“It is no thanks to you that it was not,” she said sharply.

“Ah.”

It was all he said in acknowledgment of the fact that she knew his role in bringing her here.

“I trust,” she said, “Miss Hunt is in good health. And good looks.”

“I really do not give a tinker’s damn,” he said softly, prompting her to look fully at him for the first time. Fortunately, he had spoken quietly enough that she was the only one to have heard his shocking words.

“Why did you do this?” she asked him. “Why did you persuade my great-aunt to send for me?”

“She needed you, Frances,” he said. “So did your other aunt, who was actually bedridden the last time I was here.”

“I am being asked to believe, then,” she said, “that your motive was purely altruistic?”

“What do you think?” He smiled at her, a rather wolfish smile that had her insides turning over.

“And why did you come here the first time anyway?” she asked. “Just to visit two elderly ladies out of the kindness of your heart?”

“You are angry with me,” he said instead of answering. And instead of smiling now, he was looking at her with intense eyes and compressed lips and hard, square jaw.

“Yes, I am angry,” she admitted. “I do not like being manipulated, Lord Sinclair. I do not like having someone else thinking he knows better than I what makes me happy.”

“Contented,” he said.

“Contented, then,” she conceded.

“I do know better than you what will make you happy,” he said.

“I think not, Lord Sinclair.”

“I could accomplish it,” he said, “within a month. Less. I could bring you professional happiness. And personal happiness in such abundance that your cup would run over with it, Frances.”

She felt a yearning so profound that she had to break eye contact with him and look down hastily at her hands.

“My chances for either kind of happiness were ruined more than three years ago, Lord Sinclair,” she said.

“Were they?” he said as softly as before. “Three years?”

She ignored the question.

“I have cultivated contentment since then,” she said. “And incredibly I have found it and discovered that it is superior to anything else I have ever experienced. Don’t ruin that too for me.”

There was a lengthy silence while the earl and Great-Aunt Martha laughed together over something one of them had said, and Amy’s voice prattled on happily to Great-Aunt Gertrude.

“I believe I already have,” Viscount Sinclair said at last. “Or shaken it, anyway. Because I do not believe it ever was contentment, Frances, but only a sort of deadness from which you awakened when I hauled you out of that fossil of a carriage, spitting fire and brimstone at me.”

She looked up at him, very aware that they were not alone together in the room, that her great-aunts were only a few feet away and were very probably observing them surreptitiously and with great interest. She was quite unable therefore to allow any of the emotions she felt to show on her face.

“You are to be married,” she said.

“I am,” he agreed. “But one important question remains unanswered. Who is to be the bride?”

She drew breath to say something else, but her attention was drawn to the fact that the earl was getting to his feet with the obvious intention of bringing the visit to an end.

Viscount Sinclair rose too without another word and proceeded to thank the aunts for their hospitality. Amy hugged Frances and assured her that she would somehow persuade her mama to allow her to come downstairs when Mrs. Melford and Miss Driscoll and Miss Allard came for dinner.

“After all,” she said naively, “you are my special friend. Besides, I would not miss hearing you sing again for worlds. I may not perform music with any great flair, Miss Allard, but I can recognize when someone else does.”

The earl bowed over Frances’s hand again.

“Prepare more than one song, if you will,” he said. “After listening to you once, I know that I will long for an encore.”

“Very well, my lord,” she promised.

Viscount Sinclair bowed to her with his hands clasped behind his back.

“Miss Allard,” he said.

“Lord Sinclair.”

It was an austere enough farewell, but it did not deter Frances’s aunts from going into raptures after their guests had left.

“The Earl of Edgecombe is quite as charming as he was as a young man,” Aunt Martha said. “And almost as handsome too. And Miss Amy Marshall is a delight. But Viscount Sinclair—”

“—is handsome enough and charming enough to make any woman wish she were young again to set her cap at him,” Aunt Gertrude said. “But it is a good thing we are not young hopefuls, Martha. He had eyes for no one but Frances tonight.”

