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The woman wrote to him as well, not as frequently, but regularly. A day came when a letter from Yasmin appeared on the entry table after luncheon; luckily, Lydia noticed it in passing. That Frenchified handwriting caught her attention.

The return address was for Mr. Addison, so apparently, Yasmin had moved on to another house party.

“My dear brother,” Lydia said at dinner that night, “so many people are asking me whether you have a tendre for Lady Stella. Surely, you feel, as I do, that the lady is principled and intelligent. Her spectacles are strangely flattering.”

Giles looked at her over his roast beef. “I like her.”

Excellent.

“Do you like her more than you like Blanche?” she asked boldly.

“Yes.”

With that, Lydia gave up her hope of seeing Blanche as a countess. Stella would do. If only Lydia could be certain that Giles’s attachment to Yasmin had been fleeting and died from not seeing her. Not to mention not hearing from her.

Yet he kept writing the woman every night.

Lydia found it pitiful. Her brother had no dignity. Yasmin never responded! Well, she had responded, but he didn’t know that.

As far as he knew, Yasmin had turned to another man.

Giles’s persistence was beginning to pose a problem, given Lydia’s upcoming nuptials. She and Rupert would travel to Belgium on their wedding trip, tracking a rumor of excellent bloodhounds bred to high standards. She was looking forward to being Lady Pettigrew, a future marchioness.

If only she didn’t have to worry about her brother sending more pitiable letters, once she wasn’t there to confiscate them.

Just when she was considering that she might have to bribe Duckworthy, Giles missed a day. She crept down the stairs in the early morning and discovered the salver in the entry held a few letters to peers . . . and nothing for Lady Yasmin.

Another day passed without a letter, and then a third.

The morning before her wedding day, fortune turned in her favor. She and Giles were seated at breakfast, and Lydia was devouring The Morning Post’s gossip column, which not only detailed her wedding gown but claimed, untruthfully, that she would arrive at St. Paul’s in a coach drawn by four white horses. Without question, crowds of Londoners would cluster around the church door, hoping the groom would toss coins.

“Goodness me,” Lydia said, clearing her throat. “I know that I have been rather unkind to Lady Yasmin, but I must be the first to offer my congratulations. It says here that she has agreed to become a duchess.”

Her brother didn’t look up, but she saw a pulse beating in his forehead. “Indeed?” he said flatly.

Another person might have thought that he had lost interest in the woman, but Lydia knew Giles. His lips had tightened. In fact, he looked so forbidding that she actually felt a bit nervous. But after all, she was merely noting what was written in the newspaper.

“Here,” she said, handing over the sheet. “You can read it for yourself. I have a hundred things to do before tomorrow morning!” And with that, she left.

The next morning, she confiscated one final letter addressed to Yasmin, her last-ditch effort to save her brother from a terrible marriage.

There is only so much you can do for a person. She pitied Giles; she truly did. She had done her best, and she would marry Rupert with a clear conscience. Her father would have been proud of her efforts. The late earl may have been weak and light-fingered as a youth, but he would have hated to see his son repeat his marital mistakes.

The next morning, she walked slowly down the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral, her hand tucked under her brother’s elbow. She caught sight of two girls who had tormented her at school and sailed past them with a bright smile.

She would be a marchioness, whereas neither of them had found a husband. No one had murmured a word about her father’s thefts in months, and no one had discovered that she was fathered by a footman.

When she was Lady Pettigrew, no one would even wonder about her birth.

At the end of the aisle, Rupert turned around to meet her, his brown eyes rather anxious. He had a strange likeness to a basset hound, but she smiled at him, anyway.

He was a sweet man, and they both liked dogs, and that would be good enough.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

A broken heart is a stark kind of pain. In Yasmin’s case, it didn’t make her burst into gales of tears, or write ranting letters, or have the slightest impulse to tell anyone.

After his first letter, Giles had never written again. Of course, he was busy. Likely, he was irritated at her. Perhaps he hated her. Unquestionably, he agreed with her first letter, breaking off their engagement.