia was sitting very upright, her hands folded in her lap, looking her usual composed, rather severe self. “I did have a wonderful time. I danced every set, including one with Mr. Blake and one with Mr. Huckerby’s brother-in-law. And then I made an idiot of myself when Viscount Sinclair brought me back here. I allowed him to kiss me in the carriage—indeed I did somewhat more than just allow it. But I already knew that he is about to be betrothed, that soon he will be married.”

Claudia looked at her tight-lipped.

“It was as much my fault as his,” Frances said. “I allowed the kiss. I wanted it. I was eager for it.”

“But you,” Claudia said, “are not about to be betrothed, Frances. And I suppose he initiated the embrace. It was his fault.”

Yes, it was. If it was true that Miss Portia Hunt was waiting for him in London, that he was to marry her this year—and it was true—then he ought not to have spoken to her as he had in the carriage. And he ought not to have kissed her.

“What is it about me, Claudia?” she asked wearily. “Why do I always attract the wrong men? And why is it that when I do attract the right man I cannot fall in love with him? Is there something wrong with me?”

“Sometimes,” Claudia said, “particularly when I hear you sing, Frances, I understand that you are a deeply passionate woman with a romantic heart. It is a dangerous combination for a woman, all the more so perhaps because women are expected to be nothing else but a bundle of tender sensibilities and there are plenty of men who are quite ready to take advantage of the fact. Life can be a tragic thing for us. It is safer, I have come to believe, for a woman to make a person of herself, to be proud of who or what she is and to grow comfortable with herself, regardless of what others say of her or expect of her—particularly the male world. If she is very fortunate—though admittedly it is rare—a woman can live independently of men and draw contentment from the world she has created for herself.”

She got to her feet and crossed the room to the window, where she stood looking out into darkness, her spine very straight.

“That is what I did three years ago,” Frances said wearily, “when I came here. And I have been happy, Claudia. I thought nothing could shake me from that contentment, until I ran into a snowstorm while I was returning here after Christmas.”

“I suppose,” Claudia said, her voice soft and pensive, “there is no such thing in this life as perfect happiness, Frances. We can only do the best we are able to make our lives tolerable. I sometimes think there must be more to being a woman than this, but this is what I have chosen for myself, and I would rather my life as it is than as it might be if I were the possession of some man, or else dependent upon the males of my own family.”

“And when one falls,” Frances said, pulling herself up into a sitting position at the edge of the bed, “one must simply pick oneself up and start all over again. The most simple of adages are often the wisest.”

“Except that in your case,” Claudia said, turning her head and half smiling, “you do not have to start right from the beginning again. Your classes await you tomorrow and your choirs and music pupils—and they all adore you, Frances. And your friends will be waiting eagerly at the breakfast table to hear all about the splendor of an assembly at the Upper Rooms. They so much want and even need to hear that you enjoyed yourself.”

Frances smiled wanly. “I will not disappoint them,” she said. “And then I will be ready to administer a French oral examination to the middle class, and to smile and praise my music pupils so that they will be inspired to reach greater heights. I will not let you down, Claudia.”

“I am absolutely certain you will not,” Claudia said. “We all learn to bury a broken heart beneath layers of dignity, Frances. You have done it for more than three years, and you will do it again. Good night.”

After she had gone, Frances heard the echo of Claudia’s words and frowned at the closed door—We all learn to bury a broken heart . . .

Had Claudia ever done that?

Had she?

I am not yet betrothed to Portia Hunt.

Not yet. But you soon will be.

She got wearily to her feet and began to undress.

Although the Earl of Edgecombe rose early the following morning for his usual visit to the Pump Room to drink the waters, it was obvious to Lucius that he was weary from his exertions of the night before. He was certainly in no state to travel all the way to London. Yet he still insisted that when his grandchildren returned there, he would go with them rather than go home to

Barclay Court

. He wanted to see his friend Godsworthy again. He wanted to witness the progress of the courtship between Lucius and Portia Hunt—though he did not mention her by name.

He wanted, Lucius knew, though he did not say as much, to be part of the excitement that would surround their betrothal and planned wedding.

Lucius was desperate to leave Bath even though only London and Portia and marriage awaited him. He had behaved badly after the assembly—and even during it, by Jove. He had gone out of his way to remind her of the first time they had danced together and to arouse her out of her controlled enjoyment of the evening. And then, in the carriage, when as her escort he was supposed to be protecting her from harm . . .

Well, he had been unable to deny himself the indulgence of that one last kiss. That was the trouble with him—he was not accustomed to exercising self-control, to thinking before he acted. Heaven knew where that embrace would have led if she had not put a firm stop to it.

And yet the very fact that she was always so sensible and controlled when he knew that passion throbbed just behind the facade and occasionally burst through for tantalizingly brief moments—that very fact irritated him almost beyond endurance.

They did not leave Bath the day after the assembly, then. Neither did they leave the next day since Amy, who had gone shopping with Mrs. Abbotsford and her daughter the day before, had been invited to join them and young Algernon Abbotsford on an excursion to some village not far from Bristol and begged permission to be allowed to go with such tragic certainty that she would be denied the treat that Lucius could not resist giving in to her.

