She dimpled at him. “I’m much more farsighted than you. Why I could read the sign for the blacksmith’s shop we went to yesterday long before you.”

Geoffrey converted a snicker into a cough. Dare eyed him coldly. “Nonetheless, madam, you will do as I ask.”

“Why?” Charlotte asked, looking around him to study the young man. “Is there something about your cousin that would prohibit him from being introduced to me?”

“Ha!” laughed Collins.

Dare grabbed his wife and tried again to shove her in the other direction. She remained unshoveable. “Charlotte—”

“Is he not nice to know?”

“If you want to know the truth, sister dear—”

“—for once, would you please just do as I ask—”

“Is he riddled with vices or poor manners?”

“—the young man before you, your husband’s cousin—”

“—without making a hissing about it?”

“Is he a ravisher of young maidens, a seducer of innocents, a lascivious smutmonger tainted with all sorts of evil humors?”

“—his long-lost cousin, the cousin your husband clearly thought was dead, but he’s not, and as that is so—”

Dare grabbed his wife and bodily forced her toward the group of people surrounding his sister. “Wife, I insist that you leave us now!”

“Is he a bad man?” she said, peering over her shoulder at her brother and Geoffrey.

Collins puffed his chest out and bellowed the last few words. “—he is rightfully the Earl of Carlisle, not your husband.”

Dare’s fists tightened to hard bands around his wife’s arms. Damn Collins! Damn both of them! If the man was who he said he was—and Dare would be making sure the bounder had proof of his identity—then Collins was right. His cousin was the heir to the title and lands, not him. He didn’t give a rat’s arse about the title—it was an empty honor, saddled as it was with mountainous debts—but he knew that Charlotte set a great store by it.

“I wanted to tell you privately,” he said quietly in her ear, his hand slipping up to caress the back of her neck. She had frozen at her brother’s words, staring at the earl in wordless horror, the pronouncement echoing loudly through the room. A pregnant silence filled the air for a moment, then whispered exclamations swelled to a crescendo as the crème of Society turned to each other with glee to discuss the latest scandal, one that had unfolded so deliciously before them.

Life, Dare decided as his wife turned eyes wide with pain and disbelief upon him, could not get much worse if it tried.

Twelve

Charlotte sat huddled in her bedchamber, staring with unseeing eyes at the fire burning in the grate.

She wasn’t a countess anymore.

The events of the day played through her head with the regularity of the clockwork bird she had been given for her seventh birthday. The beauty and joy of Patricia’s wedding, the tedium and trial of the wedding breakfast, Matthew’s arrival and subsequent pronouncement, the agonizing hour that followed, during which she had to stand before the knowing eyes of the ton, stripped of everything that mattered to her, the embarrassment and shame so great it was almost unbearable, and finally, the relief of seeing Patricia and her new husband off so she could return home and crumple up in despair.