It was the closest the dowager marchioness had ever come to showing affection, and it all hinged on the falsity of Lettie’s feelings and the prospect of her marriage to a marquess whose plans to surrender his bachelorhood were known by one and all.

Lettie and Caroline’s mother sailed off.

“You can cease with that ridiculous smile now,” Caroline muttered. “She is gone, and you look like you’re holding in a fart.”

Lettie burst out laughing.

“Shh,” her sister whispered frantically, stealing a glance about.

“I-I cannot help it,” Lettie managed around her mirth. “I just did not think you were still in there.”

Caroline frowned. “Do hush. Please,” she entreated.

“I prefer you how you used to be,” Lettie said softly, sadness creeping in. Back then, Caroline had been Lettie’s partner in everything. “Back when we were incorrigible together.”

Incorrigible had long been the family name for them. At one time, Lettie, Rosalind, and Caroline had all reveled in that descriptor.

“Yes, well, I don’t have that luxury anymore, and as such, I can hardly afford to go about playing child’s games and behaving in a way that is anything but proper. I’ve already done that.” Caroline’s eyes grew sad as she wistfully eyed the dancers gliding through the set of the latest waltz. “You should learn from my mistakes.”

As if she felt Lettie’s eyes on her, Caroline schooled her features, quashing that romantic glimmer in her eyes, and a frown fell over her features. “What?”

“You should not listen to Mother,” She waggled her eyebrows. “lest you become her.”

Caroline snorted. “Me, a spinster of nearly twenty-nine years, when our mother was wed at sixteen and had two babes by the time she was my age, an heir and a spare at that, is nothing like her.”

No, she wasn’t. And thank God for that. “Egads!” Lettie recoiled in pretend horror. “Since when has our beloved brother Rhys become ‘the spare’? Now, you sound like Mother.” She lightened that statement with a teasing wink.

Caroline giggled; stifling that hint of mirth behind her gloved hand.

“That’s better,” Lettie said, looping her arm through her sister’s. “Either way, sixteen is entirely too young to wed,” she felt inclined to point out. At that age, she and her sisters had still been playing hide-and-seek at their family’s properties.

Her elder sister winged an eyebrow. “What about seventeen?”

“Still too—”

Caroline continued over her, “Eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two—”

“Your point has been—”

“Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, and twenty-.”

“—made,” Lettie muttered over that interruption.

“You would do well and be wise to allow Mother to help you along.”

“Help me along?” she mouthed.

“Do you want to find yourself a poor relation, dependent upon our elder brothers’ magnanimity? I, for one, do not but I have no other choice.”