Page 58 of In With a Chance

The voice in the doorway chuckled. “If your parents have been anything like mine, they’ve been insufferable. I don’t blame you for needing a moment. See you in a minute, then!”

The door closed. They were drenched in darkness again.

Only then did Ernest permit himself to breathe.

“I have to go,” she whispered.

“Gwen—”

“There is nothing more to be said on this matter,” came Gwen’s quiet voice, resolute and without any emotion. “We must accept what this is, Ernest—Lord Frasemere. Perhaps, if we had met before, if my newfound riches had been even richer, you might be in with a chance…but it is an impossibility. We… We cannot be together.”

The door was opened once again, allowing the billowing light to intrude, and before Ernest could take a step forward, Gwen had slipped through the doorway and into the welcoming saloon.

As the door closed behind her, Ernest leaned heavily against the bookcase and allowed it to take his weight as his knees trembled.

That had been almost too close.

Chapter Eleven

September 29, 1841

Gwen had tried. She really had.

She was not a patient woman, she knew that, yet she had attempted to control the burning temper that had flowed through her from the moment her mother had asked her to step into the dining room.

Really, it had been an ambush.

“I just thought, as you don’t have anything else to do this morning…” her mother said excitedly.

Gwen scowled as she dropped into the seat her mother had pulled out for her. “Who says I don’t have something to do?”

“Well, you never do, dear,” the dowager viscountess said, most unflatteringly, though with a charming and clearly well-meaning smile. “Now, there is so much to do—”

“There is?”

Gwen had not really thought about it. She had not thought much about the Marquess of Ravenshurst the last few days as it was, and her wedding to the man had momentarily slipped her mind.

She wondered why.

“Gwen?”

Gwen blinked. Her mother was holding up two scraps of lace that looked virtually identical. “I beg your pardon?”

Lady Pernrith rolled her eyes. “Honestly! Jessy and Reeny were far more excited about their weddings.”

The last thing she needed in this moment was to be compared—unfavorably—to her two married older sisters. “Of course they were.”

“Well, they were,” her mother said placidly, laying down one of the scraps of lace and picking up a third, which was indistinguishable both from the first and the second. “What about these, then?”

Gwen swallowed. Precisely what she was supposed to be doing was completely beyond her; she hadn’t been paying attention. Was she…attempting to pick one? But for what?

“That one,” she hazarded, pointing at the scrap of lace in her mother’s left hand.

Quite by happenstance, the dowager viscountess beamed. “That is exactly what I was thinking!”

Gwen’s shoulders slumped with relief. “Oh, good.”

“Which means we now need to think about the invitations,” said her mother eagerly, dropping the pieces of lace back onto the dining room table and lunging toward a stack of paper. “I asked Mrs. Kinley to visit every engravers on Fleet Street—”