Thomasina nodded, but by this point she really didn’t care about her sister’s plan. All she cared about was that she had agreed to this foolish notion. And that tonight, even for a moment, she would be Harcourt’s. Tonight, just for a little while, he would be hers.

Chapter 2

Jasper Percival Stephen Kincaid, Earl of Harcourt, stood by the side of the ballroom floor feeling decidedly out of sorts. But then, that was his constant state and had been since a year before, when he had taken the title after the tragic death of his half-brother. A year before when the consequences of his father’s and brother’s bad behavior had become painfully and pointedly clear to him.

He was left cleaning up the mess. And this was how one did it. By standing to the side, watching the ball to celebrate his engagement dance by and trying to remember how to smile so no one would see his misery in the act.

“Small steps,” he muttered to himself as he thrust his shoulders back.

“Miss Anne Shelley,” his footman intoned, and the party stopped spinning as his fiancée entered the ball honoring her and their future nuptials. He set his jaw as he watched her enter to a smattering of applause.

She wore a stunning gown. It was red, because of course it was. Anne Shelley had never done anything by half. It had a low neckline trimmed in golden swirls of thread and would have been the exact kind of scandal he was trying to avoid at all costs but for another strip of gold fabric between her breasts that kept the world from seeing everything. Her dark blonde hair was bound up high on the crown of her head, with perfect ringlet curls falling from the mound to create an illusion of being tousled.

She was lovely, of course. And she did nothing for him. She never had and he accepted that. Reluctantly.

Only as she lifted her face toward the crowd’s adulation and subsequently in his direction, he realized something in a heartbeat. Despite the fact that she had been introduced as Anne Shelley, despite not correcting that notion nor denying the greetings of those around her…it was not Anne who stood at the entryway to the ballroom.

It was Thomasina Shelley, youngest of the Shelley triplets. The only one of the three Jasper could immediately identify the moment the sisters entered the room. He had no idea why he could pick her from the threesome and not his fiancée or the other sister, Juliana. He had no idea why he sometimes found himself watching her as she read or talked or danced or just moved through the world.

He certainly had no idea why she was gliding though his ballroom, a look of tension on her lovely face, and pretending to be Anne at this, the last of their engagement balls.

But despite not knowing, he couldn’t help a stir in his chest. Something that said life was suddenly much more interesting.