ouisa’s life changed from the moment Lord Wrenworth declared to a roomful of breathless ladies that Miss Cantwell had consented to become his wife.

Within the crisp, freshly ironed pages of the next day’s Times, she found the engagement announced with all due pride and gravity. An hour later, an enormous bouquet of pink-tinged white orchids arrived at the house, courtesy of her husband-to-be. At noon, more evidence of his regard, a magnificent diamond ring, made its dramatic appearance, sending Lady Balfour into a swoon of ecstasy.

“What did I tell you, Louisa? What did I tell you?”

Notes of congratulations snowed upon the house, along with invitations to every event taking place from then to the end of the Season. Louisa spent two entire days answering the well-wishers. When she went on calls with Lady Balfour, amidst many an envious and sometimes incredulous look, much fuss was made of her.

The luckiest lady in London.

Louisa herself was no less staggered than any of her well-wishers. She giggled when she was alone. She gaped at her ring whenever she caught sight of it. Sometimes, as she lay in bed at night, she pummeled her mattress with both hands and feet, as gleeful and irrepressible as a child about to go on her first holiday.

But other times, her dumbfoundedness took a more sober turn. Clearly his proposal took place, but with each passing day it made less sense. A mistress was a temporary feature in a man’s life, a passing fancy to be discarded or replaced anytime he so chose. A wife, on the other hand, was a permanent installation, almost as irrevocable as a mother.

What could possibly have induced him to make such a decision? She had a healthy regard for herself, but even if she esteemed herself ten times as much, she still couldn’t comprehend what it was about her that had proved irresistible to a man who could have had any woman.

The tentative explanation she cobbled together was a discomfiting one. He enjoyed wielding power over her—almost from the very beginning, he had intentionally set out to disrupt and destabilize. She’d had to fight back for every inch of footing she could command, so that she was not entirely at his mercy.

It was possible that even with her resistance, he’d come to the conclusion that he would never hold greater sway over a woman. Or perhaps it was precisely her resistance that he relished, that in spite of it he could still prevail over her as much as he did.

She often thought back to the moment their engagement first became reality, that flash of euphoric happiness that he liked and wanted her enough to pledge his name and all the privilege that came with it. But the fact remained that she could trust him no more now that he was her fiancé than when he had been merely a devious and amoral would-be lover.

When they were married, she would not try to deny his dominance in the bridal bower—in that particular arena he would probably always render her breathless and helpless. But that was the only weakness she would ever admit, lust of the body. Her mind would remain her own. And her demented and slightly shameful love she would carry as a secret to her grave.

It was the only path through the dangerous and, someday, very possibly heartbreaking terrain of her marriage.

• • •

Louisa’s epic success brought her family to London.

Their departure from home was delayed two days by Frederica’s continued refusal to leave her room. Frantic telegrams arrived for Louisa, who cabled back, Tell Frederica Lord Wrenworth has the means and the connections to make her skin marble smooth again.

Whether anything in the world could accomplish what she promised was immaterial. At twenty-seven Frederica was still a head-turningly beautiful woman—her problem had far less to do with dermatology than with perception.

“Your task, when they arrive, is to make her feel as lovely as the first star in the sky,” she told Lord Wrenworth.

It was the first time they had seen each other since the day of their engagement—she’d been quite buried by the work that came with mounting a wedding, in three weeks, of the magnitude and splendor required by his station in life.

“What?” he mock-exclaimed. “I am out a twenty-room house plus eight hundred pounds a year. And I have to play the swain to the sister-in-law, too?”

He looked both commanding and delicious standing by the window of Lady Balfour’s drawing room, bathed in the light of the afternoon. She was proud one moment, covetous the next, and then fearful the moment after that. It would always be like this, wouldn’t it, being the wife of a man she loved but couldn’t trust, whose true motives were as murky as the bottom of the sea?

“It will save you—well, me, actually—money on milk baths and exotic emollients later.”

“And why would I want to save you money?” He rounded to the side of her padded chair and looked down at her. “Wouldn’t I prefer it if you had to spend it all and come begging for more?”

She stared at his lips. He had not kissed her, ever. She would like him to, but she refused to ask. She even held back from reaching out and touching the hand he braced on the back of the chair. It was one thing to try to undermine his mastery of the situation with unwholesome speech and action, quite another to betray heartfelt desires that only further strengthened his hand.

“I couldn’t spend eight hundred pounds a year if I tried.”

“Don’t let anyone hear you speak like that. My reputation will never recover if it is known that I married a woman who can make do with eight hundred pounds a year. Besides, what will I have to complain about at my club if my wife isn’t suitably spendthrift?”

