Here is the gift I promised you from Jamaica. I expect it will arrive a year or two before myself, but I saw it in a shop and knew it for the perfect choice. The cameo reminded me of your profile portraits, and its subject reminded me of you. It is my wish that you'll wear it in the best of health and happiness.
Yours,
Tristan Nesbitt
The cameo, set in a beautiful white gold bezel with three tiny diamonds, featured a girl carved of mother-of-pearl in profile on an oval of black jet. She'd cherished it and been thrilled to think the pretty, curly-haired young miss on it reminded Tris of her. She must have read the words My dear and Yours a million times, wishing there were some way he could be hers. But after a year had passed, and then two, she'd given up those childish dreams and put both the cameo and the note away.
After another year, she'd taken his profile portrait from her wall and put that away, too.
And now, he wasn't even Tris anymore. He was Lord Hawkridge, a strange and distant man. But she couldn't help thinking that, now that he was a marquess, he was no longer unsuitable. Perhaps—
"Are you ready yet?" Corinna called from the doorway.
"Almost. Come in a moment." As her sisters entered, she threaded a delicate chain through the cameo's bale and quickly fastened it around her neck. Then she lifted a little pot of clear gloss. Watching in the mirror, she slicked it on her mouth.
"A Lady of Distinction doesn't approve of lip salve," Corinna informed her. "In The Mirror of the Graces, she says—"
"A Lady of Distinction can go hang," Alexandra interrupted. "Do you expect Lord Hawkridge might have stayed for dinner?"
"Oh, yes." Juliana straightened Corinna's pink satin sash. "Griffin has asked him to stay the night, so he can assist him with some sort of problem at the vineyard tomorrow morning."
So that was what Tris and Griffin had been so busy discussing while Alexandra was trying to keep the ratafia puffs from Lord Shelton. If Tris would be here through tomorrow, she thought with a little frisson of excitement, perhaps she might have time to make him notice her. But she was terribly inexperienced…
Did she have what it would take to tempt a marquess?
"And has Lord Shelton departed?" she asked with not a little trepidation.
His presence could ruin everything.
"Of course. He was invited only to take tea, after all." Corinna sat carefully on Alexandra's blue damask bedcovering. "He said he hopes you'll feel better soon."
"I'm absolutely recovered," Alexandra assured her. Even more so now that she knew she'd escaped the dreaded proposal. She handed her maid a blue ribbon. "Lord Hawkridge didn't seem to mind staying?"
"Not at all." Juliana smiled at her in the mirror. "I don't mind him staying, either. He's quite handsome, isn't he? In a rugged way, I mean."
"He's gorgeous." Corinna flung herself back on the bed. "I want to paint him."
"He's mine," Alexandra said quietly.
The room fell silent.
"You cannot be serious," Juliana finally said. "You're marrying Lord Shelton."
"I am not. I thought I made that clear this afternoon." Alexandra turned from the dressing table and glanced up. "Thank you, Mary. That will be all."
As her maid slipped from the room, Alexandra squared her shoulders. "I mean to marry Lord Hawkridge if he will have me." Juliana gasped, but Alexandra rushed on. "I hope you two will support me in this. I'm aware it seems rash, but the truth is, I've been in love with him since I was fifteen. Or years earlier. I'm not sure."
Corinna sat upright again, her eyes round as blue saucers. "Does he know?"
"Of course not. Last I saw him, he was a grown man of twenty-one and I was still in the schoolroom. He wasn't supposed to even notice me."
"He noticed us," Corinna disagreed. "He talked to us quite often, and he used to tease us mercilessly."
Alexandra sighed. "That wasn't the sort of noticing I was hoping for."
"In any case, he was a mere mister then," Juliana pointed out, "with no prospects."
"I never cared."
Juliana smoothed her yellow skirts. "Father would have cared."
"I know. And I accepted that then. But now everything's changed—"
"Good evening, girls." Griffin appeared in the doorway. "Father would have cared about what?"
The sisters exchanged glances before Juliana looked toward him and smiled. "Father would have cared to see one of us wed to Lord Hawkridge."
Griffin blinked. "Let us hear none of that. I didn't invite Tristan here as a potential suitor."
"Why not?" Corinna asked. "You've invited every other unmarried man in all of Britain."
"Not quite yet, but I'm working on it." He flashed her a crooked grin, then nodded toward a book on Alexandra's bedside table. "Have you been reading The Mirror of the Graces?"
"Oh, yes. Every night," she assured him, ignoring her sisters' muffled giggles.
Griffin had given them each a copy of the etiquette manual, authored by "A Lady of Distinction," in the hope that they'd learn to deport themselves in a manner conducive to winning fine husbands.
He was leaving no stone unturned in his quest to get the three of them married off.
"Excellent," he said. "I trust you're feeling better now?"
"Much better, thank you. Shall we go down to dinner?"
Downstairs, she thought as she trailed her siblings out of the room, Lord Hawkridge was waiting. Just realizing she would see him again made a pleasant hum warm her body.
And to think, only this morning she'd considered finding love to be an unrealistic, childish expectation.
PRETENDING indifference toward Lady Alexandra was one of the hardest things Tristan had ever done. And years of practice didn't seem to be making it any easier.
Dinner had been pure torture, chitchatting with Griffin about his trouble with the vineyard while all the while he could feel Alexandra's gaze on him. Now, their little party having removed themselves