One day longer was neither here nor there, he supposed.

His grandfather too went off to visit a friend during the afternoon, leaving Lucius with altogether too much time on his hands and too many unwelcome thoughts to weigh on his mind.

Dash it all, when had the promise he had made his grandfather come to be seen as a definite commitment to marry Portia Hunt? Had he ever stated aloud to anyone that she was going to be the one? But then, if not Portia, who? He had committed himself to choosing a bride—an eligible bride.

There could be no less appealing prospect.

The perfect and perfectly eligible bride!

The word perfect and all its derivatives should be stricken from the English language together with the word pleasant. The world would be a better place without them.

He sat with a book and brooded and fumed and schemed and despaired and cursed his lot in life for a whole hour before snapping the book shut—he had not read a single page—and striding out of the sitting room. He set out on a brisk walk down into the center of the city, along by the river, over the Pulteney Bridge, and along

Great Pulteney Street

. By the time he reached the end of it, he had stopped even pretending to himself that he had come walking for the benefit of his health, that his direction had been random, but that since he had come this way he might as well take a solitary turn about Sydney Gardens.

He was not a man much given to aimless or solitary walking. He favored far more vigorous exercise for his health. Besides, it was not a day that invited a pleasure stroll. It was gray and blustery and chilly. He might have spared a pitying thought for Amy, who had set out on the excursion with such exuberant hopes, except that he was quite sure the presence of young Algernon in the party would render her totally oblivious to inclement weather.

No, he was not out for a pleasure stroll. Here he was turning onto Sutton Street instead of crossing the road to Sydney Gardens, eyeing the school on the corner with Daniel Street, and remembering that it was Saturday and there would be no classes today—a fact that did not necessarily mean that she would be free, of course. It was a boarding school. Someone had to look after the girls and entertain them even at the weekends.

What the devil was he doing here?

He stood for a moment frowning at the front door, wondering if it would be more cowardly to knock or to turn tail and flee. He was not by nature a ditherer—or a coward. Or a thinker, for that matter.

He stepped up to the door, raised the brass door knocker, and let it fall against the door.

All of two minutes must have passed without any response, leading Lucius to the conclusion that the porter did not actually live in the hall, within one foot of the front door, but only occupied it when he was expecting someone. But it was he who eventually opened the door and peered out. His expression immediately turned both sour and suspicious.

“Ask Miss Allard if she will grant me a few minutes of her time,” Lucius said briskly, stepping over the threshold without an invitation.

“She is giving a lesson in the music room,” the porter told him.

“And?” Lucius raised his eyebrows.

The man turned and walked away, his boot heels squeaking on the hard floor.

“You had better go and wait in there,” he said ungraciously, nodding his head in the direction of the visitors’ sitting room.

When he was alone inside the room, Lucius stood at the window looking out on the meadows beyond

Daniel Street

and wishing he were anywhere else on earth but where he actually was. He was not in the habit of pursuing unwilling females, especially when the world was so full of willing ones. But it was too late to run away now.

He could hear the distant sounds of girlish laughter and a pianoforte playing—and then not playing. Across the meadow a group of girls, presumably from the school, was playing some organized game. The teacher supervising them looked like the auburn-haired one—Miss Osbourne. He had not noticed them when he arrived—which said something about his preoccupation. They were probably all shrieking their heads off.

When the door opened behind him, he half expected to turn and see Miss Martin again. But it was Frances herself, looking white to the very lips, who stepped inside. She closed the door behind her back.

“What are you doing here?” Her voice was actually shaking, but whether from shock or anger or some other emotion it was hard to say.

He knew something at that moment with ghastly clarity.

He was not going to be able to let her go this time.

It was that simple.

“I came to see you,” he said.

“Why?” Two spots of color had appeared in her cheeks. Her eyes had turned hard.

“Because there is something still to be said between us,” he said, “and I do not like to leave things unsaid when they should be spoken.”

“There is nothing else to be said between us, Lord Sinclair,” she said. “Nothing whatsoever.”

“There you are wrong, Frances,” he said. “Come out with me. Come walking in Sydney Gardens.”

“I am in the middle of giving a music lesson,” she told him.

“Dismiss the girl early,”he said. “She will be ecstatic. Do you have other lessons to follow this one?”

She compressed her lips for a moment before answering. “No,” she admitted.

“Then come walking with me,” he said.

“Have you noticed the weather today?” she asked him. “It is going to rain.”

“But it is not raining yet,” he said. “It may not rain all day—just as it did not snow all over Christmas. Bring an umbrella. You cannot claim to be English, Frances, and yet fear stepping outdoors lest it rain. You would be housebound all your life.”

“I do not want anything more to do with you,” she told him.

“If I thought you truly meant that,” he said, “I would be gone in a flash. But I think you lie. Or if you do not do so quite consciously, then I believe you deceive yourself.”