My wife. A wife could be the object of unabashed adoration or simply another nuisance in a man’s life. Where would she fall along that continuum? And would his, if not black, then at least darkish grey heart ever be hers?

She folded her hands together primly. “Does no one complain about their wives being too insatiable in bed?”

His gaze swept her entire person. Her skin tingled. He wanted to do wicked things to her—it was the reaction she had hoped to provoke—but he touched her nowhere, not even the fabric of her enormous sleeves.

He took a seat opposite hers, his long legs taking up most of the space between them. “Are you planning on being an overly enthusiastic wife?”

The way he studied her both absorbed and unsettled her. “Would you like me to be?”

“I am much more interested in the wife you cannot help being,” he said, the firm last word on the subject.

He wanted to strip her bare in every way. Her na**d body was only the beginning. From there, her undisguised thoughts. At last, her unhidden heart.

She took a sip of her tea, her fingers tight around the handle of the cup. “So... will you promise to shamelessly flatter Frederica?”

• • •

Two days later, as Lord Wrenworth strolled into Lady Balfour’s drawing room to meet Louisa’s family, there was a reverent collective intake of breath, as if the Cantwell women were a group of mortals who had accidentally stumbled into the presence of Apollo himself.

Louisa, too, felt as if she were seeing him again for the very first time, her eyes blurring with the potency of his physical perfection.

You, sir, are a scoundrel.

As if he’d heard her thought, he glanced her way. Their gazes held, a pair of miscreants recognizing each other in a roomful of upstanding people.

It lasted only a moment, but the sweetness of that secret communion lingered: a joy that was also an ache in her heart. They were two of a kind—she wished she wouldn’t need to always guard herself from him.

“May I present his lordship the Marquess of Wrenworth?” said Lady Balfour, still giddy from having pulled off the most spectacular match—or mismatch, as Louisa sometimes thought of it—in years. “Sir, my dear cousin Mrs. Cantwell, Miss Julia, Miss Matilda, Miss Cecilia, and Miss Cantwell.”

Frederica, addressed as Miss Cantwell, as she was the eldest, kept her head lowered.

Lord Wrenworth approached her chair. She still sat with her head down.

Much to the surprise of everyone present, he lowered himself to one knee, so as to be level with her. Flustered, she turned her entire body to one side. He studied the angle she presented him, then calmly rounded to her other side.

Lady Balfour and Mrs. Cantwell both glanced toward Louisa, who could only shake her head to show that she had no idea what he was doing.

He straightened. “I understand you have been mourning the loss of your beauty for years, Miss Cantwell. What I do not understand is why your family has allowed such an act of rampant narcissism.”

Frederica looked up in shock.

“The only imperfections I see are a few shallow pockmarks on your right cheek. I would never have permitted any sister of mine to brood over such minor blemishes for the better part of a decade.

“Had you come for a London Season, you would not have dislodged Mrs. Townsend from her perch as the most beautiful woman in London. You might not even have disturbed Miss Bessler’s place third on that list. But make no mistake, you would have been mentioned in the same breath as those women. Instead, you have wasted your youth grieving for a gross misfortune that never took place: You are perhaps five percent less lovely than you would have been without the pockmarks, not fifty percent.

“Miss Louisa asked me to compliment you, but I shall not, not when you can go out and garner hundreds of them on your own with minimum effort. And if you will not, then there is nothing anyone can do for you—the matter is not with your face, but your head.”

Without waiting for a response, he moved on. “My dear Miss Matilda, did you have a pleasant trip?”

• • •

If anything, Louisa had expected a charm offensive—and a charm offensive this was not. He acted as if he’d never encountered such a ridiculous thing as Frederica considering her looks ruined.

It was ridiculous, except Frederica refused to believe her family when they tried to convince her otherwise, certain that her mother and sisters were lying out of love—or pity. But Lord Wrenworth’s simple, almost brusque repudiation of the truth she’d long held to be self-evident had a far more dramatic effect on her. By the time he was saying his good-byes, Louisa caught Frederica looking surreptitiously at herself in the mirror hanging over the fireplace—when she’d studiously avoided any reflective surfaces for years upon years.

She was not the only one who noticed.

“Did you see that?” asked Cecilia, as soon as Frederica and Lord Wrenworth were both out of earshot.

“I saw that!” Mrs. Cantwell exclaimed. “Think of the wonderful match she can still make for herself, if only she would go out and let herself be seen. There is bound to be a rich widower somewhere who would be thrilled to marry her.”

