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Before Daisy could say anything, he disappeared.

Five minutes later, two men walked into the chapel. “Found him redoing his cravat,” Frederick boomed. “Stop doting on your mirror, I told him. Your lovely bride is waiting.”

Daisy knew Miles well enough to read the tightness at the corners of his stormy eyes, the nerve beating in his jaw. As their eyes met, his face was suddenly wreathed in one of the falsest smiles she’d ever seen.

“Darling,” he said, heading straight toward her. “Forgive me.”

Her heart stopped pounding. Miles’s acting skills were dubious, but at least he had appeared. She put a hand on his cheek and smiled at him, letting all the adoration she felt shine in her eyes. He dropped his head and gave her a swift, hard kiss.

“Totally enamored,” Regina said in a clear, high voice on the other side of the chapel.

As she spoke her vows, Daisy allowed herself only one aching wish that her groom loved her and that he’d been eager to marry her—rather than having trudged to the altar tardy and annoyed. Taking the long view, it was far more important that Miles would be loyal. She trusted him to have and to hold, for better or worse, even if he never managed the loving and cherishing.

After the ceremony, Lady Wharton ushered the guests away to enjoy the wedding breakfast, while Daisy, Miles, Regina and Frederick signed the parish book.

“Remain here two minutes, so you can make an entrance,” Regina ordered, taking Frederick’s arm and pulling him from the chapel.

“What happened?” Daisy asked bluntly. “Why were you late?”

Miles glanced at the rector, who was following Regina out the door. “Unforeseen circumstances.”

Daisy swallowed hard and then came out with the truth. “I was afraid you weren’t coming at all. People were beginning to chatter. If nothing else, your delay complicated Regina’s description of you as besotted.”

“I apologize.” His jaw set again. “I shall do my best at breakfast to seem as happy as a pig in muck. I’ll kiss you again in front of an audience, if you think that will stop them from chattering.”

There couldn’t be a more devastating contrast between the major’s jubilant kiss and Miles’s grudging offer.

“Is it so terrible to have people believe you’re in love with me?” Daisy asked, her voice rasping.

“In my opinion, no one will believe it,” Miles said coolly. “They’ll think that your mother trapped me in some way or another. Most of them are intelligent enough to know that love is a temporary delusion.”

Daisy took a deep breath. His words stung, but she couldn’t poison their wedding day with a quarrel.

Besides, he was likely right about the aristocracy’s assessment of their marriage. Lord Devin was rich, handsome, and powerful. In the eyes of society, he belonged with a diamond like Lady Regina, a woman with a superb profile fit for a family portrait.

Definitely not a plump, disheveled woman like Daisy. As if the universe heard that comment, a thick coil of hair slipped from her chignon and tumbled past her shoulder.

Miles’s eyes suddenly focused on her face. “I apologize, Daisy. I had forgotten that you consider yourself in love with me. The emotion won’t last. You do realize that, don’t you?”

“More every moment,” Daisy said wryly.

Unfortunately, freedom from that emotion lay in the future. At present, she merely had to glance at her husband, and her whole body pulsed with the urge to have and to hold him, through better or worse.

“It’s not that you’re not lovable,” he added, making everything worse. “In fact, there are parts of you, Daisy, that are verylovable.”

Parts of her? “Miles.” The word scraped from her throat as she desperately tried to think how to tell him that her father always made her feel unlovable, and that she felt wretchedly inferior, marrying a man who only proposed under duress.

“Yes?”

“Please don’t say things like that.”

He frowned.

Daisy picked her words with care. “Our marriage follows a mistake I made. A terrible mistake. I took away your choice of a wife, and I’ll always have to live with that. But please don’t tell me again that you … that you would never have chosen me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Daisy said doggedly, “When you say things such as, ‘It could have been worse,’ or say that only parts of me are lovable, ithurts. I couldn’t bear it if my husband despised me.”