“You are a betrothed man,” she said. “Miss Portia Hunt—”

“I am not betrothed yet,” he told her.

“But you soon will be.”

“The future,” he said, “is just a theory, Frances. It is not fact. How can any of us know what we will be doing soon? Now, at this precise moment, I am not a betrothed man. And you and I have unfinished business.”

“We do not—”

“You are such a coward, Frances.” He was beginning to feel frustrated, angry. Was she really going to refuse to come? And why the devil was he pressing her when she was so clearly reluctant to have any more dealings with him?

But he knew—he knew beyond any doubt—that her attraction to him was just as powerful as his to her.

“It is not cowardly,” she said, “to avoid inevitable and pointless pain.”

“I cause you pain, then?” His incipient anger disappeared in a moment. She had finally admitted to more than just a twinge.

But she would not answer him. She clasped her hands at her waist and looked composed and pale again. She gazed very steadily into his eyes.

“Give me one more hour of your life,” he said. “It is not a great deal to ask, is it?”

There was an almost imperceptible slumping of her shoulders and he knew that she would not deny him.

“One hour, then,” she said. “I will go and dismiss Rhiannon Jones and let Miss Martin know that I am going out for a while.”

He stared broodingly at the door after she had left the room. He ought, he supposed, to have stopped to think, to consider, before coming here. But, devil take it, it was his life, and there must be a way of living it to his own satisfaction and doing his duty by his family and position at the same time.

But how could he have thought or considered? When he had left the house on

Brock Street

, he had not known where he was going.

He had certainly not known why.

Or had he?

He gazed out the window with unseeing eyes, looking back wistfully on the time, not too long ago, when his life had been uncomplicated and perfectly satisfactory.

Well, it would be satisfactory again, dash it all.

It would.

He had promised to find the perfect bride.

But there was more than one kind of perfection.

He paid their way into Sydney Gardens, just on the other side of the road at Sydney Place, and they walked along beside a bowling green until the path wound upward, twisting and turning as it did so between lawns and among trees whose branches swayed and tossed in the wind.

It was not by any means an ideal day for strolling in any park. There was not another soul in sight apart from the two of them.

Frances shivered even though she was dressed warmly—in the exact cloak and bonnet and half-boots she had been wearing the first time she met him, in fact, she realized suddenly. She felt chilled to the bone, but not so much from the buffeting of the weather as from the fact that she was actually walking here beside him again, one day after she thought he had returned to London, two days after they had said good-bye forever—again.

She had already lived through a day of pain so intense that it had seemed like stark despair. Was she to have to endure the same all over again later today and tomorrow?

Would he never go away and stay away?

Would she never have the resolve to send him away and mean it?

She had received a card with the morning post from Mrs. Lund, Mr. Blake’s sister, inviting her to join Mr. Lund and herself at the theater next week. Mr. Blake was to be of the party too, she had added. Although Frances had hesitated, she had written back to accept. Life had to continue, she had reasoned. And perhaps now she would finally be able to put the past behind her and concentrate her attention upon the man who seemed eager to be her beau. It was not as if she had to make any final decision about him yet. She did not even have to tell him everything about herself yet. It was merely an evening at the theater to which she had been invited.

She had congratulated herself—again—upon her good sense. But here she was, just a few hours later, walking in Sydney Gardens with Lucius Marshall—who was soon to marry a Miss Portia Hunt.

“For someone who had something important to say,” she said, breaking a lengthy silence, “and who was granted merely one hour of my time, you are remarkably silent, Lord Sinclair.”

They walked onto a brightly painted and exquisitely carved Chinese bridge and paused for a few moments to gaze down into the slate-gray waters of the canal below. Under different circumstances, she was half aware, she would be feasting her senses on all the beauty that surrounded them, inclement weather notwithstanding.

“Do you believe in fate, Frances?” he asked her.

She considered her answer. Did she?

“I do believe in coincidence,” she said. “I believe that some unexpected things happen to catch our attention, and that what we do with those moments might affect or change the whole course of our life. But I do not believe we are blown about helplessly by a fate over which we have no control. There would be no point in free will if that were so. We all have the power to decide, to say yes or no, to do something or not to do it, to go in this direction or that.”

“Do you believe,” he asked her, “that the whole course of your life brought you to that snow-clogged road when it did, and that the whole course of my life brought me to the same place at the same time? And do you believe that coincidence as you call it willed it so? Or that in some quite unconscious way we did ourselves? Was it perhaps not simple, random accident that it was you who were there and not some other woman, or that it was me and not some other man?”

The strange, unlikely possibility made her feel breathless. Could life really be that . . . deliberate?

“You were warned that it would snow,” she said. “You might have chosen not to travel that day. I had seen all the signs of an approaching storm for days. I might have waited to see what would happen.”

“Precisely,” he said. “Either one of us or both could have heeded the warnings and warning signs, which appear to have deterred every other intended traveler in that area. But neither of us did. Has it struck you as curious that we met no one else on that road? That no one else stopped at that inn?”

