Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Tristan Somerset had expected many things from his wedding day.
He had expected the tedium of it, for one—the long hours of polite congratulation, the receiving line of distant relations whose names he was meant to remember and rarely did, the wedding breakfast with its endless toasts from gentlemen who had known his father and felt, on this account, entitled to inflict their reminiscences upon the son.
He had expected the faint, mechanical satisfaction of a duty discharged.
He had expected, in some dim, unexamined corner of his mind, that he would feel rather more than he did at acquiring a wife, and had already made his peace with the fact that he would not.
Eliza would make a suitable duchess. That was the only thing that he needed to concern himself with. It mattered not that he found her as dull as dry toast. Dull meant no propensity for scandal, which was how he preferred to live his life.
He turned toward his bride, reaching with practiced ease for the delicate edge of her veil.
It was a small, almost perfunctory gesture—one he had performed in his mind a dozen times already during the carriage ride from Somerset House.
Lift the veil. Kiss the bride. Proceed with the rest of the day as planned.
Swift, chaste and perfectly polite. That was how things were done.
That was how he did things. He had organized the entire affair down to the choice of hymns and the precise minute at which the carriages should arrive at the breakfast, and if there was a faint, sour pleasure in such management, he did not examine it too closely.
His fingers brushed the fine fabric and lifted.
And his world—so carefully structured and ordered—tilted sharply on its axis.
This was not Eliza.
For one suspended, disorienting moment, his mind refused to reconcile what his eyes clearly saw.
He had a brief, almost absurd impression that the church itself had shifted around him, that the candle flames had bent in some sudden draught, that the very stones beneath his polished boots had given a small, drunken lurch.
He blinked once. Slowly. As though the gesture might rearrange the woman before him into someone she was not.
The features beneath the veil were familiar—striking in their own right, framed by light brown hair coiled in some intricate arrangement that caught the morning light from the high windows, and bright, intelligent eyes the precise color of strong tea, currently fixed upon him with an expression of unmistakable resolve.
Imogen Harrington.
Not the quiet, dutiful bride he had agreed to wed.
Her friend.
A woman he knew well enough to recognize on sight—and not nearly well enough to ever have considered in this position.
He had a vague, almost insultingly indistinct impression of her: a low, warm laugh at some country house party two summers past; a quick remark about Byron at a literary salon he had wandered into by mistake; a figure in green silk standing near the windows at Lady Carrington’s rout, observing the room with the faintly amused detachment of a woman who had decided, sensibly enough, that the room was not worth observing very closely.
He had never intentionally sought her out because somehow he had known that she, with her abundant, lush curves, could make a man lose his head. Make him lose his head.
For all the potential distractions she presented, he’d never have considered her a woman capable of this level of deception.
His hand stilled midair, the veil now fully lifted, the gauzy fabric draped back over the small, jeweled comb that held her hair in place.
The morning light caught the high arch of her cheekbone and the soft, betraying flutter at the base of her throat—the only visible sign that she was not as composed as she appeared.
She was exposed to him now. Only to him, in that intimate, suspended moment before the world caught up to what his eyes had already seen.
Imogen did not look away.
If anything, she lifted her chin slightly, the smallest possible adjustment, as if daring him to speak.
To react.
To expose her.
A dozen calculations fired through his mind in rapid succession.
The ceremony was complete.
The vows had been spoken.
Before witnesses. Before God. Before the bishop, who was a personal friend of his late father’s and who had, at the breakfast last week, congratulated Tristan on the eminent suitability of the match with a heartiness that had nearly put him off his coffee.
There would be no quiet undoing of this. No simple correction. No discreet word with the vicar over a glass of port and the matter set right.
Annulment would require explanation.
Explanation would invite scandal.
Scandal would touch not only him—but his title, his family, the unblemished name his grandfather had spent forty years restoring after a previous duke’s fondness for the gaming tables had nearly seen the whole edifice crumble.
His mother, in her widow’s house at the dower, who had wept softly at the news of his engagement and called it the first good thing to happen to the family in a decade.
And her. Imogen. Whatever protection his name afforded her now, the absence of it would ruin her absolutely.
His gaze sharpened.
What the devil had she done?
More importantly—
Why?
And where the devil was his actual fiancée?
A flicker of something unexpected stirred beneath the initial shock, beneath the affront, beneath the cold mechanism of consequence already grinding into motion in his head. Not quite amusement. No, this was something sharper. Something dangerously close to intrigue.
He would have assumed that being raised the daughter of an earl, she would have been more suited to laughter in drawing rooms and well-turned remarks at supper, not to bold, irreversible acts of fraud committed at the altar of God before half the gentry of three counties.
He had been mistaken.
And Tristan Somerset did not, as a rule, care for being mistaken.
“Your Grace?” the vicar prompted gently, with the small, encouraging cough of a man accustomed to nudging nervous bridegrooms through the final beat of the ceremony.
Ah… Yes, there was still an audience.
Tristan became acutely aware of the expectant silence that had fallen over the church—the soft creak of a pew somewhere behind him, the faint cough of an elderly relation, the dozens of eyes fixed upon the altar awaiting the final, ceremonial gesture that would release them all into the more comfortable business of congratulation and gossip.
He lowered his head slightly. He forced his expression into something composed.
Controlled. Untouched by the upheaval beneath.
He had spent thirty-two years cultivating the particular blandness of expression that had carried him through three nursemaids, six years of Eton, and one extraordinarily tedious interview with the Prince Regent. It served him well now.
“I see,” he murmured, low enough that only she could hear, the words pitched so close to her ear that he saw the faint shiver they produced along the soft skin of her temple. “This is... unexpected.”
Imogen’s lips parted, as if she might respond—but he did not give her the opportunity.
Instead, he did what was required of him.
He kissed his bride.