Tomorrow, or more probably the next day, she would return to Bath. And this time she was going to immerse herself fully in her life there and her work as a teacher. She was going to forget about Mr. Blake—it was unfair to try to force herself into welcoming his interest when she felt no regard for him beyond a mild gratitude. She was going to forget about beaux altogether.

Most of all, she was going to forget about Lucius Marshall, Viscount Sinclair.

She thought about the music she would sing and tried to get her mind prepared. Her only wish was that she could sing in the drawing room rather than in the music room. The latter seemed just a little too magnificently formal for a relatively small family entertainment. However, she supposed it would look different with the panels shutting it off from the vaster ballroom.

“Miss Allard,” the earl said suddenly, addressing her along the length of the table, “it has seemed in the last few days that it would be just too selfish to keep your performance all to ourselves. And so Lucius has invited some friends to join us after dinner in order to listen to you. We considered that the surprise would please you. I hope it does.”

Some friends.

Frances froze.

She did indeed mind. She minded very much.

This was London.

“How splendid!” Great-Aunt Martha exclaimed. “And how very thoughtful of you both.” She beamed first at the earl and then at the viscount. “Of course Frances does not mind. Do you, my love?”

How many were some? Frances wondered. And who were they?

But her aunts, she could see, were fair to bursting with pride and happiness. And the earl could not have looked more pleased with himself if he had been holding out to her the gift of a diamond necklace on a velvet cushion.

“I will be honored, my lord,” she said.

Perhaps some meant only two or three. Perhaps they would all be strangers. Surely they would, in fact. She had not been here in three years.

“I knew you would be pleased,” the earl said, rubbing his hands together with satisfaction. “But the honor is all ours, I assure you, ma’am. Now. You will not wish to be fussed with having to be sociable to other guests for the next little while. You will wish to relax quietly before you sing. Lucius will escort you to the drawing room while the rest of us proceed to the music room. Lucius?”

“Certainly, sir.” Viscount Sinclair got up from his place farther along the table and extended an arm as Frances rose from her place. “We will join you in half an hour?”

Frances set a hand on his sleeve.

The dining room and drawing room were not on the same floor as the music room. No particularly noticeable sounds were coming up from below. Nevertheless, Frances had an uneasy feeling that there would be sounds—of people—if only they were to descend the staircase.

“How many people are some friends?” she asked.

“Already, Frances,” he said, opening the door into the drawing room and ushering her inside, “you are sounding annoyed.”

“Already?” she said, turning to face him. “I will be even more so, then, when I know the answer?”

“There are people with a quarter of your talent who would kill for the sort of opportunity with which you are to be presented tonight,” he said.

Her eyes widened.

“Then give the opportunity to them,” she said, “and save them from having to commit murder.”

He cocked one eyebrow.

“And what sort of opportunity?” she demanded to know.

“I daresay you have not heard of Lord Heath,” he said.

She stared mutely. Everyone had heard of Lord Heath—everyone who was musically inclined, anyway.

“He is a renowned connoisseur and patron of music,” he explained. “He can promote your career as no one else in London can, Frances.”

That was what her father had once said. He had been planning to bring her to the baron’s attention, though he had said that it would be very difficult to do since everyone with even a modicum of musical talent was forever pestering him to listen.

“I have a career,” she said, “and you have taken me away from it in the middle of a term under largely false pretenses. I will be returning to it within the next day or two. I need no patron. I have an employer—Miss Martin.”

“Sit down and relax,” he told her. “If you work yourself into a fit of the vapors, you will not be able to sing your best.”

“How many, Lord Sinclair?” she asked him.

“I am not sure I can give you an exact number,” he said, “without going along to the music room and doing a head count.”

“How many? Approximately how many?”

He shrugged. “You should be glad,” he said. “This is the chance for which you have waited too long. You admitted to me yesterday that this was both your dream and your father’s.”

“Leave my father out of this!” She suddenly felt cold about the heart and sat down abruptly on the closest chair. She had had a ghastly thought. “The panels that divide the music room from the ballroom had been removed yesterday. Your sister drew your attention to the fact and reminded you to have them put back in place. Has it been done?”

“Actually no,” he said. He strolled to the fireplace and stood with his back to it, watching her.

“Why not?”

Dear God, the combined rooms would make a sizable concert hall. Surely that was not—

“You are going to be magnificent tonight, Frances,” he told her. His hands were clasped at his back. He was looking at her with an intensity that might have disconcerted her under other circumstances.

Yes, that was the intention, she realized. The panels between the two rooms had been removed deliberately because the audience was expected to be too large for the music room alone. And they had done it—he had done it—without consulting her.

Just as he had brought her to London by trickery, without consulting her wishes.

“I ought to walk out of here right now,” she said. “I would if doing so would not make my great-aunts appear foolish.”

“And if it would not disappoint my grandfather,” he said.

“Yes.”

She glared at him. He stared back, tight-jawed.

“Frances,” he said after a few moments of hostile silence, “what are you afraid of? Failing? It will not happen, I promise you.”