No, it had not. She had never thought of it. But she thought of it now. She had wanted to set out earlier that morning, but her great-aunts had persuaded her to sit an extra hour with them over breakfast. If she had left when she had intended, she would very probably never have met him.

How she wished she had set out earlier!

Or did she?

What was he trying to say, anyway?

He set out along the path again, and she fell into step beside him. He did not offer his arm. He had not done so since they left the school, in fact. She was thankful for it. But she did not need to touch him in order to feel him with every fiber of her being.

Was it possible, she wondered, that it was not just the fact that she had lain with him that drew her so powerfully to him, that had made it impossible to forget him, that had made her life an agony during the past few days? She had loved before. Surely she had loved Charles. But she had never felt quite like this.

They walked onward in silence again. They still had not encountered anyone else since entering Sydney Gardens. Everyone else in Bath had more sense than they, it seemed.

When they reached the top of the hill, they paused again to look down on trees and lawns and winding paths. A roofed pavilion was in view to the left. So was the famed labyrinth a little lower down. Maps of the maze were available from the Sydney Hotel beside the entrance to the Gardens, Frances had heard, for use by those too afraid of getting lost for an indeterminate length of time before finding their way out again. Behind them was a row of swings, one of them creaking in the wind.

There were all the signs of the fact that these were pleasure gardens, not least among them the sheer beauty of nature. Yet she felt the very antithesis of joy as she looked on them all. Where was this hour leading them? It was leading absolutely nowhere at all.

His silence unnerved her, though she had sworn to herself that she would not break it again. But when she looked across at him, she found him looking back, an unfathomable expression in his eyes.

His words took her totally by surprise.

“Do those swings beckon you as strongly as they do me?” he asked her.

What? For a moment her mind was catapulted back to the inn kitchen on the first morning they spent there, when they were eating breakfast and he had suddenly challenged her to a snowman-building contest. That, she realized then—yes, just that—had been the real start of everything between them. If she had refused . . .

She turned her head to look at the swings. The broad wooden seats were suspended from tree branches overhead on long, plaited ropes. Because they were set in a grove of trees, they looked as if they were sheltered from the wind. Only the one swing at the far end swayed and creaked.

“Even more strongly,” she said, and she turned, catching up the hems of her dress and cloak as she did so, and strode toward the nearest swing.

The need to break the terrible tension between them was overwhelming. What more sure way than to frolic on a child’s swing?

“Do you need a push?” he asked as she seated herself.

“Of course not,” she said, pushing off with both feet and then stretching out her legs and bending them back under the seat to set her swing in motion and propel herself higher and higher. “And I bet I’ll be first to kick the sky.”

“Ah, a challenge,” he said, taking the swing next to hers. “Did no one ever teach you that it is unladylike to make wagers?”

“That is a rule imposed by men because they are afraid of losing to women,” she said.

“Ha!”

They swung higher and higher until the ropes of their swings creaked in protest and the wind whipped at her skirts and the brim of her bonnet and fairly took her breath away on the forward descent and ascent. With every upward swing Frances could see more and more of the gardens below. With every downward swoop she was aware of tree branches rushing by only a few feet away.

“Wheeee!” she cried on one descent.

“The exact word I was searching for,” he called, passing her in the opposite direction.

They were both laughing then and swinging and whooping like a pair of exuberant children until by unspoken assent they gradually slowed and then sat side by side, their swings gently swaying.

“One problem,” he said. “There was no sky to kick.”

“What?” She turned to him, wide-eyed. “You did not feel it? That means you did not swing high enough to touch it. I did and I win.”

“You, Frances Allard,” he said, “are lying through your teeth.”

He had said those exact words before, and the occasion rushed to her mind with startling clarity. They had been lying in bed, and she had just told him she was not cold and he had replied that it was a pity as he might have offered to warm her up.

I am frozen, she had said then.

You lie through your teeth, ma’am, he had answered her, but I like your spirit. Now, I suppose I need to think of some way of warming you . . .

What was she doing here? she wondered suddenly. Why was she doing this again—frolicking with him, wagering against him, laughing with him?

Just a few minutes ago, it seemed, she had been trying to get Rhiannon Jones to feel the melody with her right hand and allow the passion of it to rise above the accompaniment with the left.

“Frances—” he began.

But at that exact moment a large drop of moisture splattered against one of her cheeks and she saw a few more darken the fabric of her cloak. He held out a hand, palm up, and they both looked up.

“Damnation!” he exclaimed. “We are about to get rained upon, and you did not bring an umbrella even though I advised you to do so. We are going to have to make a dash for the pavilion.”

He took her by the hand without a by-your-leave, and a moment later they were running toward the pavilion a short distance away down the hill while the heavens gave every indication that they were about to open in earnest at any moment. By the time they reached shelter, they were both breathless and laughing again.

