IRONICALLY, LARISSA WAS SITTING IN FRONT OF A Christmas tree at the same time that Vincent was. She was also alone, also recalling the decoration of that other tree. This one wasn’t hers and hadn’t been preserved well, was mostly brown now, with pitifully broken branches and a pile of fallen needles beneath it that the servants couldn’t manage to keep up with. It belonged to the Applebees, good friends of her father’s who still lived in Portsmouth. He had taken her and Thomas straightaway there after they’d left Vincent’s town house.

Despite Larissa’s state of shock when they arrived there, it wasn’t lost on her that she hadn’t once considered the Applebees as an option when she had agonized over where to take her brother when they lost their home. She would have thought of them eventually, because they really were very old friends of her father’s, and she had thought of them after she was already moved into Vincent’s house, as well as her many childhood friends in Portsmouth, any one of whom would have opened his or her door to her. But by then she had conveniently ignored their existence for the simple fact that she had wanted to stay in the baron’s home.

Of course, Thomas’s illness had been the deciding factor; at least she had convinced herself of that at the time. It was better for him not to make that long trip to Portsmouth while he still had that lingering fever. But they could have managed it, could have sealed up a coach against drafts and got him there as quickly as possible if it had been necessary. Vincent’s offered hospitality had made it unnecessary. And Larissa’s desire to get to know Vincent better had kept her from considering those other options, even if she hadn’t owned up to that at the time.

They had been staying with the Applebees now for nearly a week. It had taken that long for the shock to wear off completely for Larissa. The knowledge that she had been used in a plot for revenge had utterly crushed her. Everything she had supposed about Vincent Everett had been wrong. She had fallen in love with someone who wasn’t real, who was a complete fake.

Her father had wanted to comfort her, but after her first outburst of tears when he tried, he had decided the best way to help her get over her heartache was to not discuss it at all, which meant not discussing Vincent. She was grateful for that. She really couldn’t bear to talk about him yet, when just thinking about him could start the tears flooding again. But she had been in such a state of despair that she hadn’t done much communicating with her father at all yet.