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“Mummy”—Tricia’s voice barely breached the hushed reverence of the room—“what has happened?”
Lady Clementine met her daughter’s gaze. “It’s terrible news, my dears. The father of our beloved Rose has passed on.”
The words fell like heavy stones into the stillness, and a new silence blanketed the parlor.
Tricia dropped her jaw. “Oh my!”
“Still such a young man, too.” Her mother dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “I’m dreadfully sorry for the countess. I suppose she’s the dowager countess now. I know only too well what it is like to lose one’s beloved husband.”
Indeed, Tricia’s own father had passed away when she was quite young. Kat hardly remembered him at all.
Tricia walked toward her sister-in-law. “Rose, I’m so sorry.”
Rose sniffled into her handkerchief. “It was just so sudden. The physicians don’t seem to know anything that I can tell. Of course, I must leave for Hampshire in the morning.”
“We all will, darling,” Cameron said.
“Of course,” Lady Clementine agreed.
Tricia nodded, though she worried a bit about what it would mean for coming-out season.
She was only eighteen years old. If she couldn’t come out this season, she would still be quite young for the next. She had argued and argued with Cameron about coming out. Rose hadn’t come out until she was twenty, and she’d hardly had a season at all because, although she was courted by a young lord, her sister, Lily, met and fell in love with the Duke of Lybrook and married quickly, which led to Rose meeting Tricia’s brother, who composed the waltz for Lily and the duke’s wedding.
Tricia and her brother and sister were not highborn. They found out only after Cameron asked for Rose’s hand that they were the grandchildren of the Marquess of Denbigh. His elderly mother, the dowager marchioness, saw Cameron at a theater production for which he had composed the music. He bore a striking resemblance to her son, and Tricia soon found that her father, Colton Price, was the son of a housemaid and fathered by the Marquess of Denbigh.
Overnight, they became members of the ton.
“I shall take care of everything, my sweet.” Cameron kissed Rose’s tear-stained cheek. “I suppose this means your brother is now the earl.”
Her brother…
Viscount Thomas Jameson had ensnared Tricia’s heart three years past. The viscount, a striking figure with sable hair and a perpetually shadowed jaw who carried his muscled physique with an easy grace, was still unmarried at one-and-thirty.
To him, Tricia was but a shadow, yet she was resolute to cast a light that would garner his notice in the coming season.
Viscount Jameson.
But no longer Viscount Jameson. He was now Thomas Jameson, the Earl of Ashford.
And…
He would be looking for a wife.
2
A bit over a week later, at a small parish near the Ashford estate in Hampshire, the funeral for Crispin Jameson, the Earl of Ashford, was held.
The church was adorned with black drapery and white flowers—lilies and roses, the namesakes of the earl’s two daughters.
The Duke and Duchess of Lybrook were there with their son, Morgan, the Marquess of Gordonshire. He was nearing three years old, only a few days older than Tricia’s own niece, Lady Joy Price-Adams.
The funeral was, of course, attended by the cream of society, given the earl’s social standing. The Ashford Estate was one of the richest earldoms in England.
And now…
Now it all belonged to Thomas.
Rose sat in the front of the chapel with her mother, sister, and brother, along with Cameron and Daniel, the Duke of Lybrook, Lily’s husband.
