She pressed her face to the window and peered up at the driver on his high perch. He was very smartly clad in a long buff riding coat with several capes and a tall hat set at a slight angle.

Frances, eyes wide as saucers, was not quite sure she recognized him. He was up high and almost past her line of vision. But the groom up behind him was neither. He was looking utterly contemptuous and yelling something, presumably at Thomas, that she mercifully could not hear. Just the expression on his face told her that it was not complimentary, though.

She had not been mistaken, then. If the man was Peters, the driver was certain to be Viscount Sinclair.

Why was she somehow not surprised?

She leaned back in her seat after the light vehicle was past. She closed her eyes, caught between fury and a totally inappropriate hilarity.

He talked about banishing the word pleasant from the English language. But it seemed that he had already totally obliterated the word good-bye from his own personal vocabulary.

She did not relinquish her hold on the strap. When Thomas pulled the carriage to an abrupt halt she was ready for the resulting jars and jolts that might have catapulted her across to the seat opposite and flattened her nose against its backrest had she been unprepared.

She looked out the window and ahead along the road. But the scene was very much what she had expected. The curricle, now in the care of Peters alone, was stationary and positioned right across the road. Viscount Sinclair was striding toward the carriage, his long coattails flapping against his glossy boots, his riding whip tapping against both. He was looking decidedly grim.

“If you would only choose to travel the king’s highway in a carriage instead of an apology for an old boat, Frances,” he said after yanking the door open, “you might have been to Bath and back by now. Move over.”

Frances gazed helplessly at him and moved.

It offended Lucius’s Corinthian soul to have to ride in the old fossil. But there was no avoiding such a fate—the carriage would offer more privacy than his curricle, especially with Peters—and, more important, Peters’s ears—riding up behind. He very much hoped that none of his friends was tooling along the road to Bath to see the vehicle in which he traveled, though. He would never recover from the ignominy.

“Thanks to you I have lost a perfectly perfect bride today,” he said, slamming the door and taking the seat beside Frances—he remained firmly on the surface of it instead of sinking comfortably into it, he noticed. “And I want recompense, Frances.”

Understandably she sat across the corner to which she had retreated and stared at him with hostile eyes.

There was a good deal of bad-tempered shouting going on outside, presumably while Peters and Thomas exchanged genealogies again, and then Peters must have driven the curricle onward, as instructed. A posting chaise rumbled past in the opposite direction, its coachman’s face purple with rage, and then the carriage in which Lucius sat with Frances creaked and jarred into slow motion and proceeded on its way.

“Miss Hunt actually refused you?” she asked at last. “I am surprised, I must confess. But in what sense am I responsible, pray?”

“She did not refuse me,” he said. “She was not given a chance. I announced in her hearing and her mama’s that I was off to Portman Street to offer you my compliments and my hand. By the time I discovered you gone and crept home again, both ladies had left Marshall House in high dudgeon, and in my mother’s considered opinion Portia would no longer have me if I crawled toward her on my hands and knees, eating dirt as I went, or humble pie—whichever happened to be available.”

“And would you do it if you were given the opportunity?” she asked.

“Crawl on my hands and knees?” he asked. “Good Lord, no. My valet would resign on the spot, and I am partial to the way he ties a neckcloth. Besides which, Frances, I have no wish to marry Portia Hunt—never have had and never will. I believe I would rather be dead.”

“She is very lovely,” she said.

“Exceedingly,” he agreed. “But we had this conversation last evening, Frances. I would rather talk about you.”

He was babbling, he knew—making a joke of things that were not really funny at all. Truth to tell, he had no business being where he was. But he was not about to admit that.

“There is nothing to say about me,” she said. “I think you had better summon your curricle and go back to London, Lord Sinclair.”

“On the contrary,” he said, “there is a great deal to talk about. The fact that you are a Frenchwoman masquerading as an Englishwoman, for example. How is one to know that you are not a spy?”

She clucked her tongue.

“You knew that I was French,” she said. “Does it matter whether I choose to be known as Françoise Halard or Frances Allard? Somehow people expect a Frenchwoman to be flamboyant, to talk with her hands, to flutter with emotion. They expect her to be foreign. I grew up in England. I am an Englishwoman in every way that matters.”

