She sighed and turned to face him fully again. "I have never believed in or even wanted a happily-ever-after," she said. "How foolish of me to have believed yesterday and this morning that I had found it after all. I had not. But no, nothing has been irrevocably ruined. I will live on. /We /will. Do you really find me irres - Do you really find me a little bit attractive?" "I do," he said. He could have stridden around the bed at that point and caught her up in an embrace, but it might have been the wrong thing to do. She might have doubted his sincerity. "But I did not use the word /attractive, /accurate though it would be. It is also tame. I used the word /irresistible/." "Oh," she said. "I really do not know why. I look a fright." She looked down at herself. "At this precise moment you do," he agreed. "If there were mice in the house, they would surely be frightened away after one glimpse of you.

Outdoor clothes were not meant to be worn in bed, you know. And hair was meant to be brushed every few hours." "Oh," she said, and laughed - a rather thin, tremulous sound. "Let me ring for your maid," he said. "I'll go down and tell Mama and Cecily that they do not have to starve tonight after all, that you will be down within half an hour." "It will be a Herculean task," she said as he came around the bed and made for her dressing room, "to make me presentable in just half an hour." "Not really," he said, pulling on the bell rope and turning his head to look at her. "All you really have to do is smile, Vanessa. Your smile is pure magic." "I ought to call your bluff, foolish man, and come downstairs with you now, then, smiling," she said. "Your mother would have a fit of the vapors." "I will return in twenty-five minutes," he said as he stepped inside his own dressing room and closed the door.

He stood against it for quite some time, his eyes closed.

He had much atoning to do. He had hurt too many people recently. He had been hurt himself during the past couple of years by people he had trusted so he had turned to stern duty and turned his back on love - and on laughter and joy.

He had hurt people anyway. /Love and laughter and joy./ All of them embodied in the wife he had married so unwillingly and so cynically.

He had married a treasure he did not at all deserve.

What had she said a few minutes ago? He frowned in thought. /I have never believed in or even wanted a happily-ever-after. How foolish of me to have believed yesterday and this morning that I had found it after all./ She had been happy yesterday and this morning. Happily-ever-after happy.

Dear God!

She had been happy. But /of course /she had.

So had he.

21

VANESSA had expected her task of introducing her sisters to the /ton /to be an onerous one. She was as new to society as they were, after all, even if she /was /married to a viscount, heir to a dukedom. She knew practically nothing and no one.

But it turned out not to be very difficult after all. All that had been needed was her respectable position as a lady married to a gentleman of the /ton/. Elliott more than qualified in that role.

They were something of a curiosity, the three sisters. Vanessa because she had recently married one of England's most eligible bachelors.

Margaret and Katherine because they were the sisters of the new Earl of Merton, who had turned out to be very youthful and very handsome and very attractive despite - or perhaps because of - a certain lack of town bronze. And Margaret and Katherine had the added attraction of being rare beauties.

The /ton, /Vanessa soon learned, was always avidly interested in seeing new faces, hearing new stories, getting wind of new scandals. The story of the new earl and his sisters having been found in a remote country village, living in a cottage smaller than most people's garden shed - the /ton /also had a strong tendency to hyperbole - captured the collective imagination and fed drawing-room conversations for a week or more. As did the fact that one of those sisters had captured the hand, if not the heart, of no less a personage than Viscount Lyngate. She was /not /a beauty, and therefore one must not suppose that it was a love match - though if it was not, it was strange that he had not married the /eldest /sister. And there was a positive swell of interest when word spread that Mrs. Bromley-Hayes had been dropped like a hot brick as Viscount Lyngate's mistress after she was seen in company with the viscountess one afternoon in Hyde Park.

The viscountess's prestige rose significantly.

The Huxtables were invited everywhere fashionable people were invited - to balls, soirees, concerts, picnics, Venetian breakfasts, dinners, theater parties… The list was endless. They could, in fact, have been busy merrymaking every day from morning to night. Well, perhaps not morning as they defined it. Most people slept until past noon, having danced or played cards or conversed or otherwise diverted themselves almost all night long.

