Sophie looked up at him, her blue eyes so dark as to look almost black. For a moment Patrick was startled by the enormous reserve he glimpsed in them. He drew her to him and lowered his head. Sophie rested passively against his chest, her lips cool and unresponsive.

Oh hell, Patrick thought to himself. He needed to coax a romantic kiss from Sophie’s lips in order to emphasize the idea that true love had dictated their brief engagement. He slid his large hands up her back and drew her more sharply to him, his lips demanding. Then suddenly Sophie’s lips softened and she melted against him, her breath a caress that set his blood on fire. Patrick’s head swam and his body turned to flame as a surge of heat rushed up the back of his neck.

As they drew apart, husband and wife looked at each other for a moment. Patrick was shocked, his breath coming fast, his body urgently aware of every facet of Sophie’s body. Sophie was aware only of the wanton way she had pressed against Patrick. Had anyone been able to see her knees buckle?

There was a little rustle in the chapel. Members of the ton were used to couples who turned briskly and trotted down the aisle together to the sound of trumpets, couples who wasted little time looking at each other.

“Oh my, I could almost think that it was a love match,” Lady Penelope Luster said to her best friend. “Just look at the way he’s looking at her! It’s enough to make me swoon, I do declare.”

“Oh, don’t be such a widgeon, Penelope,” her companion replied, in a whistling half-shriek. “That’s the same look he was giving her when I found them together at my ball a month or so ago, and let me tell you, that look has nothing to do with love! You wouldn’t know, since you were never married.”

Penelope shot her friend a look of near hatred. What did Sarah Prestlefield know of “looks”? She was a stout dowager of fifty-some and Penelope would eat her hat if Lord Prestlefield had ever looked at Sarah the way in which Patrick Foakes had just looked at his new wife. “I don’t care what you say, Sarah,” Penelope stated. “They appear the most romantic couple in the world to me.”

Lady Prestlefield turned up her nose in a gesture of patent disbelief.

“I’ll tell you something, Sarah,” Penelope persisted. “Only a slow-top would think that any woman in her right mind would choose Slaslow over Patrick Foakes.”

Sarah cast her another long-suffering look. “You’re a fool, Penelope,” she said shortly. “Slaslow is an earl. No woman in her right mind would turn him down for a younger brother, no matter how rich Foakes is.”