Chapter One

"I, Adrian Philip George Stuart Fitzhugh, take thee, Jeannette Rose, to be my wedded wife…"

Violet knew she was going to faint, or else be sick, right here at the altar in front of Adrian and the Archbishop. In front of everyone, nearly the entirety of the Haut Ton, assembled in St. Paul's Cathedral to witness what was being hailed as the wedding of the year.

One thousand people lined the aisles. Two thousand eyes locked in rapt fascination upon Jeannette Brantford, this Season's Incomparable—and last year's as well—as she exchanged vows with Adrian Winter, Sixth Duke of Raeburn, England's most eligible bachelor.

Trouble was, the bride wasn't Jeannette Rose Brantford.

The bride was Jeannette's identical twin sister, Jannette Violet Brantford, or Violet, as her family called her. And right now she thought perhaps she had gone a little insane.

She fixed her eyes upon her blue silk slippers, studied the intricate designs wrought upon the marble floors beneath the elegant shoes. Light swam around her in a brilliant mist. A few tiny motes of dust winking in the mix of candlelight and natural sunshine that cascaded through colorful stained-glass windows in intense shades of blues and greens.

The scents from the great bowers of blush roses and creamy white gardenias arranged for the ceremony curled inside her nostrils, their overly sweet fragrance only adding to her discomfort. She swallowed, her throat dry as sand. A trickle of nervous perspiration slid between her shoulder blades, making her long to wiggle her shoulders against the damp.

She should be a bridesmaid, she thought in dizzying panic. She should be waiting off to the side by now with the other attendants. Instead she was standing here next to Adrian in front of a pair of massive Baroque columns with their swirled bands of dark marble and mellow gold, the cathedral's great dome rising more than three hundred feet above her. Paintings of the life of St. Paul stared down at her from the ceiling, scornfully disapproving her every move, she imagined.

She willed herself to be calm.

Calm?

How could she possibly be calm when she was perpetrating the most appalling deception of her life? She kept expecting someone to notice who she really was, to stretch out an accusing finger and shout, "Fraud!"

But as her twin had accurately predicted, people saw exactly what they expected to see. Certainly her parents and the servants had earlier, accepting her as Jeannette when she'd presented herself in her sister's elegant wedding gown, a lustrous confection of ice blue silk with elbow-length half sleeves and an overskirt of snowy white organza, hundreds of seed pearls arranged in the shape of rose blossoms and trailing leaves sewn into the scoop-necked bodice. No one had questioned her identity, not even when she'd sent her sister's dresser into a tizzy by needing to have her hair arranged for a "second" time that morning, the servant forced to painstakingly rethread pearls and tiny sparkling sapphires into her upswept coiffure.

Oh, merciful God, Violet fretted for the hundredth time, how had she gotten herself into such a fix? Everything had been so blessedly normal when she'd awakened this morning. As normal as a wedding day could be, that is, the entire household thrown into a flurry of anxious activity. In hindsight, she would have been a lot more anxious herself had she realized it was to be her wedding day and not her sister's. She wished now she'd skipped the breakfast of eggs and kippers she'd eaten. The meal wasn't sitting too pleasantly in her stomach.

Oh, what an idiot she was. She'd never get away with it.

Her hand trembled inside the duke's, his clasp strong and masculine, so very warm against her own icy skin. Since walking up the aisle, she'd given him little more than a cursory upward glance, too nervous to dare look at him fully. She couldn't help but be aware of him as he towered beside her. Dark and beautiful, powerful, utterly resplendent in his formal wedding attire.

Did he know? she wondered. Did he suspect? Oh, Lord, what if he did? Would he denounce her right there in full view of the entire Ton? Or would he wait until they could be in private and demand the marriage be annulled forthwith? Either way, how would she ever be able to explain?

What could a woman say when her very identity was a lie?

Whatever had possessed her this morning? How could she have allowed Jeannette to talk her into such an appalling ruse? Isn't that why she had vowed years ago never to trade places again with her elder twin? Because it always led to trouble—for Violet!

Why, oh why, had she let herself be lured down such a treacherous path?

Copyright © 2006 by Tracy Anne Warren