LITMIR.BIZ

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WAY TO WIN, Gareth thought helplessly, as he surveyed the tray that his sister, Laura Edmonton, had laid out in anticipation of this visit. Shortbread. Cucumber sandwiches with the crust removed. Once, many years ago, he’d enjoyed both. Now they lay, marshaled in grim rows, testament to an ongoing war. Gareth could at most hope to achieve a scrambling, ignominious retreat.

      His sister—his much younger half sister, if Gareth was going to be precise about the matter—smiled at him. But the expression her eyes reflected wasn’t hope or happiness; it was fear.

      “Tea?”

      The battle was always joined with tea. “Please,” he answered.

      He could direct the products of his estates without blinking. He had braved the rain forests of Brazil for months. But this quiet room, draped in pink silks, with the pleasant burbling of the fountain coming through the window … Well, it vanquished him every time.

      Not so much the room as Laura. Her lips were compressed in concentration as she added a careful dollop of cream to Gareth’s tea—precisely the quantity that Gareth preferred.

      Every month, Laura tried desperately to please him. Today, she wore the finest morning dress she owned, made of some thin, pink flimsy cotton, the sleeves large and heavy and festooned with ribbons. Her sandy brown hair was pinned up with ruthless exactitude.

      Laura handed over a delicate china cup and saucer, as if tea would magically heal the damage between them. It couldn’t. After Laura had been born, Gareth had been too busy learning to be a marquess to become a brother. Now that they were both adults, they’d frozen into this awkward pattern.

      Awkward?

      Every month, she invited him over for tea. Every month, he accepted. And every month … To call these unfortunate tête–à–têtes awkward would understate the matter by an order of magnitude.

      Their afternoons always started this way. Gareth struggled for conversation, and Laura attempted to make up for his taciturn nature by speaking for them both.

      “Do you like my reticule?” She set her saucer on the table with a clink and retrieved a puddle of pink silk that lay nearby. She held it out for inspection.

      The object in question was embroidered with pink roses, which in turn sported pink leaves and pink thorns. It was of a size to fit a calling card—a pink calling card. Dyed pink feathers were sewed to the bottom. The handbag was not merely pink. It was fatally pink.

      Gareth searched for an appropriately supportive response. “It seems … serviceable?”

      She wrinkled her nose. “Oh. Because I took it with me when Alex took me driving, and he said it would spook the horses. He made me sit on it the whole way, and then he only took me in a single circuit around the park.” Laura looked up at Gareth.

      That look in her eyes—that damnable look that said that even after all his missteps, Gareth’s opinion still mattered—made him hunch his shoulders. It made him wish he’d done one thing to deserve it. Madame Esmerelda had accused him of being an automaton. Around his sister, he felt like a clumsy marionette, poorly jointed, unable to manage even the simplest tasks. How she would laugh if she could see him now.

      “Do you think,” Laura asked in a small voice, “that my fiancé hates my reticule?”

      Questions like these were more perilous than a company of marauding Turks. There were no right answers to give, not ever. Gareth tried anyway. “I rather suspect he likes your reticule. It’s just that he’s a man. He’s not going to waste his time poring over needlepoint flowers, even if he is marrying you.”

      As soon as his sister winced, Gareth realized waste had been the wrong word. That his clipped delivery had struck the wrong tone. Because it had never been the tea or the cucumber sandwiches, with or without crusts, that rendered this endeavor futile. It was Gareth. He had no notion of pink silk and embroidery. And damn him, he had no notion of this woman before him. For all that she was his sister and the closest flesh and blood that he had on this planet, she was still a mystery to him.

      They’d been playing out this scene ever since Laura was four and Gareth twenty, when in one of his short visits to his stepfather’s estate, she’d invited him to a tea party with all her dolls. At the time, he’d thought that if only she were a bit older, if only the minute chairs in her chambers were a tad larger, perhaps he’d be able to converse with her.

      But now she was nineteen. She was too much a lady to pelt him with shortbread and shriek that he was ruining her party.

      Laura had turned her head, as if to contemplate the elms outside the wide windows. Her hands twisted the silk of her reticule round and round until the embroidered petals distorted into harsh lines. “And what do I do,” she said quietly, “if he stops liking me?”

       If that’s what you fear, then you shouldn’t marry him.

      But saying that would be stupid and utterly selfish. Because Gareth couldn’t shake the fear in his own mind that once she married, she would have no further need of her inept brother. She would figure out that these afternoons were a waste, and Gareth would be utterly displaced. Her invitations would slow from monthly to bimonthly events. They would eventually turn into salutations exchanged in passing at the opera. If Laura were at all rational, she’d have stopped inviting him years ago.

      A real older brother would know precisely how to reassure his sister at a moment like this. He’d be able to alleviate the agitation that had her wringing the neck of her reticule. He would tell jokes and solve all her problems. But Laura had an ungainly lump of a brother, all marquess, and Gareth hadn’t the faintest idea how to comfort anyone.

      Just as she always invited him, Gareth always tried. “If you’re really worried your fiancé won’t like you, I’ll double your settlement.”

      Her eyes widened, and her mouth crumpled.

      “What?” he asked. “What did I say this time?”

      “Is that what you think of me, Blakely?” Laura choked on the words. “You think you have to bribe Alex to care for me? That nobody will love me unless you pay him?”

      No.

      Gareth had hoped to buy Laura’s love for himself. How could he make her see? He’d tried to bail himself out of these situations before, but all he ever managed was to reduce her to tears. Once a conversation started sinking, there was little choice but to abandon ship. Long experience had taught him that the way not to respond in situations like this was to enumerate the ways in which she was wrong. Somehow, every time he tried to explain that he hadn’t meant what she heard, it came out sounding like “you are an irrational goose.”

      Instead of allaying her fears, he sat in his chair and gripped his plate until the delicate edge of the china cut into his hands.

      Then he’d been silent too long, an entire species of error in its own right.

      “Very well.” Laura’s voice trembled. “Double it. I don’t care.”

      Nothing had changed since she was four except the chairs. He was still ruining everything.

      Madness, a physician had once told Gareth, was repeating the same events over and over while hoping for a different result. That was why Gareth had no fear he would fall in love, no matter what Madame Esmerelda predicted for him. Love was watching his sister choke back tears. Love hoped that month after month, she would continue to issue invitations. And love believed, against all evidence, that one day, he would get it right, that he would learn to talk to her as a brother instead of the cold, unfeeling man she must have believed him to be.

      In short, love was madness.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      HE’D EMBARKED on a new species of madness, Gareth thought as he shifted on the soft squabs of the closed carriage. It was the night of the coming-out ball that he and Ned were to attend. It had been almost a week since he left Madame Esmerelda’s

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