Eugenia forced a smile. “This is the sort of drama I remember from growing up.”

Three unsmiling people looked back at her. The Duke of Villiers seemed disappointed, her stepmother anxious, her father furious.

“You had an affaire with Edward Reeve?” he barked.

Anger went straight up her spine and she flashed, “Considering the house I grew up in, how can you be shocked that I took a lover?”

Her father’s stricken eyes, her own seething grief and rage . . . it was too much.

She burst into tears. “I didn’t mean that,” she sobbed against her stepmother’s shoulder. Harriet’s arms closed around her, warm and comforting.

“I know,” she said in her ear. “We all understand, sweetheart.”

“I don’t,” her father said stubbornly, but he closed his mouth after a glare from his wife.

“We’ve all played the idiot in our time,” Villiers said. “You have to admit, Jem, that you and I have no high ground to stand on.”

“I’ll go to my chamber,” Eugenia said, before her father could turn his anger on his oldest friend. “Please give everyone my apologies for disrupting the evening.”

“We will see Eugenia in the morning,” Harriet announced, “and she can tell us about her adventures. If she chooses to do so, and only as much as she chooses.”

Back in her room, she managed to stand still while Clothilde attended to her, removing the diamonds and the silk gown, the shoes, and the rest of it. All the time she felt as if her own breath was searing the inside of her lungs. Why did it hurt to breathe?

When Clothilde left, Eugenia sank onto the edge of her bed. Tears streamed down her face.

Sometimes life didn’t give you what you wanted. She knew that better than anyone. Not everyone found true love, or was taken care of, or adored, or pleasured.

Her love affair with Ward was over, truly over.

Over, not because Ward protected Lizzie and Otis—but because she had to protect them. She and Ward could never be happy, because he hadn’t thought her good enough for him until he’d learned of her family. He didn’t love the true Eugenia—the Eugenia who had started the registry, who was planning to open a tearoom, who had ideas about a cookery book.

The last thing the children needed was to find themselves in yet another unhappy home; she suspected that their parents’ marriage had been strained, if not worse.

No matter how much love she might lavish on Ward, in the end, he would break her heart. She had bent herself to Andrew’s ideas of what she should be, but she had been young. This wasn’t a matter of brightly colored gowns: Eugenia couldn’t change the fact she had started Snowe’s—and in any case she didn’t want to.

A piercing sense of loneliness sank into her bones, which was ridiculous. Ward had entered her life only a month or two ago.

No one fell in love that quickly.

Except she had.

First with Andrew, and then with Ward.

There was a gentle knock and her father’s voice said, “May I come in, Eugenia?”

“Of course.” She stood up and pulled on her robe, then went to the door and let him in.

Her father just opened his arms and she walked into them. For eight years, it had been just the two of them, and though she loved Harriet with all her heart, her father was her mainstay.

After Andrew’s funeral, her father had brought her home and stayed with her for weeks, not leaving the house, coaxing her out of bed, making her eat toast, if nothing else. Harriet and her half-siblings came and went, but her father stayed.

“The man is rubbish,” he said gruffly.

“Don’t you remember that you thought Harriet wasn’t a lady?” Eugenia asked.

“Harriet was disguised as a young man and doing a damn good job of it. No duchess I’ve ever known wore breeches as well as she did.”

“No duchess wears breeches,” Eugenia pointed out.

“Harriet still does, on occasion,” her father said with satisfaction. He tightened his arms and rocked her back and forth. “I suppose I’ll see his father at the session for that private act at the end of the month. I mean to say something about the idiot he raised.”

“The earl and countess are on a diplomatic mission to Sweden,” Eugenia said with an inelegant sniff. “But you do have to go to London and vote against the private act, Papa. The Duchess of Gilner is a harridan who only wants to raise Lizzie and Otis because they’re legitimate, whereas she tossed Ward out as a baby.”

“I shall.” He handed her a handkerchief.

“They’ll be shocked to see you, won’t they?”

“Who?”

“All those lords . . . You don’t attend Lords often, do you?”

“Certainly I do,” her father said indignantly. Then he added, with a shrug, “When I haven’t anything better to do.”

Eugenia stepped back. “I love you, Papa.”

He cupped her face in his hands. “You are the most beautiful and brilliant woman of your age in all Britain. If this young ass can’t see it, he’s not worth a single tear.”

“Thank you,” she said with a watery smile.