The pavilion had been built more as a sun shelter than as a refuge from the rain. It was walled on three sides, with a roof that jutted out in front a couple of feet beyond the side walls. Fortunately for them, the wind was blowing from behind and the inside of the shelter remained dry. They sat on the wide bench against the inside wall and watched as the expected deluge arrived. It came down in sheets, drumming against the thin roof, forming a curtain across the front opening, almost obliterating the view of lawns and trees beyond. It felt like sitting behind a massive waterfall.

“One can only hope,” she said, “that this is not about to set in for the day.”

But their laughter had faded, and their solitude seemed far more pronounced here than it had out in the deserted gardens.

He took one of her hands in his and held it in both his own while she looked away and tried not to react to the warmth of his touch.

“Frances,” he said, “I think you had better come to London with me.”

She tried to remove her hand then, but he held it in a firm clasp.

“That was fate,” he said. “And it was speaking loudly and clearly. It was so insistent a fate that it threw us together again this week when we had missed the chance it presented to us after Christmas. Forgive me for saying this, but I have known many women, Frances, and I have not mourned the departure of a single one of them from my life. Until you, that is. I have never before known one for only two days and still been obsessed with her three months later.”

“I suppose,” she said bitterly, “it is because I said no to you and you are not accustomed to women who deny you what you want.”

“I have considered that as a distinct possibility,” he admitted. “But injured pride, if that was all that was involved, would actually have sent me dashing off in the opposite direction to find another woman to bolster my sagging confidence in my own charms. I could never grovel before any woman simply because she had thwarted my will. I would be off in pursuit of more easy prey instead.”

“Of which there is doubtless plenty,” she said tartly.

“Quite so,” he said. “I am young, you see, Frances, and have all my hair and all my teeth, tolerably white. I am also wealthy and titled, with the prospect of vastly more in the future. It is an irresistible combination for many women. But all that is beside the point under present circumstances. I am groveling before you, you see.”

“Nonsense!” Her heart was hammering against her ribs. She would have been able to hear it, she was sure, if the sound of the rain against the roof had not been almost deafening. “You want to get me into bed, that is all.”

Her cheeks grew hot at the bold vulgarity of her own words.

“If that were all it was,” he said, “I would have been satisfied long ago, Frances. I have had you in bed. One bedding is often enough to satisfy simple lust. Yet I am not satisfied.”

She grew hotter. But she could hardly reprove him for his very direct words. She had led the way.

“You need to be in London,” he said. “Bath becomes suffocating after a week or two.”

“You find it so only because you are idle here,” she said. “I am not.”

“Even apart from the fact that you could be with me if you were in London,” he said, “you need to be there for your singing, Frances. You are wasting your talent by teaching music when you should be performing it. If you were in London, I could introduce you to the right people and you would acquire the exposure you need and the audience you deserve.”

She snatched her hand from his and stood up abruptly, suddenly panic-stricken. He wanted to prostitute her talent, then, just as George Ralston had done? And be his mistress on the side, no doubt? Even though he was about to marry someone else? She felt suddenly bilious. What had she expected? She took one step closer to the outdoors and then stopped. There had been no easing of the cloudburst yet.

“I hated London when I lived there,” she said, “and vowed that I would never go back there. And I do not need anyone to introduce me to the right people. I am happy as I am. Can you not understand that?”

“Contented,” he said. “You have admitted before, Frances, that you are contented. And I say again that you are not a woman made for contentment. You were made for glorious, passionate happiness. Oh, and for unhappiness too, of course. The challenge of living is to reach for the one and learn from the other, if only the strength to endure. Come with me.”

“I will not,” she said. “Oh, I absolutely will not. You think that happiness and sexual passion are one and the same, Lord Sinclair, and that the latter is something to be indulged at all costs. There is more to life than physical gratification.”

“For once we are in total agreement,” he said. “You still believe I am trying to persuade you to be my mistress, Frances, do you not?”

“I do,” she said, turning to look down at him. “And if you say otherwise you lie—or you deceive yourself. I am an independent woman here. I am not wealthy, but I am beholden to no one. I have a freedom many women can only dream of. I will not give that up to become your toy until you tire of me.”

“My toy?” he said. “Are you not listening? I want to help you share your talent with the world and be happy and fulfilled as a result. Rid yourself of the notion that I am a simple, unprincipled rake. I want you in bed, yes. Of course I do. But more than that, I want you.”

She shook her head slowly. She wanted the issue to remain simple. She wanted nothing that would tempt her, as she had been tempted for a few moments back in December. She wanted nothing to shake her resolve to be sensible.

“Do you not understand even now?” he asked her. “I am asking you to be my wife, Frances.”

Her mouth opened to reply even before he had finished speaking. She stared at him and closed it again with a clacking of teeth.

“What?” she said.

