Gray’s brother and sister adored the annual regatta, and since he had recovered from his bout with malaria, he had no excuse to avoid it. Besides, he desperately needed the opportunity to start guiding Caroline and Luke toward a more responsible life. The twins were the product of his father’s second marriage, and they’d been so young when Gray’s responsibilities took him abroad that it seemed each time he returned to America, they were an inch taller and a mile more reckless. He’d recently caught Caroline smoking cigarettes on the roof of their house with some of her disreputable city friends, and last week he’d had to bail Luke out of jail for drunkenness.

The hardest thing when he first went overseas was leaving Caroline and Luke behind, for during their early years, it was as though they were his own children. He was twelve when the twins were born, and he guided their first steps, bandaged their skinned knees, and taught them to read. He loved them down to the marrow of his bones, but they had both grown wild, and he didn’t know what to do about them. At twenty-eight, it seemed the only thing Luke truly loved was boat racing, so Gray would dutifully watch his brother compete in this afternoon’s double-scull races.

“Oh, look, there is the Secretary of the Treasury and his wife,” Caroline said as she nodded toward an older couple holding court near the refreshment stand. “Would you like me to introduce you?”

Gray looked at his pocket watch. “Luke’s race begins in five minutes.”

“Bah!” Caroline said. “No one is here to watch the races. This is an opportunity to see and be seen.” She smiled at each couple they passed on the promenade.

The society pages had dubbed Caroline “the Contessa” for the way she effortlessly captured the attention of a crowd. She was the cream of high society: beautiful, flirtatious, and wickedly charming. She was also completely useless. If the world needed a tea party, Caroline would outshine every hostess on the Eastern Seaboard. For anything else, she knew how to summon her maid.

Caroline steered him toward the group of fashionable people near the refreshment stand, but an old acquaintance intercepted them.

“Mr. Delacroix, I’m sorry to hear of your father’s passing,” the middle-aged gentleman said. “Nicholas Delacroix was truly one of our finest.”

“He was indeed,” Gray said. “Thank you for your kind words.”

His father had died six months ago, but the pain was still raw. Gray had been in Ceylon when news of his father’s stroke reached him. He took the fastest steamship home but still arrived the day after Nicholas breathed his last. On that day Gray lost his mentor, his business partner, and the best man he’d ever known.