“Now, why didn’t we talk to Frederica like that earlier?” said Cecilia.

“We did,” Matilda pointed out. “We talked ourselves blue in the face. We said everything Lord Wrenworth said—we just didn’t say it the way he did.”

Lady Balfour nodded authoritatively. “And the way he said it made all the difference.”

Mrs. Cantwell turned toward Louisa. “I hear they call you the luckiest lady in London, my dear. I think you must be the luckiest lady in all of Britain.”

That same general sentiment prevailed. Matilda, with whom Louisa shared a room at home, was the only one to say, before they went to sleep that night, “I know everyone else is saying how lucky you are, Louisa, but I think he is the lucky one. Just think how much Mr. Charles will envy him in having you for a wife.”

Louisa reached over and hugged this most beloved sister. “Thank you, my dear.”

“I hope you aren’t only marrying him because we need the money,” said Matilda. “You do like him, don’t you?”

Louisa had never asked herself that question before. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending how one looked at it—the answer was all too obvious. She did like him, his villainous ways included. In fact, his villainous ways might be the very reason she liked him so much, this darkly gleeful secret that he shared only with her.

“Not only do I like him,” she answered, “I would have volunteered to be his mistress if I couldn’t be his wife.”

That sent Matilda into a fit of giggling. She hugged Louisa back. “I’m so glad to hear that. I am sure you will make him very happy, and I hope he will do the same for you.”

Louisa had her doubts. She had no idea what made her fiancé happy or otherwise. Nor did she know how she would handle herself should the day come when he was no longer excited by the prospect of sleeping with her—when he would go on to bed the next woman who titillated him.

His heart in the palm of her hand might—might—act as insurance against this infelicitous eventuality. But where was the path to his heart? Did he have great trolls guarding it? Perhaps a fire-spewing dragon, chained before the castle gate?

Assuming, that was, The Ideal Gentleman had a heart at all.

• • •

I’m in your debt, sir,” Louisa told Lord Wrenworth the next time she saw him.

A week had flown by since the day he was presented to her family. During that time, Frederica made a quick appearance at the afternoon tea party Lady Balfour had hosted to welcome the Cantwell ladies to London—and she’d gone to the dressmaker’s in an open carriage, wearing only a veiled hat that didn’t do much to hide her face at all.

“That is terrible. You will only ever be able to pay me with my own money,” he said as he handed her up into his carriage. It was pouring again. Since they were now affianced, however, he was allowed to fetch her from the bookshop on his own. “But joking aside, do you mean to tell me that my words had some effect on your sister?”

“Yes. She now has a mirror permanently attached to her right hand and studies herself constantly.”

“Sounds like symptoms of a mental disorder.”

With his walking stick, he knocked on the ceiling of the carriage to signal the coachman that they were ready to go. Louisa had not seen him with that particular accessory since they were last in the town coach together, before his proposal. She couldn’t stop herself from staring a moment at its ebony handle.

And he certainly didn’t help matters by moving his thumb in a slow circle around that stylized jaguar head.

“Take your hand off it,” she said.

He looked at her with a half smile that made everything inside her shift and drop, and set the walking stick aside. “Better?”

“No, not really. But what were you saying?”

He smiled again. “That your sister’s new tendency to study herself constantly in a mirror sounds like an affliction.”

“It does, but it is a much better affliction than the one she’d suffered for so long. We are all delighted. My mother especially—she is beginning to speak again of Frederica as the future spouse of a very wealthy man.”

She looked at him sideways. “In fact, she thinks rather wistfully of you as that very wealthy man. I believe she is ever so slightly embarrassed that you will have me instead, when she has so much prettier daughters.”

“Your mother actually thinks that any of her other daughters could possibly hold the slightest temptation for me?”

She ought not to, but she adored the dismissiveness of his tone.

“That is a very smug smile on your face, my dear, dear Louisa.”

“That is a very smug sensation inside my heart, my dear, dear Lord Wrenworth.”

The carriage turned a corner and his walking stick went sliding. They both reached out, but she caught it first.

“Maybe I ought to keep a better grip on it,” he said.

She laid the walking stick across her lap. “There, I’ll make sure it isn’t up to mischief.”

He glanced at the walking stick for a fraction of a second longer than completely appropriate, before he looked up into her eyes. “By the way, our marriage settlement is being drawn up as we speak. When you meet your solicitor again, he will tell you that you will have five thousand pounds a year in pin money.”

She nearly dropped the walking stick. “Five thousand!”

