The duke’s mouth fell open. “What?”

“The entire estate,” James repeated. “I will pay you an allowance, and no one need know except for the solicitors. But I will not be responsible for you and your harebrained schemes. I will never again take responsibility for any debts you might incur—nor for any theft. The next time around, you’ll go to prison.”

“That’s absurd,” his father spluttered. “I couldn’t—you couldn’t possibly—no!”

“Then make your good-byes to Staffordshire,” James said. “You might want to pay a special visit to my mother’s grave, if you’re so certain she would have been distressed at the sale of the house, let alone the churchyard.”

His father opened his mouth, but James raised a hand.

“If I were to let you keep the estate, you’d fling Daisy’s inheritance after that which you’ve already lost. There would be nothing left within two years, and I will have betrayed my closest friend for no reason.”

“Your closest friend, eh?” His father was instantly diverted into another train of thought. “I’ve never had a woman as a friend, but Theodora looks like a man, of course, and—”

“Father!”

The duke harrumphed. “Can’t say I like the way you’ve taken to interrupting me. I suppose if I agree to this ridiculous scheme of yours I can expect to look forward to daily humiliation.”

It was an implicit concession.

“You see,” his father said, a smile spreading across his face now that the conversation was over, “it all came well. Your mother always said that, you know. ‘All’s well that ends well.’ ”

James couldn’t stop himself from asking one more thing, though, God knows, he already knew the answer. “Don’t you care in the least about what you’re doing to me—and to Daisy?”

A hint of red crept back into his father’s cheeks. “The girl couldn’t do better than to marry you!”

“Daisy will marry me believing that I’m in love with her, and I’m not. She deserves to be wooed and genuinely adored by her husband.”

“Love and marriage shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath,” his father said dismissively. But his eyes slid away from James’s.

“And you’ve done the same to me. Love and marriage may not come together all that often, but I will have no chance at all. What’s more, I will begin my marriage with a lie that will destroy it if Daisy ever finds out. Do you realize that? If she learns that I betrayed her in such a callous way . . . not only my marriage, but our friendship, will be over.”

“If you really think she’ll fly into a temper, you’d better get an heir on her in the first few months,” his father said with the air of someone offering practical advice. “A woman scorned, and all that. If she’s disgruntled enough, I suppose she might run off with another man. But if you already have an heir—and a spare, if you can—you could let her go.”

“My wife will never run off with another man.” That growled out of James’s chest from a place he didn’t even know existed.

His father heaved himself out of his chair. “You as much as called me a fool; well, I’ll do the same for you. No man in his right mind thinks that marriage is a matter of billing and cooing. Your mother and I were married for the right reasons, to do with family obligations and financial negotiations. We did what was necessary to have you and left it there. Your mother couldn’t face the effort needed for a spare, but we didn’t waste any tears over it. You were always a healthy boy.” Then he added, “Barring that time you almost went blind, of course. We would have tried for another, if worse came to worst.”

James pushed himself to his feet, hearing his father’s voice dimly through a tangle of hideous thoughts that he couldn’t bring himself to spit out.

“Neither of us raised you to have such rubbishing romantic views,” the duke tossed over his shoulder as he left the room.

Having reached the age of nineteen years, James had thought he understood his place in life. He’d learned the most important lessons: how to ride a horse, hold his liquor, and defend himself in a duel.

No one had ever taught him—and he had never imagined the necessity of learning—how to betray the one person whom you truly cared for in life. The only person who genuinely loved you. How to break that person’s heart, whether it be tomorrow, or five years, or ten years in the future.

Because Daisy would learn the truth someday. He knew it with a bone-deep certainty: somehow, she would discover that he had pretended to fall in love so that she would marry him . . . and she would never forgive him.

Two

Theodora Saxby, known to James as Daisy, but to herself as Theo, was trying very hard not to think about Lady Corning’s ball, which had been held the night before. But, as is often the case when one tries to avoid a topic, the only thing her mind saw fit to review was a scene from said ball.

The girls she had overheard chattering about her resemblance to a boy weren’t even being particularly unkind. They weren’t saying it to her, after all. And she wouldn’t have minded their comments so much if she didn’t have the distinct impression that the gentlemen at the ball agreed with them.

But what could she possibly do about it? She stared despairingly into her glass. Her mother’s fear of just that assessment—though Mama refused to acknowledge it—had led to Theo’s hair being turned to ringlets with a curling iron. The gown she’d worn, like everything else in her wardrobe, was white and frilly and altogether feminine. It was picked out in pearls and touches of pink, a combination that (in her opinion) did nothing but emphasize the decidedly unfeminine cast of her profile.

She loathed her profile almost as much as she loathed the dress. If she didn’t have to worry about people mistaking her for a boy—not that they really did, but they couldn’t stop remarking on the resemblance; at any rate, if she didn’t have to worry about that—she would never again wear pink. Or pearls. There was something dreadfully banal about the way pearls shimmered.

For a moment she distracted herself by mentally ripping her dress apart, stripping it of its ruffles and pearls and tiny sleeves. Given a choice, she would dress in plum-colored corded silk and sleek her hair away from her face without a single flyaway curl. Her only hair adornment would be an enormous feather—a black one—arching backward so it brushed her shoulder. If her sleeves were elbow-length, she could trim them with a narrow edging of black fur. Or perhaps swansdown, with the same at the neck. Or she could put a feather trim at the neck; the white would look shocking against the plum velvet.

That led to the idea that she could put a ruff at the neck and trim that with a narrow strip of swansdown. It would be even better if the sleeves weren’t opaque fabric but nearly transparent, like that new Indian silk her friend Lucinda had been wearing the previous night, and she would have them quite wide, so they billowed and then gathered tight at the elbow. Or perhaps the wrist would be more dramatic. . . .

She could see herself entering a ballroom in that costume. No one would titter about whether she looked like a girl or a boy. She would pause for a moment on the top of the steps, gathering everyone’s gaze, and then she would snap open her fan. . . . No, fans were tiresomely overdone. She’d have to come up with something new.