He wanted to marry her?

“You are to marry Miss Hunt,” she said.

He made an impatient gesture with one hand.

“That is the general expectation,” he admitted. “We saw a fair amount of each other while we were growing up, as her family often visited my grandparents and we often visited them. And, of course, our families embarrassed us horribly—or me, anyway—by referring openly to their hopes that we would make a match of it one day and by teasing us mercilessly if we so much as exchanged a glance. And my mother holds firmly to the notion that Portia has been waiting for me to the advanced age of three-and-twenty. But I have never spoken a word to her of any intention to marry her, nor she to me. I am under no obligation whatsoever to offer for her.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “she would disagree with you.”

“She has no grounds for doing so,” he said. “I have made my own choice and it is you. Marry me, Frances.”

She closed her eyes. They were words the romantic, unrealistic part of her had dreamed for three months of hearing. She had even enacted scenes similar to this in her imagination. But if she could ever have expected to hear them in reality, she would have dreaded them. Her heart, she thought, would finally break in all earnest.

When she opened her eyes she was feeling dizzy and somehow staggered back to her seat. He took first one and then both of her hands in his own—they were warm and large enough to encompass her own. He lowered his head and held both of them against his lips.

“I cannot go back to London,” she said.

“Then we will live at Cleve Abbey,” he said. “We will raise a large, riotous family there, Frances, and live happily ever after. You may sing for all our neighbors.”

“You know you could not live in the country indefinitely,” she told him. “You will have to take your place in the House of Lords when you inherit the earldom. I cannot go back to London or polite society.”

“Cannot?” he asked. “Or will not?”

“Both,” she said. “There is nothing in the life you offer me that attracts me.”

“Not even my person?” he asked her, lowering her hands.

She shook her head.

“I do not believe you,” he said.

She looked up at him with a flash of anger.

“That is the trouble with you,” she said. “You really cannot take no for an answer, can you, Lord Sinclair? You cannot believe that any woman in her right mind would prefer the sort of life I lead here to the sort of life you offer me, or that she would prefer relative solitude here to a life in the beau monde with you.”

Both his eyebrows arched upward. But he looked rather as if she had struck him across the face.

“No!” He frowned. “This is not good enough, Frances. What is so abhorrent about life in London or life as the Viscountess Sinclair that you would reject me in order to avoid them? I cannot believe you are so averse to me personally. I have seen you, I have felt you, I have known you when your guard is down, and that woman responds to me with a warmth and a passion that match my own. What is it?”

“I am not eligible,” she said. “Not to be the Viscountess Sinclair. Not to be acceptable to your grandfather or your mother or the ton. And I am not going to say any more about it.”

There was no point in saying more—in pouring out the whole sorry story of her life. He was an impulsive man, she knew. She doubted he had really thought out all the implications of what he was doing this morning. He liked to get what he wanted, and for some reason he wanted her. He would not listen if she told him all. He would brush everything aside and try to insist anyway that she marry him.

It simply could not happen—for her sake and for his.

And for the sake of his grandfather, whom she liked and respected.

Good sense must rule the day as it had ruled the last three years of her life—with a few notable exceptions.

And so she lost her chance for joy. Fate had singled her out quite markedly, both after Christmas and this week—he was quite right about that—and she rejected fate, setting against it the power of her own free will. What else, after all, was free will for?

She would not destroy her hard-won new life and his into the bargain.

“I do not like society,” she said as if that were explanation enough for refusing an offer that was hugely advantageous to herself and that he knew was emotionally appealing to her. “It is artificial and vicious and not what I would choose as the environment in which to live the rest of my life. It is what I deliberately left behind me more than three years ago in order to come here.”

“If I had been there then,” he said fiercely, his eyes blazing into hers, “and if you had known me then, if I had asked you then what I have asked you now, would you have made the same choice, Frances?”

“Hypothetical questions are like the future you spoke of earlier,” she said. “They are a meaningless figment of the imagination. They have no reality. I did not meet you then.”

“No is your final answer, then,” he said. It was not really a question.

“Yes,” she said, “it is.”

“Good God!” He released her hands. “One of us must be mad, Frances, and I fear it may be me. Can you look me in the eye, then, and swear to me that you have no feelings for me?”

“Nothing is ever as simple as that,” she said. “But I will not swear either way. I do not have to. I have said no. That is all that needs saying.”

“By Jove, you are right.” It was he who got to his feet this time. “I beg your pardon, ma’am, for causing you such distress.”

His voice was tight with hostility.

She suddenly realized that they were surrounded by silence again except for the sounds of water dripping off the roof onto the soaked ground. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

“But there is still a part of me, Frances,” he added, “that could cheerfully throttle you.”

She closed her eyes and set a hand over her mouth as if to stop the outpouring of words she would regret. She was assailed with such a yearning to hurl herself into his arms and throw good sense to the winds that she felt physically sick again.

Thoughts whirled through her head in a chaotic jumble.

Perhaps she should be more like him and simply act instead of always thinking.

But she would not do it. She could not.

She got to her feet, stepped past him, and looked up at the sky. It still looked full of rain, and indeed there was still a fine drizzle falling.

“The hour is at an end, Lord Sinclair,” she said. “I am going back to the school now. You need not accompany me.”

“Damn you, Frances,” he said softly.

They were the last words he said to her—the last words of his she would ever hear, she thought as she hurried down the path, heedless of the fact that it was very wet and muddy and even slippery in places.

He had wanted her to marry him.

And she had said no.

Because, for a whole host of reasons, a marriage between them simply could not work.

And because love was simply not enough.

She was mad, she thought. She was mad, mad, mad.

He had asked her to marry him.

No, it was not madness. It was sanity—cold, comfortless, merciless sanity.

She was half running by the time she came to the gates and emerged from the gardens onto

Sydney Place

. And she was half sobbing too, though she tried to tell herself that it was only because she was out of breath from hurrying to get back to school before the rain came down heavily once more.

Lucius had wanted to marry her, and she had been forced to say no.

Actually participating in all the busy rituals of the spring Season—attending balls and routs and Venetian breakfasts and concerts and theater performances, riding in Hyde Park during the morning and tooling a curricle about it during the fashionable hour of the afternoon, being drawn into a thousand and one other frivolous activities—actually participating in it all did help to distract one’s thoughts from past humiliations and one’s spirits from taking up permanent residence in the soles of one’s boots, Lucius found over the coming month, especially when one also spent a large portion of one’s nights at White’s or one of the other gentlemen’s clubs and one’s mornings at Jackson’s boxing saloon or Tattersall’s horse auction or one of the other places where gentlemen tended to congregate in significant numbers and one could forget about being on one’s best social behavior.

Of course, it was all very different from the life he was accustomed to, and he was forced to endure the wincing sympathies and rowdy teasing of a number of his acquaintances, who could not fail to notice that he was living at Marshall House instead of in his usual bachelor rooms and that he was participating in the activities of the marriage mart and who, if the truth were told, were only too glad that it was not their turn to be thus occupied.