It amused Vanessa to discover that an invitation to breakfast actually was an invitation to a meal beginning in the middle of the afternoon. It amazed her that most people seemed perfectly content to begin their day in the afternoon and end it early in the morning.

What a sad waste of daylight and sunshine!

She accompanied her sisters to numerous entertainments, but she did not have to make any great effort to introduce them to people whose names she often could not recall herself or to find conversational groups for them to join or partners for them to dance with. As Elliott had predicted, they met the same people almost wherever they went, and names, faces, and titles soon became more familiar.

Margaret and Katherine soon acquired friends and acquaintances, and each very quickly had a court of admirers - as did Vanessa herself, to her great amazement. Young gentlemen whose names she scarcely remembered asked her to dance or offered to fetch her refreshments or to escort her on a stroll about a garden or dance floor. One or two even offered to drive her in the park or to ride on Rotten Row with her.

It was not an uncommon occurrence, of course, for married ladies to have their cicisbei. And she remembered Elliott telling her at the theater that it was quite unexceptionable for a married lady to be escorted in a public place by a man who was not her husband.

It spoke volumes to Vanessa about the state of marriage among the /ton, /though she had no wish to behave as others did. If Elliott could not be with her, she preferred the company of her sisters or her mother-in-law to that of some strange gentleman.

She was not unhappy during the weeks following her presentation at court.

She was not particularly happy either.

There had been something of a reticence between her and Elliott since the day on which she had confronted him over the matter of Mrs.

Bromley-Hayes. They were not estranged. He accompanied her to many entertainments, especially in the evenings. He conversed with her whenever the opportunity presented itself. He made love to her each night. He slept in her bed.

But there was…something. Some sense of strain.

She believed him, and yet she was hurt. Not hurt that he had had a mistress before marrying her - that would have been unreasonable. Hurt perhaps because he had visited his ex-mistress after marrying her and would have said nothing to her if she had not found out on her own. And hurt perhaps because Mrs. Bromley-Hayes was beautiful in every imaginable way - physically at least.

There was nothing wrong with her marriage, Vanessa kept telling herself.

There was only everything right with it, in fact. She had a husband who paid attention to her, who was faithful to her, who had sworn to remain faithful. She was well blessed. What more could she ask for? /His heart?/ If one had the moon and the stars, must one be greedy for the sun too?

It seemed that the answer was yes.

Katherine treated her court of admirers much as she had done in Throckbridge. She smiled kindly and indulgently upon them all, granted them all equal favors, /liked /them all. But when asked, she would admit that there was no one special among them. "Do you not /want /someone special in your life?" Vanessa asked her one morning when they were taking a brisk walk through an almost deserted park. "Of course I do," Katherine said with something of a sigh. "But that is it, you see, Nessie. He must /be /special. I am coming to the conclusion that there is no such person, that I am looking for an impossibility.

But that cannot be so, can it? Hedley was special to you, and Lord Lyngate is. How I envied you when I watched you waltzing together at Cecily's come-out ball. If it has happened to you twice, is it too much to ask that it happen to me just once?" "Oh, it will," Vanessa assured her, taking her arm and squeezing it. "I am glad you will settle for no less than love. And what about Meg?" Their sister was not with them. She had gone to Hookham's library with the Marquess of Allingham. "And the marquess, you mean?" Katherine said. "I do believe he is seriously courting her." "And will she have him?" Vanessa asked. "I do not know," Katherine admitted. "She seems to favor him. Certainly she pays no attention to anyone else, though there are several eligible and personable gentlemen interested in her. She does not behave as if she were in love, though, does she?" It was true. Meg was far more concerned with trying to control Stephen's movements and with encouraging Kate to enjoy herself as much as she was able and with assuring herself that Vanessa was happy than with forging a new life for herself.