If Geoff had had his way, he would have shown up at Mary's door, hat in hand, and endured the requisite interview with her father, the one that began "I assure you, it is my every intention to make your daughter happy," and ended with an announcement in The Times. Then he would have ridden out to Gloucestershire to endure a decidedly less businesslike—even if just as predictable—meeting with his mother, who tended to regard her only surviving child with the same sort of proprietary air that Bonaparte felt for most of Europe. He knew his mother would cut up stiff about his engagement, with a gale of recriminations that would make her tantrums upon being told that Geoff was going to France look like a pleasant afternoon's tea party. It was, reflected Geoff, rather like the challenges tossed before heroes in old storybooks. If he could weather a full week of his mother's vapors, he would have more than earned his princess.

But on Friday, just as Geoff's valet had been loading his trunks into his curricle in preparation for a weekend house party in Sussex, Mary had sent him a note with "urgent" underscored four times. Fearing the worst, Geoff told the groom to unhitch the horses, ordered the trunks placed back in his dressing room, and rushed off to meet Mary in the appointed place in the park.

With her well-bribed maid standing a circumspect three trees away, Mary had tearfully informed him that All Was Lost.

"Sweetheart, don't fret," said Geoff, who had never learned to think in capital letters. "Surely it can't be as bad as all that."

Mary hastily averted her eyes, her entire form drooping like a wilted tulip. "No—it's worse!"

After a great deal of coaxing, Geoff had succeeded in persuading Mary to remove her hands from her face and tell him, as Mary put it, the Terrible Truth. Her parents, she explained, wished to marry her off forthwith.

"That is rather the point of the marriage market," commented Geoff with a hint of amusement. "And if that's your parents' goal, I'm sure we can satisfy them on that score."

"You wish to marry me?"

"Surely you can't be under any doubt," said Geoff fondly, thinking of how lovely she was, and what a miracle it was that she should be so unaware of her own powers.

Mary's dark lashes veiled her eyes. "But what about your mother? I have no family, no fortune…. What if she objects?"

There was no "if" about it. Snobbery vied with hypochondria for preeminence as his mother's favorite pastime. She would take noisily to her bed, threatening imminent demise. When that failed, she would set a cry that would be heard all the way from Gloucestershire to London, and probably as far north as Edinburgh. His mother, when she forgot her delicate condition and failing nerves (or was it her failing condition and delicate nerves? Geoff had never been quite clear on that point), revealed the possession of a set of lungs that would be the envy of any Master of the Hounds.

"She can object," replied Geoff practically, "but there's not much else she can do about it."

"Oh, if only we could be married at once!" Mary wrung her gloved hands. "You say you love me now, but there will be talk…and your mother…How can I be sure that you won't forsake me?"

With a crooked smile, Geoff lightly touched her hand. "Trust me. There's not much danger of that."

Mary paced two rapid steps away from him and came to an abrupt stop, her finely boned back quivering with emotion through the film of blue muslin. "I couldn't bear it! Not after…" Her voice failed her.

Geoff's smile faded. Bounding after her, he possessed himself of both her hands, asking earnestly, "What proof of my devotion can I offer? How can I convince you how highly I honor and esteem you?"

Her only answer was a muffled sob and an emphatic shake of her bonneted head. One perfect tear trickled down the sculpted loveliness of her cheek.

Geoff did what any sensible man would do when confronted with a weeping woman. He began promising things. Anything. Just so long as she would smile again. A phoenix feather from the farthest end of the earth, John the Baptist's head on a platter, jewels, furs, rotten boroughs, just so long as she would consent to stop crying.

And so it was that Geoff found himself staggering back to Pinchingdale House through the twilight, having promised a beaming Mary that he would present himself at her door—or, at least, somewhere beneath her bedroom window—in two nights' time, with a speedy traveling coach, a special license, and a set of matched rings. In that same bemused daze, he had canceled his trip to Sussex, postponed all his engagements for the next two weeks, and rousted out a tame parson who was more than willing to conduct a midnight wedding ceremony so Geoff and Mary could set off into the sunrise as man and wife.

He might not like the idea of an elopement, but if the end result meant that his goddess was going to be his wife, Geoff wasn't going to tempt fate by being too persnickety about the means.

As he clattered down Kingsway toward Holborn, passing shuttered shops and the odd drunken dandy straggling away from the pleasures of Covent Garden, Geoff spotted a familiar vehicle lumbering away up ahead. The family coach might not have much to recommend it in the way of speed, but it was outdated enough as to have become easily recognizable. Geoff would have spurred his horse on, but the cobbles were slick with a recent rain and the effluvia from dozens of windows, so he was forced, instead, to keep to a responsible trot as he gradually closed the distance.

He caught the coach up just as it pulled into the forecourt of the Oxford Arms. Flinging his reins to a sleepy ostler, Geoff vaulted off his horse, and, without waiting for the postboy to unfold the steps, or even for MacTavish to bring the carriage to a full stop, he wrenched open the door, every nerve fired by clear, pure joy—stronger than brandy in his blood. Every inch of his skin, every bone in his body, felt intensely alive, thrumming with an imperative that went straight back to the Garden of Eden.

When the door of the coach racketed open beneath his hand and he saw the vague outline of a cloaked figure for him within, Geoff acted on pure instinct.

