Prologue

"Should we try to…talk to people?" Miss Emily Rutley asked her friend Lady Frances Johnson.

Frances' wide-eyed look of horror spoke volumes.

"Yes, well," Emily said, feeling only the tiniest bit defeated. It wasn't that she felt any desperate need to go mix with the assembled members of the ton. She'd been fortunate enough to gather a small, close group of friends at the start of the Season and felt little need to expand that circle, especially when so many of the other debutantes felt it abidingly necessary to comment upon Emily's height.

Did they think she didn't know she was tall? Did they really, truly think she'd moved through life for twenty years not realizing that she was head and shoulders taller than most other young ladies?

And if it wasn't her height, it was her age. Yes, twenty was a bit older than your average debutante, but she was hardly decrepit. And her sisters had needed her.

They still needed her, of course, though now they needed her for a different matter.

Now they needed her to marry.

Hence her interest—such as it was—in not continuing to linger near this wall with its hideous hangings.

But she couldn't abandon Frances, could she? No, certainly not.

"We'll wait for Grace," she said, even though she knew this was an excuse to remain safely at the edges of the room for a few minutes longer. "You know Grace always has someone new to introduce."

Lady Grace Miller was the shining star of the Season, a luminous beauty who not only was the daughter of a duke but who had (as rumors held it) a prodigious dowry. She was also, despite all this, another member of Frances and Emily's small group of friends.

According to the rules of Society, it hardly made sense, but, then again, Grace was just like that; no matter that the world had given her a dozen reasons to be petty, spoiled, or snobbish, she was genuinely kind and clever and sought kindness and cleverness in her friends instead of things like wealth and pedigree.

Not that Emily, daughter of a viscount, or Frances, daughter of a marquess, lacked pedigree, but nobody would claim that they were up to Grace's level of perfection.

"Good idea," Frances said, even though she looked faintly green at the idea. Frances was a lovely, charming, wonderful girl…who clammed up the instant anyone whom she didn't consider a close friend was within earshot.

"My goodness!" came a teasing cry from a few paces away. "If it isn't the very wallflowers I was hoping to see!"

This was Lady Diana Fletching, daughter of the Earl of Preston and the fourth in their quartet. Her dark green eyes gleamed with feisty humor, even as her expression held the lingering tension that suggested she'd just escaped her mother's clutches. The Countess of Preston was matrimonially minded to an aggressive degree, and Diana had no intention of marrying that Season.

None of Emily's friends were seeking marriage that year, actually. Frances was terrified of the prospect, and Diana preferred books to men. Grace, meanwhile, intended to have as much fun as she could before she settled down.

Only Emily approached the thing with any seriousness…not that this had helped her garner any prospects.

"Really, Diana," she chided gently, "you oughtn't call us ‘wallflowers.' Someone might hear you."

Diana made a pointed, skeptical gesture at the wall. "And think I'm wrong?" she asked.

"And diminish our popularity," Emily corrected. "We needn't give others any reason to consider us undesirable."

To consider me undesirable, she amended mentally though she couldn't bear to say it out loud. It sounded far too self-pitying.

It was the truth, though. Although the others had no interest in marrying yet, they were all better poised for it. Diana's golden hair made her a beauty even if she didn't seem to know it, and Frances' diminutive figure lent her the kind of feminine stature that men supposedly found more appealing than Emily's willowy height.

Plus, there were her dratted curls, she recognized as she felt the telltale pull of one threatening to spring free from its pins. Fashion dictated that hair should be meticulously curled with a hot iron into neat, manageable waves. Emily's hair was a force of its own, constantly threatening to break free.

But Diana knew how Emily felt about all this; she didn't need to be told. She came to stand next to Emily, peering at her dance card.

"How's your card looking this evening, Em?"

Emily sighed. "Not good. I've only two dances spoken for, and they're both country dances. Hardly helpful for striking up conversations."

Emily tried not to think too hard about just how far Diana had to reach up in order to deliver a sympathetic pat to her shoulder.

"We need Grace to come make introductions to some gentlemen," Frances said, picking up the thread of their conversation. She stood on her toes to look out over the crowd; the effort still put her eyeline lower than Emily's. "Where is Grace?"

Emily looked, too. Even at her height, though, there was no sight of Grace's shining blonde head. "I don't see her.

"Well, heaven knows she won't be able to see us, tucked back here as we are," Diana claimed, grabbing Emily's hand. Emily grabbed Frances as Diana led them. They moved easily to the center of the ballroom as the pause between sets sent the rest of the attendees filtering towards the room's edges.

