“But it is an impossibility,” Gwen said. “He has no real patience with the upper classes even though some of his dearest friends are aristocrats. He thinks us a frivolous, idle lot. He is middle-class and proud of it. And why should he not be? There is nothing inherently superior about us, is there? But I am not sure I could be the wife of a businessman, even a wealthy and successful one. Besides, there is a darkness in his soul, and I do not want to have to live with that again.”

“Again?” Lauren repeated softly.

Gwen looked down at her hands once more and said nothing.

“I am not saying another word,” Lauren said, “until you start at the beginning and tell me the whole story.”

Gwen told her everything.

And, strangely, they ended up convulsed with laughter over the way he had bungled his marriage proposal earlier by giving the impression that his only reason for asking her was so that his sister might attend a ton ball.

“I suppose,” Lauren said, drying her eyes, “you will be taking her to a ball?”

“I will,” Gwen said.

“It is a good thing I am still firmly in love with Kit,” Lauren said. “If I were not, I believe I might be falling a little in love with Lord Trentham myself.”

“We had better go back upstairs to the drawing room,” Gwen said, getting to her feet. “I suppose everyone had plenty more to say after I left. Wilma, for example.”

“Well,” Lauren said, following her out of the room, “you know Wilma. Every family has some cross to bear.”

They laughed again and Lauren linked an arm through Gwen’s.

The letter arrived more than two weeks later.

It had been an endless fortnight.

Hugo had thrown himself headlong into work. And he was reminded of how he had never been able to do things by halves. When he was a boy, he had spent every spare moment with his father, learning everything he possibly could about the businesses and developing ideas of his own, some of which his father had actually implemented. And when he had taken his commission, he had worked tirelessly to achieve his goal of becoming a general—perhaps the youngest in the army. He might have got there too if he had not first gone out of his head.

Now he was owner of the businesses, and he was immersed in the running of them, though part of him longed to be back at Crosslands, where he had lived an entirely different sort of life, not driven either by the demands of work or by the press of ambition.

He took Constance out walking or driving or shopping or to the library almost every day. He continued to take her calling upon their relatives too. He took her to a party at a cousin’s home one evening, and she promptly acquired two potential beaux, both of them respectable and personable enough, though Constance on the way home pronounced one to be a prosy bore and the other a boastful bore. It was just as well she did not wish to encourage them as Hugo had found his fingers itching all evening to plant them both a facer.

He did not tell her about his visit to Newbury Abbey or its outcome. He did not wish to raise her hopes only to have them dashed again if no letter ever arrived. Though even if Lady Muir did not carry through on her promise, of course, then he was going to have to carry through on his. He had promised to take his sister to a ton ball.

He must know a few ex-officers who had not been hostile to him and who also happened to be in London. And George had said he was coming to town sometime soon. Flavian and Ralph sometimes came during the spring. There must be some way of wangling an invitation, even if it was only to one of the less popular ton balls of the Season, one to which the hostess would welcome anyone willing to attend short of her chimney sweep.

He kept his distance from Fiona as much as he could during those two weeks. She was very unhappy to be left alone so often, but she refused to go out with her daughter and stepson. She had long ago broken off all communication with her own family, though Hugo knew that his father had gone to the trouble of raising her parents and her brother and sister out of grinding poverty. He had bought a small house for them and set them up in the grocery shop beneath it. They had managed the shop well and made a decent living out of it. But Fiona would have nothing to do with them. Neither would she consort with her husband’s relatives, who looked down upon her and treated her with contempt, she claimed, though Hugo had never seen any evidence of it.

She chose to remain at home now and wallow in her imaginary ailments. Or perhaps some of them were real. It was impossible to know for sure.

She fawned upon him when Constance was present. She whined at him on the few occasions when they were alone. She was lonely and neglected and he hated her, she claimed. It had been a different story when she had been young and beautiful. He had not hated her then.

He had.

But then he had been a boy, clever at his schoolwork and astute in business, but naïve and gauche when it came to more personal matters. Fiona, dissatisfied with the wealthy, hardworking, adoring husband who worked long hours and was many years her senior, had fancied her young stepson as he grew closer to manhood and set out to seduce him. She had almost succeeded too, just before his eighteenth birthday. It had happened on an evening when his father was out and she had sat beside Hugo on the love seat in the sitting room and rubbed her hand over his chest while she told him some tale to which he could not even listen. And the hand had slid lower until it had no lower to go.

He had hardened into full arousal, and she had laughed softly and closed her hand about his erection over his clothing.

He had been upstairs in his room less than one minute later, dealing with the erection for himself and crying at the same time.

The next morning he had been in his father’s office early, demanding that his father purchase a commission for him in an infantry regiment. Nothing would change his mind, he had declared. It was his lifelong ambition to go into the military, and he could suppress it no longer. If his father refused to make the purchase, then Hugo would go and take the king’s shilling and enlist in the ranks.

He had broken his father’s heart. His own too, actually.

He was no longer a naïve, gauche boy.