He grasped her by the shoulders and scooped her eagerly into his embrace.

Chapter Three

The moment was everything Geoff had known it would be.

After an initial startled gasp, his intended bride dissolved into his arms, returning his kiss with more fervor than she had ever shown before. They were on the verge of being married, after all. Amazing what a difference imminent vows could make.

Her hands, originally poised against his chest as though to push him back, slid slowly up to his shoulders and stayed there, as her head tilted back, her lips matched to his. Warm and soft beneath the voluminous folds of her cloak, she fit perfectly into his arms. The dark interior of the carriage closed around them like the velvet lining of a jewel box, blotting out the inn behind them, the unfortunate scents of the courtyard, and the very passage of time.

It was quite some time before it began to dawn on Geoff that she might be just a bit too soft. The arms encircling his neck were a little rounder than he remembered them, and her shoulder blades seemed to have receded. Geoff's hand made another tentative pass up and down her back, without breaking the kiss. Yes, definitely smoother. It might just be the added padding of the cloak, but other discordant details were beginning to intrude upon Geoff's clouded senses. Her fragrance was all wrong, not Mary's treasured French perfume, but something fainter, lighter, that made him think without quite knowing why of the park at Sibley Court in summer. It was a perfectly pleasant scent, but it wasn't Mary's.

He was kissing the wrong woman.

In the sudden rush of clarity, Geoff arrived at another painful realization. The roaring noise he had been hearing, which he had cheerfully ascribed to the pounding of his blood in the heat of the moment, wasn't coming from within at all. Someone was actually roaring, and not far away. The roar had a decidedly jeering quality to it, and it was coming from right behind him. Whoever it might be was clearly having a rousing, roistering good time—at Geoff's expense.

Stiff with horror, Geoff pulled away, breaking the kiss with an audible pop. He could hear the woman in his arms, the woman who wasn't Mary, draw in a ragged breath, as if she were just as shocked as he.

Devil take it, whom had he been kissing?

"Nice work, Pinchingdale!" called a voice behind him, and Geoff swung around, still poised on the brink of the carriage, to see Martin Frobisher saluting him in a gesture of exaggerated approbation. "I give that at least three minutes without coming up for air, don't you, Ponsonby?"

As inebriated as his companion and slower on the uptake under any circumstances, Percy Ponsonby stumbled into the small circle of light cast by the carriage lamps and peered owlishly at the woman behind Geoff. "I say, Pinchingdale, what's all this?"

All this was very clearly not Mary Alsworthy.

The woman so recently entangled with Geoff yanked back with enough force that her hood slipped back, revealing a confusion of ginger-colored hair that glinted like a fuzzy halo where the light struck the individual strands. It could not have been farther from Mary's sleek fall of black hair, which ran silver and blue in the candlelight like a midnight stream. Mary's eyes were delicately tilted at the corners; this woman's were perfect rounds of shock, primrose to Mary's sapphire. The only similarity lay in the lips, full and generous—though some more generous than others. Mary had never responded like that.

"Well, well, well," said Martin Frobisher, rolling the word over his tongue like a fine port. "Well, well, well."

Once he found a syllable he liked, he stuck with it till the bitter end. At least, Geoff was feeling bitter, not to mention decidedly unwell.

He had just been kissing his future sister-in-law. With considerable relish. That undoubtedly counted as incest under an obscure ecclesiastical law dating to the early years of the Reformation, complete with a punishment involving a sack, a beehive, and a large pot of honey.

In his preoccupation with incest, Geoff realized he had completely missed a crucial step. What was Mary's little sister doing in his carriage in the first place? He felt rather as though someone had just whacked him over the head with a very thick plank. Nothing made sense and the world was still spinning.

"If it isn't little Letty Alsworthy," continued Frobisher, looking like the cat who had gotten the canary that had fallen into the cream pot.

Letty Alsworthy very rapidly snatched her hood up over her head. "No, it isn't," she trilled from the depths, in a palpably false fluting soprano. "Can't you see it's Mary, you silly, silly man?"

Percy might be dim, but even he wasn't that dim. He crossed his arms over his chest, peered into the carriage, and said, "No, you're not."

"How can you be so sure? It's dark."

For a moment, Percy wavered, swayed by the obvious truth of that last statement. He shook his head. "You're still Letty. Can't fool me there. They don't look a'tall alike, do they, Pinchingdale?"

"No," said Geoff grimly, "they don't."

One would have thought he might have noticed that before he swept her into his arms. But it had all happened so quickly…. One moment he was at the door, the next his arms were around her, and after that, he didn't remember much at all.

At least, he was trying very hard not to remember. If he could, he would scrape his mind clear with sand, obliterate from his memory the way the swell of her chest had felt pressed against his, the curve of her waist beneath his arm, the arch of her neck as his hand had stroked upward into her hair. None of that, he told himself firmly, had ever happened. It wasn't allowed to have happened.

Unfortunately, there were witnesses willing to attest that it had.

"Well, well, well." Geoff could learn to hate that word. Despite being somewhat wobbly on his feet, Frobisher still managed to direct a creditable smirk at Geoff before stumbling into Percy. "Caught by the oldest trick in the book."

"I say, Frobbers, that can't be right." Slinging an arm around his friend, Percy blinked sagely. "What about that trick played by those Greek chappies—something about a horse…" Percy subsided into academic reflection.