Her brother didn’t look up, but she saw a pulse beating in his forehead. “Indeed?” he said flatly.

Another person might have thought that he had lost interest in the woman, but Lydia knew Giles. His lips had tightened. In fact, he looked so forbidding that she actually felt a bit nervous. But after all, she was merely noting what was written in the newspaper.

“Here,” she said, handing over the sheet. “You can read it for yourself. I have a hundred things to do before tomorrow morning!” And with that, she left.

The next morning, she confiscated one final letter addressed to Yasmin, her last-ditch effort to save her brother from a terrible marriage.

There is only so much you can do for a person. She pitied Giles; she truly did. She had done her best, and she would marry Rupert with a clear conscience. Her father would have been proud of her efforts. The late earl may have been weak and light-fingered as a youth, but he would have hated to see his son repeat his marital mistakes.

The next morning, she walked slowly down the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral, her hand tucked under her brother’s elbow. She caught sight of two girls who had tormented her at school and sailed past them with a bright smile.

She would be a marchioness, whereas neither of them had found a husband. No one had murmured a word about her father’s thefts in months, and no one had discovered that she was fathered by a footman.

When she was Lady Pettigrew, no one would even wonder about her birth.

At the end of the aisle, Rupert turned around to meet her, his brown eyes rather anxious. He had a strange likeness to a basset hound, but she smiled at him, anyway.

He was a sweet man, and they both liked dogs, and that would be good enough.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

A broken heart is a stark kind of pain. In Yasmin’s case, it didn’t make her burst into gales of tears, or write ranting letters, or have the slightest impulse to tell anyone.

After his first letter, Giles had never written again. Of course, he was busy. Likely, he was irritated at her. Perhaps he hated her. Unquestionably, he agreed with her first letter, breaking off their engagement.

It felt as if a shard of glass lodged deeper in her heart as the days went by. She’d walk around a corner and discover Cleo in her husband’s arms. The shard would shift, sending pain streaking through her chest. She had been certain Giles would respond to her letter about Hippolyte, but every day that passed without mail, the shard gouged again.

Finally, she wrote him a last letter . . . that letter. The one saying she loved him.

She didn’t send it through the post, because she kept worrying that perhaps her other letters had been lost in the post. Instead, she dispatched one of Jake’s grooms all the way to London. He reported that he had handed the letter to the Earl of Lilford’s butler, who promised it would be waiting when His Lordship returned from Parliament.