“You are nothing but a meddler,” she said bitterly. “An arrogant meddler, who is forever convinced that only he knows what I ought to be doing with my life. You knew I did not wish to return to London, yet you maneuvered matters so that I would come anyway. You knew I did not want to sing before any large audience, especially here, but you have gathered a large audience anyway and made it next to impossible for me to refuse to sing before it. You knew I did not wish to see you again, but you totally ignored my wishes. I think you really do imagine that you care for me, but you are wrong. You do not manipulate someone you care for or go out of your way to make her miserable. You care for no one but yourself. You are a tyrant, Lord Sinclair—the worst type of bully.”

He had, she thought, turned pale while she spoke. Certainly his expression had grown hard and shuttered. He turned abruptly to stare down into the unlit coals in the fireplace.

“And you, Frances,” he said after long moments of uncomfortable silence, “do not know the meaning of the word trust. I have no quarrel with your choosing to teach rather than sing. Why should I? You are free to choose your own course in life. But I do need to understand your reason for doing so—and there is a reason beyond simple preference or even simple poverty. I have no real quarrel with your refusal to come to London with me after Christmas or to marry me when I asked you a little over a month ago. I do not consider myself God’s gift to women, and I do not expect every woman to fall head over ears in love with me—even those who have bedded with me. But I need to understand the reason for your refusal, since I do not believe it is aversion or even indifference. You will not trust me with your reasons. You will not trust me with yourself.”

She was too angry to feel renewed regret that she had not been more open with him yesterday.

“I do not have to,” she cried. “I am under no compulsion to confide in you or any man. Why should I? You are nothing to me. And I am certain of only one thing in this life, and that is that I may trust myself. I will not let myself down.”

He turned to look at her, all signs of humor and mockery wiped from his face.

“Are you sure of that?” he asked her. “Are you sure you have not already done so?”

She understood suddenly—she supposed she had known it all along—why she had been able to contemplate a future with Mr. Blake but not with Lucius Marshall. Beyond a full confession about her past, including what had happened just after Christmas, she would not have had to share anything of her deepest self with Mr. Blake—not ever. Some instinct told her that. Courtesy and gentility and certain shared interests and friends would have taken them through life together quite contentedly. With Lucius she would have to share her very soul—and he his. Nothing else would ever do between them—she had been wrong yesterday about open books. As a very young woman she might have risked opening up to him—indeed she would have welcomed such a prospect. Young people tended to dream of the sort of love and passion that would burn hot and bright throughout a lifetime and even beyond the grave.

Although she was only twenty-three she shrank from the prospect of such a relationship now—and yearned toward it too.

She remembered their night together with sudden, unbidden clarity and closed her eyes.

“I will come to escort you to the music room in twenty minutes’ time,” he said. “It is a concert I have arranged for you, Frances. There will be other performers, but you will be last, as is only fitting. No one would wish to have to follow you. I will leave you alone to compose yourself.”

He crossed the room with long strides, not looking at her. But he paused with his hand on the doorknob.

“If you ask it of me when I return,” he said, “or even now, I will take you home to

Portman Street

. I will find some excuse to make to the guests in the music room. I am endlessly inventive when I need to be.”

He waited, as if for her answer, but she made none. He let himself quietly out of the room and closed the door behind him.

It was a miracle beyond hoping for, Frances supposed, that there would be no one in the music room and ballroom who would recognize her. Strangely, the realization made her feel almost calm—resigned to her fate. There was nothing she could do about it now. She could leave the house, of course—she could do it without even waiting for Lucius’s return. But she knew she would not do that.

The Earl of Edgecombe would be disappointed.

Her great-aunts would be upset and humiliated.

And somewhere deep within her there was a more selfish reason for staying.

A lifelong dream was being painfully reborn.

He had not answered her question about the size of the audience. But he had not needed to. She knew that it must be large. Why else would the panels between the music room and the ballroom have been removed? Even the music room itself was a fair-sized room and must be capable of seating a few dozen people. But it was not large enough for tonight’s audience.

And one member of that large audience was to be Lord Heath. How proud her father would be if he could know that!

The artist in her, the performer who had grown up dreaming of singing in public, yearned to sing tonight regardless of the consequences.

A painter, after all, did not paint a canvas and then cover it with a sheet so that no one would see it. A writer did not write a book and set it on a shelf beneath other books so that no one would ever read it. A householder, as the biblical story would have it, did not light a lamp and set it beneath a basket so that it would give no light to those within the house.

She had not even realized fully during her years of teaching how much she had repressed her natural instinct to sing so that others would hear.

He taught me to reach for the stars and settle for nothing less.

Papa!

Well, tonight she would sing, both for him and for herself.

And tomorrow she would make arrangements to return to Bath.

Lucius’s intention when he left the music room was to creep off to his own room to sulk in private for twenty minutes—or to storm at the four walls in righteous fury. But he had the niggling suspicion that his thoughts would be more than a little disturbing if he went somewhere where he would have nothing else to do but allow them to rattle about in his head and clamor accusingly at him.