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.”