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She didn’t have a man. Her heart was in pieces. The ton had laughed while she stumbled out of the Pavilion.

Mother’s fingers tightened on Papa’s. “Now,” she said, “my parents are dead. Your grandparents’ disapproval cannot haunt us any longer. Now you have faced down worse than gossip and are still standing. And now,” she added, with a fierce little lift of her chin, “I am weary of pretending my heart made a mistake when it chose your father.”

“We have wasted enough years,” Papa said. His gaze gentled as it moved back to Pepper. “Your mama told me about Brighton. About the Pavilion. About Wyndale.” His voice put the name somewhere between a curse and a question. “Did you make him the crème?”

Pepper swallowed. “Yes,” she said. Her fingers curled against her skirt, remembering the way Chester’s eyes had closed on that first spoonful. “Papa’s recipe. I put it in front of Wyndale without knowing that he was…” She broke off, shook her head. “It is all too much.”

“We know,” Mother said softly.

Mrs. Hart cleared her throat. “It seems that I’m also to blame,” she said, “I may have…over-corrected. In keeping you from one sort of pain, I steered you straight into another.”

Pepper looked at her. “You took me to Harley Street,” she said. “You knew. You both knew. All this time.”

Mrs. Hart’s expression did something complicated. “Your mother was breaking her own heart,” she said. “I thought, in my folly, that once your grandparents were gone she would…fix it. Bring him into the light. When she did not, I grew impatient.” She lifted her chin bravely. “So yes. I walked you to Harley Street. Often. I thought if you saw what a good man your father was, you would not be ashamed to have his blood. And I thought if Lady Erica saw how much you loved that world, she might reconsider keeping the halves of your life so very far apart.”

“And you said nothing,” Mother said to Mrs. Hart, but there was tired affection under the sting. “You meddlesome angel.”

“Someone had to,” Mrs. Hart said. “You were very busy pretending not to miss him.” She sighed. “But the difference between you and me was that your husband lived. You still had a chance. Still do.”

Pepper pressed her hands to her temples. “My head is spinning,” she said. “You two have been…married on rainy days. Mrs. Hart has been smuggling me to Harley Street. Aunt Florence has been providing cover stories. And I have been the only person in the house who did not realize my life was a farce.”

“Not a farce,” Papa said gently. “A story. We have simply reached the part where the truth refuses to stay politely offstage.”

He was right. She just didn’t know what to do with it.

Mother drew in a breath, straightened, and fixed Pepper with the look that usually preceded either ball invitations or battle.

“Which brings us,” she said, “to Wyndale.”

Pepper’s heart lurched.

Of course it did. The law, the flour, the nursery full of small children—and the man who had kissed her as Chester and broken her as Wyndale.

For the first time, it struck her that this might not be a conversation about Society at all, but about what she wanted.

About whether she meant to keep the old, foolish promise she’d once scrawled in her head over Papa’s recipe card: I will not hate the man I love for the name he was born to carry.

She had no idea whether that would mean shutting the door on him forever…

…or daring to open it and let him all the way in.

Chapter 32

Chester had never been more aware of his heartbeat in his life.

The carriage rocked to a halt outside the house just as the lamps in the street were being lit, one by one, like small, golden battlements against the dark. Rain had threatened all afternoon; now it merely hung in the air, soft and cool, beading on the horses’ flanks and the shoulders of the waiting footman.

Inside the carriage, Anna chose that exact moment to hiccup.

Chester adjusted his hold on her, palm spread across the impossibly small back beneath her borrowed shawl. “Not now, please,” he murmured into the warm fuzz of her hair. “We spoke about timing.”

Across from him, Margy sat very straight on the seat edge, clutching the skirt of her new frock in both hands as if she might float away without anchor. Bess’s legs swung, scuffed boots drumming lightly against the carriage wall; she had commandeered one of the tassels from the interior and was whispering some complicated game to it.

His mother—Dowager Duchess of Wyndale, terror of half of Sussex and all of Mayfair—sat beside him in iron-boned silence, chin lifted, mouth a thin line.

“This is folly,” she said, for the twelfth time since they’d left Wyndale House. “You arrive at a respectable address with three strange children as if you are bringing calling cards.”

“We are not strange,” Margy said, scandalized. “I am nearly five.”