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“A pleasure to meet you, Lord Seymour,” she returned with a smile.

“Your Grace, you have a much better sense of humor than your husband deserves, if this morning is any indication. I watched him nearly swallow his tongue when you came through the church doors.”

“I shall treasure the image, My Lord,” Laura said, and found she meant it.

“As will I. It was tremendously entertaining. And please, call me Everett. My best friend’s wife is my friend, too.”

“Then you must call me Laura,” she offered.

There was something genuinely disarming about Everett’s easy warmth, a relief after a morning of careful composure.

“I fear I must make the rounds, but I will see you, I am sure.”

“Ah, and here is my dearest friend.”

“I will leave you to it.”

Everett walked away just as Kitty found her, squeezing her hand tight enough to cut off her circulation.

“You looked beautiful,” she murmured, close to Laura’s ear. “And he could not stop looking at you, which I will remind you of at length the next time you insist you feel nothing where he’s concerned.”

“Kitty!” Laura hissed.

“Later, I know.” Kitty released her, already turning to greet the next guest with a bright smile, leaving her to face the slow procession of well-wishers on her own.

They came in twos and threes—acquaintances from past Seasons, distant relations of her husband, a few of her father’s business associates—and each offered the same careful congratulations, the sort that skated just above the surface of what everyone in the room already seemed to know.

“How fortunate to be wed at your age, and so well,” Lady Britland trilled.

“Thank you, Lady Britland.”

At my age? I am hardly two-and-twenty. Yet, by the ton’s standards, this is old for marriage.

“What a match. Your father must be so relieved,” Lady Marlowe commented.

“Thank you, Lady Marlowe.”

Oh, he most surely is.

Each congratulation carried a faint undertone Laura could not label. Yet she felt that every guest in the room understood perfectly well that she had not chosen this match. She wanted so badly to scream, to speak her mind, but she remained polite and kept her thoughts to herself.

One matron squeezed her hand with practiced sympathy. “Men are fickle. You just need to learn to ride the waves,” she said, as though Laura had been handed a difficult horse rather than a husband. “You will learn to abide the Duke’s temperament in time, I am sure.”

“I will remember that.”

Laura smiled through all of it. She thanked each guest, and by the end of the second hour, she felt as though she had spent her entire wedding breakfast being congratulated on her own sale.

By the time the last guest had left, the light outside had shifted toward afternoon.

Laura stood in the front hall in her traveling clothes. Now that the celebration had ended, she realized that she had barely set eyes on her husband since the wedding.

Her father crossed the distance between them with the stiff, formal gait of a man performing the role of a father rather than being one.

The silence stretched, awkward and cold, filling the space where another man might have offered his daughter a word of comfort, or even simple affection, on the last morning she woke beneath his roof.

Suddenly, Iris appeared at her side, with the Duke’s hand resting lightly on her shoulder.

“Aren’t you going to hug your daughter goodbye?” she asked sincerely, looking up at Lord Harwood. “She’s leaving. You’re supposed to hug people when they leave.”