Lucien Boch greeted her smilingly. Lucien was one of her favorite beaux. Even so, Sophie looked at him with guarded coolness. After all, it was Lucien’s sister who was making a peagoose of herself by hanging on Patrick’s arm.

“Woe is me!” Lucien said, his black eyes snapping with charm. “Somehow I have fallen into the bad graces of my favorite Englishwoman. Tell me it is not due to your up-coming marriage, Lady Sophie! My heart will always be at your feet … marriage or no.”

Despite herself, Sophie found she was smiling at his nonsense.

Lucien leaned closer, his French accent making his words whimsically seductive. “I must tell you, Lady Sophie, that a true Frenchman would never allow a paltry thing like marriage lines to prevent him from laying his heart at his true love’s door. No indeed.”

“I am sure you would not,” Sophie replied with a laugh. “But we who are only half-French … alas, we find ourselves bound by convention.”

“What a loss,” Lucien said mournfully. “At the very least, my dear lady, you must promise that I may remain your chevalier after you become a countess. I shall—” Whatever extravagant gesture Lucien was about to promise was interrupted by Charlotte, who clapped her hands sharply.

“Hear ye, hear ye,” she said gaily. “Let’s have an old-fashioned game before we finish the evening, shall we? I suggest that we play one game of hide-and-seek, or shall we play blindman’s buff?”

“Hide-and-seek!” cried the young ladies.

“Hide-and-seek it is,” Charlotte said. She opened her hand to show a long scarf of silky purple. “Lady Sophie is ‘it,’ since this party is in her honor. Whoever finds Lady Sophie may take the scarf, and then that person becomes ‘it.’ The only rule is that you must answer honestly if someone asks you whether you have the scarf.”

There were only a few objections and questions, and Charlotte had to reexplain the new twist in the rules—the addition of the scarf—but she could tell that eyes were brightening. The possibilities for dalliance during this game were endless, as anyone could tell. At Charlotte’s quick instruction, footmen picked up the lighted torches and deposited them around the winding paths of the garden, making it look like a twinkling starry patch of night.

Before Sophie had time to think, Charlotte swooped down on her and wound the scarf around her neck. “Go to the summerhouse!” Charlotte whispered, and gave Sophie a push toward the edge of the terrace. Sophie ran mindlessly down a garden path.

She felt miserable, really miserable. What if Charlotte was right to insist that marrying Braddon was a bad idea? Sophie found the summerhouse and sank onto a white bench, grateful for the moment of silence. In the distance she could faintly hear Charlotte’s high, clear voice counting to one hundred.

No, marrying Braddon was the right thing to do. Because if she was clear-headed about the evening, it was not Braddon’s disinclination to kiss her—who really cared anyway?—but Patrick’s flirtation with Daphne Boch that was making her stomach twist into miserable knots. And burning jealousy was precisely the emotion that she planned to avoid by marrying Braddon.