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He cleared his throat. “Miss Sutton is a remarkably graceful dancer, and I expect she would be very pleased to dance with us.”

Torie smiled and vanished through the door.

A small hand touched his elbow. “Must you?” Florence whispered.

He didn’t pretend not to know the real question. “Yes. A gentleman never betrays those to whom he has made promises. Nor does a gentlewoman.”

“But Mother—” Florence broke off.

“We understand,” Valentine said.

Chapter 9

Torie woke up in the morning with a terrible feeling of foreboding. What would happen if the twins were wards of a man with no connections to her family other than a broken betrothal to her sister?

Moreover, a man who didn’t seem to like her very much.

The idea of not watching them grow up was heartbreaking. She felt swamped with sadness.

The day before, Leonora had brooded in a corner of the carriage the whole three blocks from Kelbourne House before accompanying Lord Bufford to a musicale in the afternoon. After that, she claimed to have a headache and took her supper on a tray in her room.

Leonora almost certainly intended to return Kelbourne’s ring.

Torie couldn’t argue with her sister’s decision. She’d never understood Leonora’s ruthless adherence to social rules, but there it was. Kelbourne would have to find a different viscountess to introduce the twins to society.

The ironic thing was that in Torie’s opinion, Leonora was wrong. Seven years from now, Florence and Valentine would stroll into London ballrooms and effortlessly command attention. They had easy confidence, a quality that could not be taught. Their aplomb, as Florence called it, was innate.

Torie was more observant of that quality than most because she did not have it. No one who’d spent her life so aware of failures could.

In short, she was addle-headed.

She’d never felt more addled than in the aftermath of the moment when she blurted out that offer to “take” the children. Even thinking of it made her hands curl into humiliated fists. How could she have been so stupid?

Lord Kelbourne had been appalled.

Appalled.

She’d seen it in his eyes. And he was right. Florence and Valentine were extraordinarily intelligent and deserved to be cared for by someone who was as brilliant as they.

Never mind her instinctual feeling that the twins just needed to be loved. Kelbourne did love them, in his own way, but he showed it by expressionless nods and frequent additions to the Prohibited List—with the best motives, of course.

Florence and Valentine needed someone in their lives who’d put them first. Before society’s rules, before the House of Lords, before lovers (in the case of their mother), before their reputed paternity (in the case of their father).

If Torie had taken the children to the country, she would have put a minuet low on the list of skills to be mastered. The pirate game was the first time she saw the twins playing. They needed to learn to have fun outdoors.

Who better to teach that than Torie? She’d spent her childhood dodging nannies waving books that she couldn’t understand. Leonora may be able to read, but she’d never walked through Torie’s favorite glade, where the wild bees thronged and rabbits raised their kits. Torie had climbed trees to peer into robins’ nests, and clung to a tall elm in a windstorm, pretending to be a ship’s boy. More than one summer had been spent trailing after the estate gardeners. When she painted roses, she knew their names; when she painted rabbits, she knew the precise pink of their velvety noses.

Now she folded her arms behind her head and stared up at the gathered draperies over her bed. If she had Valentine and Florence, she’d take their books away after breakfast and chase them out of the house.

Florence would soon have more to write about than severed limbs. Or they could make her descriptions more realistic by dissecting a dead squirrel. If Leonora hadn’t started screaming when Torie cut open a dead frog, she would have extracted all its bits and pieces for a closer look.

The bedchamber door burst open while she was imagining a daily picnic. She and the children could lie on their backs in a field of cow parsley and watch starlings circle. Or listen to Val read the Odyssey.

Emily dashed in, threw open the curtains, and screeched, “Miss Sutton is gone!”

Torie sat up. “What?” She squinted at the window. It couldn’t be more than nine in the morning. Her heart sank; she could guess where her sister was. “I expect Leonora is calling on Lord Kelbourne before he leaves for the House of Lords, Emily. She likely slipped out of the house and walked there.”

“Miss Sutton doesn’t walk anywhere,” Emily retorted. “No, she has left for good!”