“He kissed you?” Juliana gasped, leaning forward. “When, where?”

“A few times since Anne left,” Thomasina said. “And I liked it. Very much.”

Juliana seemed to ponder that a moment. “I’m surprised. Anne always talked about how cold Lord Harcourt was, how distant. I didn’t think he could be passionate in any way.”

A sudden desire to defend Jasper rose up in her, but Thomasina tamped it down. There was no reason to reveal her growing attachment to Juliana, who would surely only point out the foolishness of it all. Rightly so, perhaps.

“I think they were not a good match,” she said instead. “And maybe he and I could be a better one. At any rate, this is happening almost right this moment and I am…I must be…content with the outcome.”

Juliana stepped forward as Thomasina got to her feet, and together they looked in the mirror. They were parallel images of each other, but for Thomasina’s pretty wedding dress. The only remnant of Anne. Anne, who she ached for on this most important of days.

“I worry about you as much as I do her,” Juliana mused. “But if you claim you could be happy with this man, I will do anything in my power to ensure you will be.”

“I know you will, you always fix things,” Thomasina reassured her.

Juliana’s smile faltered and she turned toward the door. “We should go down, I’m certain they are waiting for us. For you, really. It’s time.”

Thomasina’s heart leapt at those two words, which held so much power. It was time. Time to surrender the name Shelley and take the title of Harcourt. Time to give herself over to a man who confused and confounded her. Time to become his wife and then his lover.

It was time to start the new chapter in her life.

Jasper held out a glass of champagne to his mother and tried not to contemplate the cost of such an extravagance. Shelley was paying for it, so he supposed he should just enjoy it, but he couldn’t help trying to track it in the ledger that always ran in his mind.

“And so you are married,” Lady Harcourt said. “Which makes me the dowager.”

“It does,” he said, focusing his attention back on her. His mother was dressed beautifully, not a hair out of place, looking the part of mother of the groom. Except she didn’t smile. She never smiled. “I hope you are not unhappy with that outcome.”

She shrugged and stared off into the crowd without any emotion on her face. Jasper frowned. He was doing all this partly for her, to make up for the shame she had been forced to carry both by her husband and by his firstborn son. And yet nothing Jasper did ever seemed to help her. Change her. Please her.

But somehow he still tried. And tried. And tried. It had always been that way, for as long as he remembered. His father had tried to talk to him about it once. Tried to steer him away from, as he had called it, dancing to her tune. They’d had a row, of course.