“I have discovered,” he said, “that I do not want to live without you. I happen to be currently in need of a wife. My grandfather is dying, I am his heir, and I have promised to do my duty and take a bride while he is still living, it is to be hoped. Only today has it occurred to me that you are perfectly eligible, Frances. Your father presumably had some connection with the French court, and you have family ties with Baron Clifton. There will be some who will feel, of course, that I ought to ally myself with someone of more obviously equal or superior rank and fortune to my own, but I have never paid too much heed to what others think, especially where my own comfort and happiness are concerned. And my grandfather, whose contrary opinion is the only one that does matter to me, is inordinately fond of you—and he honors and respects your talent. He will be won over in a moment when it becomes clear to him that I will have no one but you. And my mother and sisters will be won over—they love me and want my happiness when all is said and done. Marry me, Frances. I do not much like the look of this stone floor, but I will go down on one knee before you if you wish. It is something you will be able to boast of to our grandchildren.”

He flashed a grin at her.

She could not seem to draw sufficient air into her lungs. It was not that there was not enough inside the pavilion. There seemed to be far too much of it, in fact. Her legs were shaking, but if she had tried to return to her seat on the bench, she would have staggered and fallen, she was sure. She stood where she was.

He wanted to marry her?

“You are to marry Miss Hunt,” she said.

He made an impatient gesture with one hand.

“That is the general expectation,” he admitted. “We saw a fair amount of each other while we were growing up, as her family often visited my grandparents and we often visited them. And, of course, our families embarrassed us horribly—or me, anyway—by referring openly to their hopes that we would make a match of it one day and by teasing us mercilessly if we so much as exchanged a glance. And my mother holds firmly to the notion that Portia has been waiting for me to the advanced age of three-and-twenty. But I have never spoken a word to her of any intention to marry her, nor she to me. I am under no obligation whatsoever to offer for her.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “she would disagree with you.”

“She has no grounds for doing so,” he said. “I have made my own choice and it is you. Marry me, Frances.”

She closed her eyes. They were words the romantic, unrealistic part of her had dreamed for three months of hearing. She had even enacted scenes similar to this in her imagination. But if she could ever have expected to hear them in reality, she would have dreaded them. Her heart, she thought, would finally break in all earnest.

When she opened her eyes she was feeling dizzy and somehow staggered back to her seat. He took first one and then both of her hands in his own—they were warm and large enough to encompass her own. He lowered his head and held both of them against his lips.

“I cannot go back to London,” she said.

“Then we will live at Cleve Abbey,” he said. “We will raise a large, riotous family there, Frances, and live happily ever after. You may sing for all our neighbors.”

“You know you could not live in the country indefinitely,” she told him. “You will have to take your place in the House of Lords when you inherit the earldom. I cannot go back to London or polite society.”

“Cannot?” he asked. “Or will not?”

“Both,” she said. “There is nothing in the life you offer me that attracts me.”

“Not even my person?” he asked her, lowering her hands.

She shook her head.

“I do not believe you,” he said.

She looked up at him with a flash of anger.

“That is the trouble with you,” she said. “You really cannot take no for an answer, can you, Lord Sinclair? You cannot believe that any woman in her right mind would prefer the sort of life I lead here to the sort of life you offer me, or that she would prefer relative solitude here to a life in the beau monde with you.”

Both his eyebrows arched upward. But he looked rather as if she had struck him across the face.

“No!” He frowned. “This is not good enough, Frances. What is so abhorrent about life in London or life as the Viscountess Sinclair that you would reject me in order to avoid them? I cannot believe you are so averse to me personally. I have seen you, I have felt you, I have known you when your guard is down, and that woman responds to me with a warmth and a passion that match my own. What is it?”

“I am not eligible,” she said. “Not to be the Viscountess Sinclair. Not to be acceptable to your grandfather or your mother or the ton. And I am not going to say any more about it.”

There was no point in saying more—in pouring out the whole sorry story of her life. He was an impulsive man, she knew. She doubted he had really thought out all the implications of what he was doing this morning. He liked to get what he wanted, and for some reason he wanted her. He would not listen if she told him all. He would brush everything aside and try to insist anyway that she marry him.

It simply could not happen—for her sake and for his.

And for the sake of his grandfather, whom she liked and respected.

Good sense must rule the day as it had ruled the last three years of her life—with a few notable exceptions.

And so she lost her chance for joy. Fate had singled her out quite markedly, both after Christmas and this week—he was quite right about that—and she rejected fate, setting against it the power of her own free will. What else, after all, was free will for?

She would not destroy her hard-won new life and his into the bargain.

“I do not like society,” she said as if that were explanation enough for refusing an offer that was hugely advantageous to herself and that he knew was emotionally appealing to her. “It is artificial and vicious and not what I would choose as the environment in which to live the rest of my life. It is what I deliberately left behind me more than three years ago in order to come here.”

“If I had been there then,” he said fiercely, his eyes blazing into hers, “and if you had known me then, if I had asked you then what I have asked you now, would you have made the same choice, Frances?”

“Hypothetical questions are like the future you spoke of earlier,” she said. “They are a meaningless figment of the imagination. They have no reality. I did not meet you then.”

“No is your final answer, then,” he said. It was not really a question.

“Yes,” she said, “it is.”

“Good God!” He released her hands. “One of us must be mad, Frances, and I fear it may be me. Can you look me in the eye, then, and swear to me that you have no feelings for me?”

