Sarah chuckled and reached out to take what was left of her cake. Frances had made significant progress on the icing. Hugh started to tell her to take his; he’d already had a piece back when he’d been watching her dance. But with his leg on the table, he couldn’t bend forward enough to slide his plate in front of hers.

So he just watched as she took a bite and listened while Frances chattered on about nothing in particular. He felt remarkably content, and he might have even closed his eyes briefly, until he heard Frances say:

“You’ve got a bit of icing.”

He opened his eyes.

“Right here,” Frances was saying to Sarah, motioning to her own mouth.

There were no napkins; Frances hadn’t thought to bring them. Sarah’s tongue darted out of her mouth and licked the corner of her lips.

Her tongue. Her lips.

His downfall.

Hugh yanked his foot off the table and came awkwardly to his feet.

“Is something wrong?” Sarah asked.

“Please give my apologies to Lady Chatteris,” he said stiffly. “I know she wanted me to wait for her, but I really do need to rest my leg.”

Sarah blinked with confusion. “Weren’t you just—”

“It’s different,” he interrupted, even thought it wasn’t, really.

“Oh,” she said, and it was a very ambiguous oh. She could have been surprised or delighted or even disappointed. He couldn’t hear the difference. And the truth was, he shouldn’t want to be able to hear it, because he had no business lusting for a woman like Lady Sarah Pleinsworth.

No business at all.

Chapter 10

Chapter Ten

The next morning

The Fensmore drive was one long line of carriages as wedding guests prepared to depart Cambridgeshire and travel southwest to Berkshire, more specifically to Whipple Hill, the country home of the Earls of Winstead. It would be, as Sarah had once put it, the Great and Terrible Caravan of British Aristocracy. (Harriet had, quill in hand, insisted that such a term required capitalization.)

As London was only a bit out of the way, some of the guests who had been relegated to the nearby inns chose to return to town. But most had elected to turn the dual celebration into a three-week-long traveling house party.

“Good gracious,” Lady Danbury had declared upon receiving her invitations to both weddings, “do they really think I’m going to reopen my town house for ten days between weddings?”

No one had dared to point out that Lady Danbury’s country estate was located in Surrey, which was even more directly between Fensmore and Whipple Hill than London.