“Don’t be so loud, don’t look so astonished, and don’t, for goodness’ sake, appear grateful. I would not be able to show my face in Society if it became known that my wife managed to squeeze only eight hundred pounds a year out of me.”

“You offered me only five hundred,” she said indignantly.

“And you were the worst negotiator ever, asking for only a thousand from a man who has two hundred thousand a year. Shame on you.”

Her face heated. “Well, you have always known that I am a country bumpkin.”

“I thought you were ambitious. You were certainly more ambitious where telescopes were concerned.”

“Your proposal caught me off guard.”

“Excuses, excuses, Louisa. Were I less mindful of my reputation, you would have been robbed.”

Hardly, when she would have given him the eleven pounds, eight shillings she’d studiously scraped together for emergencies, just so he didn’t withdraw his offer.

Still, five thousand pounds a year, just for her. She wanted to laugh: She was now her own rich man.

Suddenly she remembered her deception. “Goodness gracious. There was something I was going to let you find out for yourself after the wedding. But at five thousand pounds a year, my conscience won’t let me keep quiet anymore.”

He cast her a sidelong look. “So your conscience was fine at eight hundred a year?”

“Did you really think my conscience was the sort that couldn’t be told to keep quiet when only eight hundred a year was a stake?”

“True, morally upstanding you are not. So what dastardly secret am I going to find out now?”

Was that fondness in his voice? Why did she feel as if she were slowly melting? “I employ an array of bust improvers.”

He shrugged, unperturbed. “So do at least half of the ladies in London. God does not make that many perfectly waspish figures.”

“Well, my bust improver doesn’t so much improve my bust as create one where none exists.”

He glanced at her bosom. “So how much of that is actually yours?”

“Twenty-five percent. Thirty-five at most.”

His eyes widened.

“I apologize!”

“Only sorry to be caught, I see.”

“Well, I always did plan to make up for it.”

“How?” Was that a barely suppressed smile in his voice? “Isn’t it a bit late for you to develop a bigger pair?”

“I once heard Lady Balfour talk about her brother-in-law’s mistress. She said the woman was completely flat-chested, but was willing to take part in all kinds of unnatural acts.”

He made the sound of choked laughter. “Sorry, go on.”

“So I thought...” She pulled at her collar. “I thought if I would consent to unnatural acts, then perhaps it would not be so difficult to achieve my husband’s forgiveness in this matter. And, well, you are most certainly the sort to incline toward unnatural acts.”

“Am I?”

“Are you not?” She couldn’t tell whether she was asking out of hope or apprehension.

He didn’t answer her. “Suppose you had become engaged to Mr. Pitt instead. Would you have just remained silent on the matter?”

“I would have started putting on progressively less exaggerated bust improvers and hoped that he didn’t notice. But if he did, there were always the unnatural acts.”

“He might never again believe anything you say the rest of your life.”

She was hardly worried about Mr. Pitt. “What about you?”

“I have never trusted a word you said, since the very beginning.”

“I do tell the truth sometimes,” she pointed out, half pouting. “Besides, now that I have ensnared myself a rich lord and confessed my sins regarding my undergirding, I have no more lies to tell.”

“Is that what you think marriage is, a hotbed of honesty and transparency?”

“Well, no...”

“Exactly. If I know you, you will go on lying, bust improvers or no.”

“Then why did you propose to me?”

It always came back to this central mystery, this seemingly benign puzzle at the foundation of her current good fortune.

“Because you will never have headaches,” he answered in apparent seriousness.

“I beg your pardon?”

His lips quivered. “Nothing. Just know that I am looking forward to being the most happily married man in the empire.”

He smiled at her. And it was such a gorgeous smile that a few moments passed before she remembered that she, too, never trusted a word he said.

• • •

Why had Felix proposed to her?

He had not answered her because he was coming to the realization that it was impossible to prevaricate when he couldn’t pin down the truth.

Like affixing the position of stars in the sky—if one didn’t know where one stood, the exercise became futile. An accurate knowledge of the truth was, for him at least, a necessary starting point for any well-crafted lie.

He, who could look people in the eye, smile, and spin a perfect yarn on the spot, was dodging her question because he had failed to find the real reason behind his action.

Was it merely because his conscience itched over what he’d said about Lord Firth? Because he pitied her? Because he’d always planned on marrying a country bumpkin anyway, and she was as good as any rosy-cheeked girl he could have in twenty years?

He was able to become The Ideal Gentleman because he knew every last one of his faults intimately—and therefore understood exactly how he ought to misdirect attention and create illusions.

But now he had based one of the most important decisions of his life on a shifting foundation.

