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“You don’t like it?” Her sister stared down at the material. “I like it.”

How on earth she could, Gwen did not know. The purple-and-green stripes were all very well, but the yellow splodges did not match at all, and that orange thread?

“Absolutely not,” she said firmly.

“But it would look so vibrant and unusual.”

“‘Vibrant’ and ‘unusual’ are not the two adjectives I want anyone to use to describe my wedding,” Gwen said in a hiss, attention darting about the shop. “Just—Just let me look, Teddy!”

It had been a mistake to bring her, but her mother had refused to permit the outing unless Gwen had taken someone, and the maid was busy and Mrs. Kinley declared herself utterly at sea when it came to things like this. Gwen’s mother had been invited to tea by the Cothrom Chances, something she never missed if she could help it, as the petit four were so delicate, and so that had left Teddy.

Gwen sighed. It was not that she did not like her sister. She was reasonably pleasant, which was more than could be said for so many people in Society. But it was only on outings like this that she realized how little she actually knew her sister.

Purple-and-green tartan?

“I suppose you want to go for something dull,” her sister said moodily, returning the sample swatch of the tartan to its place on the shelf. “Something like all white, like the queen.”

Gwen perked up at that. “I like that idea. Something simple. Elegant.”

“Boring.”

“It is not boring to look refined!” Gwen hissed, trying to maintain a smile on her face as the other customers at Rivers’s Haberdashery glanced around to stare at the bickering sisters. “Are you saying Her Majesty is boring?”

Her sister colored but still did not look away, and the defiance in her eyes was something Gwen had never seen before. “I still think you’d look better in stripes.”

Stripes! Her!

“You know, I quite agree.”

Gwen froze.

No. No, he couldn’t have been here…could he?

But her body knew the truth before her mind had even bothered to catch up with her. The hair on the back of her neck was prickling, and there were hot trickles flickering through her veins. Her pulse was rapid, shallower but faster, and her cheeks were surely pink with all this heat shooting to them.

Slowly, Gwen turned around on her heels.

And there he was.

And he was not the Marquess of Ravenshurst.

“I thought I’d pop in to see about a new cravat,” said Baron Frasemere with a smile and a polite incline of his head toward Teddy. “Miss Chance. Miss Gwendoline. I hope you are both well.”

‘Well’?

Gwen swallowed. She was perfectly well. Absolutely well. She had never been weller.

Well…

That was not exactly the truth, was it?

Yesterday, she had not seen Lord Frasemere at all and it had been…boring. Far more boring because she had been forced to have luncheon with her parents and Lord Ravenshurst and Sir James and Lady Heather Stuart, though naturally, Gwen had been far too polite to point out that the time spent together had been so mind-numbingly tedious, she had taken to counting the squares of the paneling opposite her in the marquess’s dining room in his splendid townhouse.

And it was a splendid townhouse. And she very much looked forward to living there.

Except that the entire luncheon, all she had been able to think about was Baron Frasemere…

Lord Frasemere smiled. “What are you here for?”