“He was very charming to us,” Aunt Martha said, “but every time he looked at Frances, his eyes fairly devoured her and he forgot our very existence. Did you notice how he went to sit beside her, Gertrude, the moment we drew the attention of Lord Edgecombe and Miss Marshall away from them?”

“Well, of course I noticed,” Great-Aunt Gertrude said. “I would have been severely disappointed if our ruse had not worked, Martha.”

“Oh, goodness,” Frances protested. “You must not see romance where there simply is none. Or try to promote it.”

“You, my love,” Aunt Martha said, “are going to be the Viscountess Sinclair before the summer is out unless I am much mistaken. Poor Miss Hunt is just going to have to find someone else.”

Frances held both hands to her cheeks, laughing despite herself.

“I absolutely agree with Martha,” Aunt Gertrude said. “And you cannot tell us that you are indifferent to him, Frances. We would not believe you, would we, Martha?”

Frances bade them a hasty good night and fled to her room.

They did not understand.

Neither did he.

Was there such a thing as fate?

But if there were, why was it such a cruel thing? For what it had set in her path three separate times now since Christmas was quite, quite unattainable.

Did fate not understand?

But one important question remains unanswered. Who is to be the bride?

Did he still want to marry her, then? Had it not been mere rash impulse that had prompted him to offer for her in Sydney Gardens while the rain poured down all around them?

Did he love her?

Did he?

Frances had agreed to sing at Marshall House, though she had imposed a sort of condition.

Very well, then. I will come and sing, my lord, just for you and my aunts.

They were words that echoed in Lucius’s head during the coming days while he schemed ruthlessly to thwart her modest will. She had not meant those words literally, he told himself.

At least, she probably had, he conceded, since there was something very strange, almost unnatural, about Frances’s attitude to her own talent. But she ought not to have meant them. Anyone with her voice ought to be eager to sing for an audience of a million if that many persons could only be packed within one room. It would be a criminal waste to allow her to sing just for his grandfather and her great-aunts—and presumably for his mother and sisters and him too.

Frances Allard had shuttered herself—body, mind, and soul—behind the walls of Miss Martin’s School for Girls for far too long, and it was time she came out and faced reality. And if she would not do it voluntarily, then by God he would take the initiative and drag her out. Perhaps she would never give him the chance to make her happy in any personal sense—though even on that matter he had not yet conceded final defeat. But he would force her to see that a glorious future as a singer awaited her. He would do everything in his power to help her to that future.

Frances had not been born to teach. Not that he had ever been present in one of her classrooms to discover that she was not up to the task, it was true. She very probably was, in fact. But she had so clearly been born to make music and to share it with the world that any other occupation was simply a waste of her God-given talent.

He was going to bring her out into the light. He was going to help her—force her, if necessary—to be all she had been born to be.

And so he ignored the words she had spoken to his grandfather—I will come and sing, my lord, just for you and my aunts.

He knew someone. The man was a friend of his and had only recently married. He was a renowned connoisseur of the arts, notably music, and was particularly well known for the concert he gave at his own home each year, at which he entertained a select gathering of guests with prominent musicians from all over the Continent and with new discoveries of his own. Just this past Christmas his star performer had been a young boy soprano whom he had discovered among a group of inferior church carolers out on

Bond Street

. He had married the boy’s mother in January.

It was strange to think of Baron Heath as a married man with two young stepchildren. But it seemed to happen to all of them eventually, Lucius thought gloomily—marriage, that was. At least Heath had had the satisfaction of choosing his own bride and marrying for love.

Lucius invited him to attend a concert at Marshall House and promised him a musical treat that would make his hair stand on end.

“She has an extraordinarily lovely voice,” he explained, “but has had no one to bring her to the attention of people who can do something to sponsor her career.”

“And I will soon be clamoring to be that sponsor, I suppose,” Lord Heath said. “I hear this with tedious frequency, Sinclair. But I do trust your taste—provided we are talking of taste in voices, that is, and not in women.”