Geoff pushed away from the desk and made purposefully for the door, threading his way back through the empty rooms that wouldn't be empty once he brought Mary home as his bride. If he rode quickly, he might be able to catch the more cumbersome coach before it even reached the Oxford Arms. His blood—and other parts of his anatomy—quickened at the thought of Mary already tucked away into his coach, speeding through the night to be by his side. He still couldn't believe, even with the preparations made, the coach dispatched, the precious special license crackling in his pocket, and the parson summoned, that she had really chosen him.

Geoff remembered her as he had first seen her two years ago at the start of her first Season. Two years, one month, and three days to be precise, since time as Geoff reckoned it had never been quite the same again. There might have been the proverbial clap of thunder, but Geoff couldn't tell for sure; he couldn't hear anything over the sudden roaring in his ears. She had favored him with a dance. It had been a country dance, of the sprightlier sort, but to Geoff, every skip and hop seemed suspended in the air, every turn about the room a journey of a thousand miles. The music, the feet pounding the floorboards, the voices and laughter, had all receded somewhere behind the garden gate created by Mary's smile, and the periodic press of her hand in his.

And that had been all. The dance had ended and Mary's other admirers had closed back around her with all the finality of brambles around a sleeping princess. The following day, Geoff had returned to France to resume his duties in the League of the Purple Gentian. He had tucked the image of Mary away with his volumes of poetry and his collection of Renaissance etchings as something to be taken out and marveled over, something beautiful and pure in a world gone mad. Something worth fighting for. The hazy memory of Mary's face, lit like a Madonna with a hundred dripping candles, buoyed Geoff through his forays into the grim underworlds of Paris.

It seemed nothing short of a miracle that she should, after two years, still be unwed, and even more of a miracle that out of all the men in London she would look favorably upon him.

It wasn't that Geoff didn't know he was accounted a good catch. As society reckoned such things, he was right up there with the heirs to earldoms and considerably above ambitious second sons. He had a title, a respectable fortune, and all his own hair—although the latter fact was immaterial to most of the matchmaking mamas who thronged London's busy ballrooms. He could have been a knock-kneed dwarf with a hook for an arm and still made it to the upper end of the matrimonial lists. Viscounts, after all, weren't exactly thick on the ground, not even in Mayfair.

But he also knew that his wasn't the sort of face and form to set fans fluttering and females swooning when he swaggered into a ballroom. Geoff didn't swagger; he walked. He had never perfected the pose in the ballroom door, never cultivated the slow stare that stripped a lady down to her chemise in one easy arc of the eyes.

On the contrary, much of Geoff's life had been spent in learning how to deflect attention rather than command it. He had learned stillness in the quiet corridors of Pinchingdale House, and his lean form and aquiline features possessed the benefit of being unobjectionable, unremarkable, and entirely unmemorable. Miles, whose attempts to disguise himself generally resembled those of an elephant sticking a lamp shade on its head, had observed disgruntledly that Geoff didn't even need a disguise to slip about unseen.

"My dear boy," replied Sir Percy Blakeney, with a debonair twirl of the quizzing glass, "sink me if our Geoffrey isn't a very prince of shadows."

And so Geoff had gone on his shadowy way, gathering information, thwarting French plots, and building up an impressive repertoire of contacts in cities across the Continent. Richard might live for the dashing escapade, and Miles might garner genuine glee from bashing French operatives over the head, but Geoff was more than content to mastermind from the shadows. He had his friends, his books, his work—and he believed himself happy.

Until he met Mary Alsworthy.

Handing off his message to the courier, Geoff drew on his riding gloves and bounded down the steps at the front of the house. His groom held his horse for him, saddled and ready, not all that happy to have been dragged from the warm stables, and completely unaware that he was about to carry his master to the most momentous event of his life.

If Geoff had had his way, he would have shown up at Mary's door, hat in hand, and endured the requisite interview with her father, the one that began "I assure you, it is my every intention to make your daughter happy," and ended with an announcement in The Times. Then he would have ridden out to Gloucestershire to endure a decidedly less businesslike—even if just as predictable—meeting with his mother, who tended to regard her only surviving child with the same sort of proprietary air that Bonaparte felt for most of Europe. He knew his mother would cut up stiff about his engagement, with a gale of recriminations that would make her tantrums upon being told that Geoff was going to France look like a pleasant afternoon's tea party. It was, reflected Geoff, rather like the challenges tossed before heroes in old storybooks. If he could weather a full week of his mother's vapors, he would have more than earned his princess.