“Nothing is ever as simple as that,” she said. “But I will not swear either way. I do not have to. I have said no. That is all that needs saying.”

“By Jove, you are right.” It was he who got to his feet this time. “I beg your pardon, ma’am, for causing you such distress.”

His voice was tight with hostility.

She suddenly realized that they were surrounded by silence again except for the sounds of water dripping off the roof onto the soaked ground. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

“But there is still a part of me, Frances,” he added, “that could cheerfully throttle you.”

She closed her eyes and set a hand over her mouth as if to stop the outpouring of words she would regret. She was assailed with such a yearning to hurl herself into his arms and throw good sense to the winds that she felt physically sick again.

Thoughts whirled through her head in a chaotic jumble.

Perhaps she should be more like him and simply act instead of always thinking.

But she would not do it. She could not.

She got to her feet, stepped past him, and looked up at the sky. It still looked full of rain, and indeed there was still a fine drizzle falling.

“The hour is at an end, Lord Sinclair,” she said. “I am going back to the school now. You need not accompany me.”

“Damn you, Frances,” he said softly.

They were the last words he said to her—the last words of his she would ever hear, she thought as she hurried down the path, heedless of the fact that it was very wet and muddy and even slippery in places.

He had wanted her to marry him.

And she had said no.

Because, for a whole host of reasons, a marriage between them simply could not work.

And because love was simply not enough.

She was mad, she thought. She was mad, mad, mad.

He had asked her to marry him.

No, it was not madness. It was sanity—cold, comfortless, merciless sanity.

She was half running by the time she came to the gates and emerged from the gardens onto

Sydney Place

. And she was half sobbing too, though she tried to tell herself that it was only because she was out of breath from hurrying to get back to school before the rain came down heavily once more.

Lucius had wanted to marry her, and she had been forced to say no.

Actually participating in all the busy rituals of the spring Season—attending balls and routs and Venetian breakfasts and concerts and theater performances, riding in Hyde Park during the morning and tooling a curricle about it during the fashionable hour of the afternoon, being drawn into a thousand and one other frivolous activities—actually participating in it all did help to distract one’s thoughts from past humiliations and one’s spirits from taking up permanent residence in the soles of one’s boots, Lucius found over the coming month, especially when one also spent a large portion of one’s nights at White’s or one of the other gentlemen’s clubs and one’s mornings at Jackson’s boxing saloon or Tattersall’s horse auction or one of the other places where gentlemen tended to congregate in significant numbers and one could forget about being on one’s best social behavior.

Of course, it was all very different from the life he was accustomed to, and he was forced to endure the wincing sympathies and rowdy teasing of a number of his acquaintances, who could not fail to notice that he was living at Marshall House instead of in his usual bachelor rooms and that he was participating in the activities of the marriage mart and who, if the truth were told, were only too glad that it was not their turn to be thus occupied.

He danced with Emily at her come-out ball and with Caroline at her betrothal ball two weeks later. He took both sisters—and even Amy once or twice—shopping and walking and driving. He took his mother visiting and shopping and browsing at the library. He escorted them all to the theater and the opera. He even, for the love of God, escorted them to Almack’s one evening, that insipid bastion of upper-class exclusivity, where there was nothing to do but dance and eat stale bread and butter and drink weak lemonade and make himself agreeable to a veritable host of young female hopefuls and their mamas.

But their hopes, raised no doubt by the sight of someone so eligible in unaccustomed attendance at ton revelries, were entirely misplaced and no doubt they soon realized it. For even before he arrived back in London from Bath a dinner at the Marquess of Godsworthy’s town house on Berkeley Square, at which his family members were the guests of honor—and indeed the only guests, he was soon to discover—had already been arranged, as had a similar dinner and small soiree at Marshall House a few evenings later. And soon after his return—the very day after, in fact, when he paid a courtesy call on the Balderstons with his mother and sisters—arrangements were made for the two families to sit together in the Earl of Edgecombe’s box at the theater one evening within the week.

On each occasion—during both dinners, during the courtesy call, and at the theater—Lucius found himself seated beside Portia Hunt. They could not have seemed more like an established couple if they had already been betrothed.

She was indeed in good looks—very good looks. She had the sort of beauty that only improved with age. Her blond curls and blue eyes and perfect features and English rose complexion had made her merely exceedingly lovely as a girl. Now she was nothing short of beautiful—and added to that beauty were a poise and dignity that proclaimed her to be a lady of perfect breeding.

Everything about her was perfect, in fact. There was not a pimple or a mole or a squint or a fatal flaw in sight. And she was the sort of woman to whom duty was so instinctive that she would doubtless present her husband with an heir and a spare within two years of the nuptials before she even thought of the possibility of bearing daughters.

She would be the perfect wife, the perfect hostess, the perfect mother, the perfect viscountess, the perfect countess.

The word perfect definitely needed to be stricken from the English language.

