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Steadying herself, she turned to meet her brother’s gaze. “Where I go is none of your concern, Lionel.”

He glared at her, but she stared him down until he dropped her hand. They had not spoken in ten years. His face, in feature so like her own, shocked her. It was diffused with dull anger, the dark brows lowered, the mouth cruel and sullen, the gray eyes unsmiling.

“What do you think you are doing here?” he asked. “You have no right to bring yourself to the notice of the fashionable world.”

“Is that what you imagine I was doing?”

“What else? Need a husband? Tired of feeding at the Luxborough trough?”

Harriet refused to rise to the attempt to goad her. Octavia was out on the terrace, where Captain Fanshaw would surely find her. “Excuse me, Lionel.”

“No.” He shook his head. “You’ll hear me out. You ruined your chances in the world long ago when you refused to do your duty to obey your brother and marry advantageously for your family’s sake.”

“It was never my duty to marry a cruel and unprincipled man.”

“Don’t think you can have Wynford now. He turned you down flat. He left that shooting party without even taking a look. You’ve been sunk for so long, you have no idea how odd an appearance you make.”

“How I appear doesn’t matter to you, Lionel. You washed your hands of me long ago. Now, I have a duty to perform.” She turned and stepped out onto the terrace.

She shivered with the cold, standing for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the dark. Then she gripped her torn skirts firmly in one fist and began her search. Torches flared from several brackets along the wall, giving a dim light. The cold seemed to have discouraged all but the most amorous, or perhaps the most drunken, of Lady Hardwicke’s guests from lingering. Those who did clung to one another. But she saw no scarlet coat or poppy-colored gown.

Harriet stepped back inside the ballroom, hit at once by its warmth after the chill of the night. Another waltz was in progress, and, more anxious now, she began to work her way around the edge of the room toward the benches in the shadows under the gallery.

As she reached the darkened stretch, a man’s foot sprawled in her path. She glanced at him to ask for help, but his eyes stared at her unseeing. His body listed to the right against a cushion.

A dreadful suspicion crossed her mind. She reached out to touch him. “Are you well, sir?” she asked.

At her touch, his shoulders slid sideways down the wall. His head hit the seat cushion, and a trickle of blood escaped his unmoving lips.

The rush of attentions from an insincere man is likely to be as heady as an ascent in a hot air balloon and equally likely to lead to a tumultuous descent.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Chapter 19

When Charles returned to the ballroom, the musicians had stopped playing for the supper interlude, and he perceived at once the difficulty of finding his sister and Miss Swanley in the sea of bobbing ostrich plumes as the crowd pressed toward Lady Hardwicke’s supper room. He set himself to search the room, methodically slowing the sweep of his gaze. He made little progress before he was knocked roughly aside by a gentleman with a glass of claret in his hand.

The wine spilled, and the man swore viciously. He offered no apology but stared at Charles, shaking the drops of wine from his cuffs. “Wynford.”

“Dunraven.” Charles mustered what civility he could for Harriet Swanley’s older brother, the Earl of Dunraven. When Charles had asked her to marry him, he’d forgotten his distaste for her brother. Dunraven’s hair and eyes, even the shape of his face, proclaimed the relationship. Everything except the harsh, resentful spirit.

“You’ve got a nerve,” Dunraven said.

“Have I?”

“Bringing my sister into fashionable society where she has no place.”

“I beg your pardon. It’s true. The company here is far beneath her. I mean to remove her from it as soon as I can. Have you seen her?”

Dunraven peered drunkenly at him as if Charles had made an obscure joke. “Hah! What do you know! Don’t be fooled by that façade of the meek governess. She’s a stubborn, strong-willed jade.”

“Disobeyed you, did she? Refused Torrington’s suit?” Charles continued to look for Octavia and Harriet.

“Damn fool, Torrington. If he hadn’t shot the dog, he could have had her.” Dunraven tossed back the last of the wine in his glass.

An icy chill settled in Charles’s gut. He saw a kneeling girl with her arms around a dog, her gray eyes lifted to his. He kept his voice bland by a supreme effort. “He shot Nelson, her black spaniel?”

“Worthless animal deserved shooting. My foolish sister whistled away a fortune for a dog. But I made her pay,” Dunraven said.