Perhaps more alarmingly, he almost didn’t care—not when there were bust improver–sized revelations to be had. The knowledge gave him a secret elation, an expansive pleasure, so that when they parted that day, he told her, “Go on wearing those bust improvers. In fact, have some bigger ones made.”

Her expression of befuddlement and suspicion was also a thing of joy.

He further misdirected her attention by opening lines of credit at various establishments and gifting her mother a house that had thirty rooms. As if she weren’t busy enough with a wedding breathing down her neck, she was now also required to inspect chairs, drapery, and side tables.

“If you are trying to make me drop dead from exhaustion, you are not far from succeeding,” she accused him the last time they saw each other before the wedding.

No one else spoke to him as she did, with as much frankness and... could he call it affection? Yes, he decided, exasperated affection, but affection all the same. “Will you ever stop suspecting me of ulterior motives?”

“Yes, when you stop harboring as many of them as a Medici pope.”

“Then whom will you suspect for fun?” he answered cheerfully. He usually enjoyed himself around people. Her company, however, he adored.

And tomorrow they would join in matrimony, for as long they both should live.

He had been trying not to think of the wedding night—no need to torment himself lusting after what would soon be his. But sometimes he couldn’t quite help the direction of his thoughts.

Dear, dear Louisa was in for a night to remember.

She cleared her throat. “You said you’d come to give me my wedding present.”

So she’d caught him ogling her—forgivable for a man the day before his wedding. “Your wedding present is currently being set up in the conservatory at Huntington. After all your sisters and your mother each told me separately about the telescope, I had no choice but to buy one exactly like the one that slipped from your fingers.”

Her eyes narrowed dramatically. “You mean you wouldn’t have bought it for me on your own?”

“Of course not. I’d have bought you a much better one, but now you are stuck with your heart’s desire.”

Her scowl turned into a smile. “Well, I can live with that.”

People smiled at him all the time, but when she did it, he felt... supremely accomplished.

The thought gave him pause. Wasn’t that how he had felt earlier, when he’d made her testy?

He ignored that particular insight. “But it is hugely unsatisfying to be told that one’s present is hundreds of miles away, so I brought you this.” He took out a book from his pocket and handed it to her. “A telescope is useless unless you know what you are looking at.”

The book was a first-edition copy of Catalogue des Nébuleuses et des Amas d’Étoiles, otherwise known as Messier’s Catalogue.

She frowned. And suddenly he stood chest-deep in uncertainty, not knowing how his present would be received, fearing that it would be cast aside as soon as he left the room.

It wasn’t even a real gift, just something he had taken from his study at Huntington on his way out to meet the train, after he was satisfied that the telescope had been correctly set up, because he thought it would please a girl who loved the stars.

“Don’t worry if you can’t read French.” His tone was stilted and formal. “There are far more comprehensive catalogs and star maps published these days.”

“I’m sure there are better works published these days, but this is the one I have always wanted to have,” she said, her eyes downcast, her fingers rubbing against the binding of the catalog.

He wasn’t sure he believed her. “Then why do you look so consternated?”

She turned the book around once in her hands. “Because it disconcerts me that you can so easily guess my heart’s desire.”

All the apprehension drained away, replaced by a startling buoyancy. How silly he’d been to be prey to such needless concerns. “I am to be your husband. I should be able to read your heart’s desire.”

She looked up, her gaze meeting his. “You are the sort of man who is just as likely to grant a woman her heart’s desire as to torment her with it.”

And she was the one woman who knew that he was the furthest thing from The Ideal Gentleman, yet still wept when she thought he would never have anything more to do with her. “May I remind you that you were willing to take me and my lady-tormenting ways for a measly eight hundred pounds a year.”

That brought a reluctant smile to her face. “I haven’t been able to make a single good decision since I fell in lust with you.”

Her sexual infatuation with him had always gratified him immensely. Yet for some reason, this iteration of the fact didn’t thrill him as much as it usually did. It was as if he wanted more.

What more, he couldn’t say—if the girl was any more willing, they would be copulating in the streets. Perhaps he was simply impatient to at last pin her underneath him, and watch her face as her pleasure gathered.

“I will leave you to study your new book then.”

As he turned to go, she took hold of his hand. They touched as infrequently as they ever did, and the sensation of her skin on his was almost numbing in its intensity.

“I do not mean to imply that I am not grateful,” she said.

“But you are not,” he pointed out.

“I am. I am just also wary, as any woman with half a brain ought to be, when it comes to you.”

And with that, she kissed him on his cheek. “I will see you at the wedding.”