Even Emily went to her toes to search, not that the height helped much. She was already taller than half the gentlemen here. But it felt as though it should help, somehow. Yet…nothing. A frown crossed her face.

"Do you see her, Diana?" Frances asked.

Before Diana could answer, a man spoke. "Excuse me." The three girls whirled. "Have you seen Lady Grace?" asked the unassuming man, whose name Emily could not immediately place. "She and I are due for the next dance, but I'm afraid I cannot locate her…"

Something about the broad smile on Diana's face made Emily's confusion turn to worry.

"Oh, Mr. Cartwright—" Ah, yes, that was it. "—I am so sorry," Diana said earnestly. "Grace stepped on her hem and has had to hie to the ladies' retiring room. She bid us to make her apologies and asked if you would be so kind as to dance with Miss Rutley for this set, instead."

Emily tried not to look surprised by this.

"Of course," Mr. Cartwright said kindly. "Miss Rutley, if you would do me the honor?"

"Of course," she said. She looked back at her friends as he led her to the dance floor. Diana and Frances had bent their heads together and were whispering furiously, their faces masked in dismay.

Emily might have enjoyed doing the Allemande with Mr. Cartwright—who was soft spoken, occasionally funny, and rather handsome once she looked past his spectacles—were she not so worried. It was silly to worry over Grace's absence for a mere handful of minutes, but Emily was quite accustomed to worrying. Raising her sisters since their childhood had rendered the habit ingrained. As it was, she barely executed a proper curtsey to poor Mr. Cartwright before she bolted for the edge of the ballroom.

"Did you find her?" Emily demanded when she found Diana and Frances. She knew the question was pointless; they would not look so vexed if they had located Grace.

Diana worried at her lip. "I saw her earlier. Two dances ago now, I think? She was with the Duke of Hawkins."

Frances looked horrified. "Him? He's old enough to be her father."

The Duke's age, however, was not what bothered Emily. "He's also rather…forceful," she said, thinking of the way the Duke looked at Grace, which had always struck her as being aggressive, somehow. "He hovers around Grace quite a lot and isn't terribly gracious about it when she pays attention to other people."

She hated to even suggest what she was suggesting. Diana immediately gathered the implication.

"You don't think he would…?" she broke off, aghast.

"No," Emily assured her, despite feeling no such assurance herself. "But perhaps he pressured her to accompany him for a walk?"

Frances bit her lip. "Maybe we should check the gardens?"

Emily felt instantly sick. Going unchaperoned into a garden was practically asking for one's reputation to be obliterated, and she'd spent years carefully honing her sense of propriety, so she could make an advantageous marriage that would help her set her sisters up for happy lives.

But for Grace, she would do it.

"I think we should," Diana agreed though even she sounded hesitant. "We shan't go far from the house. Just far enough to call for her."

"Surely anyone who…took her for a walk would release her once he knew we were looking," Emily said, her voice less convincing that she'd hoped.

Still, they went. The strange turn of the evening was too much for Emily to wrap her mind around, so she focused on the fervent hope that nobody would note their odd behavior. When she made fleeting eye contact with a dowager, the older woman raised her eyebrows curiously, and Emily felt herself flush to her hairline. She offered the woman a nervous smile, hoping she'd chalk the trio off as merely overwhelmed by the close heat of the room. It was hot inside in a way that made the cool night air feel like a slap.

"Are you sure?" Frances asked as Diana led them towards the stairs that led down from the empty veranda.

Her words were cut off by a scream, sharp and terrified. All thoughts of propriety, of reputation, fled Emily's mind as she bolted towards the sound, nearly turning her ankle when hard stone gave way to the soft lawn.

"Grace?" she called, her voice too frightened and breathy to travel far. They'd scarcely gone a few paces into the garden, and she already felt disoriented, the pounding of her heart in her ears making it nigh on impossible to hear anything. Even if she could hear, however, the scream had faded, gone as quickly as it had arrived.

Frances and Diana nearly crashed into her when she stopped; her height had served her well, for once, and she'd long outpaced them.

"I'm going back for help," Diana panted. She spun on her heel and raced back toward the house without even pausing to ask if the others wished to risk being found in the garden. Whatever was happening out here was far more important than idle gossip.

Frances slipped her hand into Emily's.

"Grace?" she called, her voice shaking. "Are you there?" Her fingers shook, too, where they held Emily's tight.

There was no response. Even so, the girls kept calling, kept straining their eyes to peer into the dark. By the time Diana returned with half the ton beside her, Grace's father, a whey-faced Duke of Graham, in the lead, Emily had come to fear that there never would be a response, not from Grace.