“Of course you are lonely, Fiona,” he said. “My father has been gone longer than a year. And of course you feel neglected. He is dead. But your year of mourning is over, you know, and difficult as it may be, you need to get out into the world again. You are still young. You still have your looks. You are wealthy. You can remain here, wallowing in self-pity and making a companion of your pills and your hartshorn. Or you can begin a new life.”

She was weeping silently, making no attempt to dry her tears or cover her face.

“You are hard-hearted, Hugo,” she said. “You used not to be. You loved me once until your father discovered it and sent you away.”

“I went away at my own insistence,” he said brutally. “I never loved you, Fiona. You were and are my stepmother. My father’s wife. I would have been fond of you if you had allowed it. You did not.”

He turned on his heel and left the room.

How different his life would have been if she had been content with his affection after her marriage to his father. But there was no point in such thoughts or in imagining what that other life might have been. It might have been worse. Or better. But it did not exist. That other life had never been lived.

Life was made up of choices, all of which, even the smallest, made all the difference to the rest of one’s life.

The letter came a little after two weeks following his return to London from Dorsetshire.

Lady Muir was at Kilbourne House on Grosvenor Square, the letter announced, and would be pleased if Lord Trentham and Miss Emes would call upon her there at two o’clock in the afternoon two days hence.

Hugo foolishly turned the page over to make sure there was nothing else written on the back of it. It was just a formal little note with not a breath of anything personal in it.

What had he expected? A declaration of undying passion?

She had invited him to court her.

That was a thought that needed some examination. He was to court her. With no guarantee of success. He might try his damnedest all spring and then go down on one knee and offer her a perfect red rose and some flowery proposal of marriage only to be rejected.

Again.

Was he willing to expend that much energy only to end up making an ass of himself? Did he really want her to marry him? There was a lot else to marriage and to life than what happened between the sheets. And, as she herself had pointed out, one could not give marriage a try. One either married or one did not. Either way, one lived with the consequences.

It would probably … No, it would undoubtedly be better to err on the side of caution and not court her at all. Or ever again offer her marriage. But when had he ever been a cautious man? When had he ever resisted a challenge merely because he might fail? When had he ever entertained the possibility of failure?

He ought not to marry her—even assuming she gave him the chance. And if she helped Constance during the spring and took her to a couple of balls, and if by some miracle his sister met someone with whom she could be happy and secure, then he would not need to marry Gwendoline or anyone else. He could go home in the summer with a clear conscience to his three functioning rooms in a large mansion and his barren, spacious park and his own scintillating company.

Except that he had more or less promised his father that when the time came he would pass the business empire on to a son of his own. He needed to marry if that son were ever to be more than a figment of his imagination.

Arrgghh!

Constance had joined him at the breakfast table. She kissed his cheek, bade him a good morning, and sat down at her place.

He set the letter, open, beside his plate.

“I have heard from a friend,” he said. “She has just arrived in London and has invited me to call upon her and to bring you with me.”

“She?” Constance looked up from her toast, which she was spreading with marmalade, and smiled impishly at him.

“Lady Muir,” he said, “sister of the Earl of Kilbourne. I met her earlier in the year when I was staying in Cornwall. She is at Kilbourne House on Grosvenor Square.”

She was gazing at him, saucer-eyed.

“Lady Muir?” she said. “Grosvenor Square? And she wants me to call there with you?”

“That is what she says,” he said, picking up the letter and handing it to her.

She read it, her toast forgotten, her mouth slightly open, her eyes still wide with amazement. She read it again. And she looked up at him.

“Oh, Hugo,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “Oh, Hugo.”

He guessed that she wanted to go.

Lauren was at Kilbourne House on the afternoon when Gwen had invited Lord Trentham to call with his sister. She had begged to be allowed to be there for the occasion. Gwen’s mother and Lily were at home too. They had wanted Gwen to accompany them on a visit to Elizabeth, Duchess of Portfrey, and she had felt obliged to admit that she was expecting callers. She could hardly then withhold the names of those visitors.

She would much rather have had only Lauren for company. Oh, and perhaps Lily too—Lily had been absurdly disappointed to hear that Gwen had refused Lord Trentham and that he had gone away without another word. She had seen him as a romantic as well as heroic figure and had hoped he would be the one to sweep Gwen off her feet.

Gwen’s mother looked puzzled and a little troubled when she learned who the visitors were. Lily, on the other hand, regarded her sister-in-law with bright, speculative eyes but made no comment.

“It was only civil to invite them to call, Mama,” Gwen explained. “Lord Trentham did save me from what could have been a very nasty fate when I was staying with Vera in Cornwall, after all.”

The four of them sat in the drawing room as the appointed hour approached, looking out upon bright sunshine, and Gwen wondered if her visitors would come or not—and whether she wanted them to come.

They came, almost exactly upon the dot of two.

“Lord Trentham and Miss Emes,” the butler announced, and they stepped into the room.

Miss Emes was as different from her brother as it was possible to be. She was of medium height but very slender. She was blond and fair-complexioned and had light blue eyes, which were as wide as saucers now. Poor girl, it must be a horrid shock to her to find herself confronting four ladies when she had expected one. She stood very close to her brother’s side and looked as if she would hide behind him if he had not had her arm very firmly tucked beneath his own.