But on Friday, just as Geoff's valet had been loading his trunks into his curricle in preparation for a weekend house party in Sussex, Mary had sent him a note with "urgent" underscored four times. Fearing the worst, Geoff told the groom to unhitch the horses, ordered the trunks placed back in his dressing room, and rushed off to meet Mary in the appointed place in the park.

With her well-bribed maid standing a circumspect three trees away, Mary had tearfully informed him that All Was Lost.

"Sweetheart, don't fret," said Geoff, who had never learned to think in capital letters. "Surely it can't be as bad as all that."

Mary hastily averted her eyes, her entire form drooping like a wilted tulip. "No—it's worse!"

After a great deal of coaxing, Geoff had succeeded in persuading Mary to remove her hands from her face and tell him, as Mary put it, the Terrible Truth. Her parents, she explained, wished to marry her off forthwith.

"That is rather the point of the marriage market," commented Geoff with a hint of amusement. "And if that's your parents' goal, I'm sure we can satisfy them on that score."

"You wish to marry me?"

"Surely you can't be under any doubt," said Geoff fondly, thinking of how lovely she was, and what a miracle it was that she should be so unaware of her own powers.

Mary's dark lashes veiled her eyes. "But what about your mother? I have no family, no fortune…. What if she objects?"

There was no "if" about it. Snobbery vied with hypochondria for preeminence as his mother's favorite pastime. She would take noisily to her bed, threatening imminent demise. When that failed, she would set a cry that would be heard all the way from Gloucestershire to London, and probably as far north as Edinburgh. His mother, when she forgot her delicate condition and failing nerves (or was it her failing condition and delicate nerves? Geoff had never been quite clear on that point), revealed the possession of a set of lungs that would be the envy of any Master of the Hounds.

"She can object," replied Geoff practically, "but there's not much else she can do about it."

"Oh, if only we could be married at once!" Mary wrung her gloved hands. "You say you love me now, but there will be talk…and your mother…How can I be sure that you won't forsake me?"

With a crooked smile, Geoff lightly touched her hand. "Trust me. There's not much danger of that."

Mary paced two rapid steps away from him and came to an abrupt stop, her finely boned back quivering with emotion through the film of blue muslin. "I couldn't bear it! Not after…" Her voice failed her.

Geoff's smile faded. Bounding after her, he possessed himself of both her hands, asking earnestly, "What proof of my devotion can I offer? How can I convince you how highly I honor and esteem you?"

Her only answer was a muffled sob and an emphatic shake of her bonneted head. One perfect tear trickled down the sculpted loveliness of her cheek.

Geoff did what any sensible man would do when confronted with a weeping woman. He began promising things. Anything. Just so long as she would smile again. A phoenix feather from the farthest end of the earth, John the Baptist's head on a platter, jewels, furs, rotten boroughs, just so long as she would consent to stop crying.

And so it was that Geoff found himself staggering back to Pinchingdale House through the twilight, having promised a beaming Mary that he would present himself at her door—or, at least, somewhere beneath her bedroom window—in two nights' time, with a speedy traveling coach, a special license, and a set of matched rings. In that same bemused daze, he had canceled his trip to Sussex, postponed all his engagements for the next two weeks, and rousted out a tame parson who was more than willing to conduct a midnight wedding ceremony so Geoff and Mary could set off into the sunrise as man and wife.

He might not like the idea of an elopement, but if the end result meant that his goddess was going to be his wife, Geoff wasn't going to tempt fate by being too persnickety about the means.

As he clattered down Kingsway toward Holborn, passing shuttered shops and the odd drunken dandy straggling away from the pleasures of Covent Garden, Geoff spotted a familiar vehicle lumbering away up ahead. The family coach might not have much to recommend it in the way of speed, but it was outdated enough as to have become easily recognizable. Geoff would have spurred his horse on, but the cobbles were slick with a recent rain and the effluvia from dozens of windows, so he was forced, instead, to keep to a responsible trot as he gradually closed the distance.