If he had to travel very far in this carriage, he thought, his spine would surely suffer permanent damage—not to mention his hindquarters.

“I will release you from suspicion as a spy, then,” he said. “But what about the fact that you were singing at orgies before you became a teacher, Frances? You must have some interesting anecdotes to relate about that.”

Suddenly he felt grim again. And she looked tight-lipped.

“Orgies,” she said softly.

“Lady Lyle did not use that exact word,” he said. “She was speaking to Portia and so would have felt obliged to temper her language. But that is what she meant.”

She turned her head to look out the window. She was not wearing a bonnet—it was lying on the seat opposite. Her profile, he could see, looked as if it were carved out of marble. It was about that color too.

“I do not have to justify myself to you, Lord Sinclair, when you take that tone with me,” she said. “Or even when you do not, for that matter. You may get out of my aunts’ carriage and go back to town.”

He heaved an audible sigh of exasperation.

“I cannot do it, though, you see,” he told her. “I cannot simply go away, Frances. Not until our story has been ended. I remember reading a book as a boy—an ancient tome from my grandfather’s library. I became totally immersed in the story and let two perfectly decent summer days go by outdoors while I remained indoors and lapped up its contents. And then the story came to an abrupt halt—the last who-knows-how-many pages were missing. I was left feeling as if I were hanging over the edge of a cliff by my fingernails with no hope of rescue. And no one I questioned had ever read the infernal thing. When I hurled the book across the library, it sailed through a window, taking a large pane of glass with it, and I lost my allowance for at least the next six months. But I have never forgotten my wrath and frustration. They have been rekindled lately. I like stories to have neat endings.”

“We are not living within the pages of a book,” she said.

“And therefore the story can end however we wish it to end,” he said. “I no longer demand a happily-ever-after, Frances. It takes two to make a happy marriage, and so far we seem to have a total of one willing partner. But I do need to know why—why you have spurned me, why you rejected an opportunity last evening with Heath that many musicians with half your talent would kill for. Deuce take it, what happened in your past? What skeleton are you hiding in your wardrobe?”

She almost noticeably slumped into her corner.

“You are right,” she said. “You deserve an explanation. Perhaps I would have offered it in Sydney Gardens if I had realized that you were really serious in your offer and not merely acting from romantic impulse. I ought to have told you when you took me walking in Hyde Park—but I did not. I intended to write to you from Bath. But now I will have to say it in person.”

“From Bath?” he said. “Why not from London?”

“Because,” she said with a sigh, “I was afraid you would come to confront me after reading the letter. I was afraid that you would not see sense.”

She looked up at him, and he held her gaze. A smile tugged at the corners of her lips.

“Do you never see sense?” she asked him.

“There is a fine line between sense and nonsense,” he said. “I have not yet worked out exactly where you belong on the line, Frances. Tell me about the skeleton in the wardrobe.”

“Oh,” she said, “there are enough to fill a whole mansionful of wardrobes. It is not one single thing, but a whole host of things. I made a mess of my life after my father died, that is all. But I was fortunate enough to be able to break free and build a new life for myself. It is what I am going back to now. It is a life that cannot include you.”

“Because I am a viscount, I suppose,” he said irritably, “and heir to an earldom. Because I live much of my life in London and mingle with the ton.”

“Yes,” she said. “Precisely.”

“I am also Lucius Marshall,” he said, and had the satisfaction of seeing her eyes brighten with tears before she looked down at her hands.

The carriage had lumbered around a bend in the road, and the evening sunlight slanted through the window beside him to shine on her hair.

“Tell me about Lady Lyle,” he said. “You lived with her for a couple of years but almost bit my head off when I told you last evening that I had invited her to hear you sing. Then she dropped a word in Portia’s fertile ear. She could only have meant mischief.”

“She was very fond of my father,” she said. “I believe she was in love with him. Perhaps—no, probably—she was his mistress. She sponsored my come-out and was attentive to me in other ways too. When he died, she invited me to live with her and it seemed natural to me to go there. I do not believe she meant me harm. But he left enormous debts behind him, some of them to her. I was quite destitute, though I did have hopes of making an advantageous marriage.”