Lucius bore it all with determinedly gritted teeth and stiff upper lip. He had made the fatal—and quite unexpected—mistake of falling in love, and the woman had snubbed and rejected him. On the whole it was a good thing. Although his grandfather had admired Frances Allard as a singer, he might have taken a dimmer view of accepting her as a candidate for the role of future Countess of Edgecombe—even though she was a lady with impeccable connections on her father’s side, at least.

From the moment he had left Bath—and a rather ghastly moment it had been too—Lucius had set the whole experience of falling in love and blurting out an impulsive marriage proposal behind him with a grim firmness of purpose.

He had made a promise at Christmas time, and by God he would keep it. And since he could not have the woman he had wanted, he would have Portia instead. He could not do better, after all—a thought he entertained with a slight grimace.

His mother was a fond parent and liked to see all of her children enjoy their particular moment in the sun. For the first two weeks after Lucius’s return to town that moment belonged to Emily as she prepared for her presentation to the queen and then her come-out ball. And for the next two weeks the moment was Caroline’s as Sir Henry Cobham finally came to the point and talked marriage settlements with Lucius and then made his offer to Caroline herself. And of course the occasion necessitated another ball at Marshall House in celebration of their betrothal.

Had Lucius offered for Portia Hunt within that month, he would have unfairly taken the focus of attention away from one of his sisters and his mother would have been upset.

At least, that was what he told himself—he was trying hard to give more of his time and attention and affection to his family than he had been in the habit of doing through the heedless years of his young manhood.

But to procrastinate indefinitely was not an option for him this spring. He had made his promise to his grandfather, and nothing remained but to make his formal offer and be done with it.

He would do it, he decided, the morning after Caroline’s ball. There was no further excuse for delay. Already his mother was making pointed remarks, and his grandfather was regarding him with twinkling eyes every time Portia’s name was mentioned—and it was mentioned with ominous frequency.

He dressed with care under Jeffreys’s expert ministrations and took himself off on foot to

Berkeley Square

—only to find after steeling himself to the ordeal that Lord Balderston was not at home. The ladies were, however, the butler informed him. Did Lord Sinclair wish to wait upon them?

Lord Sinclair did, he supposed, though he thought longingly of his male friends now fencing or sparring or looking over horseflesh at all the usual haunts—and not a one of them with a care in the world.

When he was shown into the morning room, however, he found that Portia was in there alone.

“Mama is still in her own apartments after the late night at Caroline’s ball,” she explained after he had made his bow to her.

It was understandable. It was somewhat surprising, in fact, that Portia herself was up and so neatly dressed and coifed that she was able to receive guests on a moment’s notice. There had not been a mother or sister in sight when he had left Marshall House.

Did she add early rising to her other virtues?

“Do you wish to send for her?” he asked, looking about the empty room. “Or for your maid?”

“Do not be foolish, Lucius,” she said with cool poise, indicating a chair while she seated herself gracefully and picked up her embroidery frame. “I am no green girl to be needing a chaperone in my own home while entertaining a longtime friend.”

They were on a first-name basis, having known each other for many years. Were they also friends?

“Lady Sinclair must be very gratified,” she said, “with one daughter married and another betrothed and Emily taking so well with the ton. And Amy will surely do as well next year if she can learn to curb her natural exuberance.”

Her needle flashed in and out of the cloth, producing a perfect peach-colored rose.

“I hope,” he said, “she will never learn that lesson, Portia. I like her well enough as she is.”

She looked up at him fleetingly.

“It was unfortunate,” she said, “that you took her walking in the park so late the afternoon before last. She ought not to have been seen by the fashionable crowd. And she ought not to have laughed with such unconsidered delight at something you said to her and so made herself conspicuous. Lord Rumford ogled her through his quizzing glass, and we all know his reputation.”

“When my sister is on my arm,” he said, “she is quite safe from the impertinences of rakes, Portia. And girls who are not yet out need fresh air and exercise just as desperately as young ladies who are.”

He was feeling irritated again, he thought. Dash it all, irritation was becoming almost habitual with him. Doubtless ninety-nine out of every one hundred ladies in London would agree with Portia.

Would Frances? He ruthlessly quelled the thought.

“Your fondness for your sisters is commendable,” Portia said. “But I am sure you would not wish to hurt Amy’s chances of taking well next year after her presentation.”

He stared at her blond curls and wondered if the years ahead were to be filled with such gentle reproofs for his every opinion and action. He would be willing to wager a fortune that they were. He would escape, he supposed, as most husbands did, by tramping about his lands, gun in hand and dog at heel, when in the country and by retreating to his clubs when in town.

“It was remarkably kind of you,” she continued, “to take her with you when you went to Bath. Her youthful presence must have been a great comfort to Lord Edgecombe.”

“I believe it was,” he said. “And I enjoyed it too.”

“But was it wise,” she asked him, “to allow her to attend a soiree?”

He raised his eyebrows, but she did not look up from her work.

“And an assembly at the Upper Rooms?” she continued. “Mama was shocked beyond words when Emily told us that, I do not mind telling you, Lucius.”