Chapter 1

The Boscastle-Welsham marriage would have been the wedding of the year—if the groom had bothered to put in an appearance. Sir Nigel Boscastle was so noticeably absent from his own nuptials that the bride's father had been forced to walk the long-suffering Lady Jane to the altar where, surrounded by a cluster of distraught bridesmaids, the wedding party minus the bridegroom waited. And waited.

"I shall deal with the corkbrain after the ceremony," the distinguished seventh Earl of Belshire muttered as his daughter stood with her back to their bewildered guests. "The idiot will be late to his own funeral."

After several minutes of confusion, the minister and bride's parents decided that perhaps until the bridegroom arrived, Jane's older brother, Simon, Viscount Tarleton, should stand in as temporary proxy. And so brother and abandoned bride stood. And stood.

At first no one doubted that Nigel would eventually show up to rescue Jane from this embarrassment. If, as one guest in the third pew remarked, he remembered what day it was.

After all, Sir Nigel was hardly known about town for his towering intellect, although his generosity had earned him a loyal following of friends.

The bride-to-be had not wished to be married at the popular St. George's Church in Hanover Square. A respectable young lady never previously involved in scandal, she avoided fussy affairs as a rule. Yet today the haut ton were crammed to capacity inside the private chapel of the Marquess of Sedgecroft's Park Lane mansion. To witness a wedding that apparently would not take place.

Lady Jane Welsham, the guests agreed, resembled a royal princess. She positively glowed in an eggshell white satin dress worn over an ivory tissue underbodice. The scalloped hem of the dress foamed daintily around her pearl-seeded slippers. A flowing veil of Honiton lace framed her face, casting in shadow whatever emotion it revealed, to the disappointment of her enrapt audience.

The bouquet of white rosebuds she held glistened from a double-dipping in gilt. White kidskin gloves encased her slender hands, hands that remained remarkably steady considering that their owner was undergoing one of the worst humiliations in a young woman's life. To be abandoned at the altar.

What could have happened?

Everyone in London knew that the parents of both parties had been planning this wedding since Jane and Nigel had toddled about the nursery in nappies. The Society papers had remarked more than once that rarely had a betrothed couple seemed so compatible.

What had gone wrong?

The bride's sister Lady Caroline bitterly remarked, "Those flowers will have dried into a sachet if Nigel takes any longer. I shall strangle him for this."

Her younger sister, Lady Miranda, shook her head in sympathy. "Poor Nigel. Do you think he might have gotten lost? Jane did say he required a map to find his carriage."

Caroline's golden-brown eyes narrowed in contemplation. "She's holding up well under the humiliation, isn't she?"

"Would you expect less of a Welsham?" Miranda whispered back.

"I don't know," Caroline replied, "but I daresay that such bad behavior is probably typical of the Boscastle male. For all his gentle ways, Nigel did descend from one of the most notorious bloodlines in England. Just look at our host Sedgecroft over there, lounging like the lord of lions in his pew with his ladybirds around him."

"His what?" Miranda asked in a scandalized whisper.

"I can hardly shout out the word, Miranda. That woman in the deep pink dress is Lady Greenhall, his last lover."

"And he brought her here, to Jane's wedding?"

Copyright © 2005 by Maria Hoag