Chapter 1

Three Years Later

"Inever should have found them a governess," Emily muttered to herself as she searched for her sisters. "Let alone one that encouraged independent thinking. I should have locked them in the cellar and let them out when they were five-and-twenty. Nay, thirty."

Emily herself might only have been two-and-twenty, but she felt confident that the twins would require more time to become respectable members of Society who did not seek to sow chaos at every turn. The events of this evening were, she felt, ample evidence of that notion.

Tonight was, after all, only the twins' second night out in Society; they'd debuted only days earlier. In advance of that debut, Emily had reminded them again and again (and again and again and again) to comport themselves in a manner that would not bring scandal down upon their house and name.

Amanda and Rose had managed the thing perfectly. They'd been pleasant and popular, had danced with a variety of gentlemen, and had avoided insulting anyone or speaking too outlandishly on any of their radical viewpoints. And Emily, who was apparently the worst kind of idiot, had patted herself on the back. A job well done, she'd considered it. Clearly the girls knew how to behave.

So, tonight, she'd only impressed the importance of propriety upon them once.

It had not been enough, apparently.

They'd given her the slip within ten minutes, their manner too coordinated to have been circumstance. They'd been retrieving their cups of punch when Amanda had made a distressed sound over her hem. She'd handed Emily her glass and bent to fuss with her skirts. Just then, Rose had spotted a friend. She'd needed to check her coiffure. When Emily had turned back to Amanda, she was gone. When Emily turned to ask Rose where Amanda had hied off to, Rose was also gone.

And Emily had been left juggling three cups of punch.

"Too clever," she groused now as she searched the crowd for them. If her sisters had been as tall as Emily was, this would have been easy. Alas, Emily topped them both by several inches. The girls blended easily into the crowd.

"Too clever," she said again. "And can they use those powers for good? No. I should see about marrying Amanda off to some kind of intelligence officer. If we're lucky, that will improve the nation's security. If not, well, at least he'll have experience dealing with slippery characters."

Emily recognized that she was working herself into quite the state. And most of this had to do with irritation with her sisters. Could they never just listen to her? She was constantly trying her hardest—had been doing so since she was a child herself, really—to provide a good model for them and was always working to be proper and helpful and motherly though she knew she could never truly make up for the mother they had lost.

Emily would normally have commended the twins on knowing their own minds; Emily's dear friend Diana Young, the Duchess of Hawkins, was not the type to listen to the demands of others, and Emily adored her for that.

But all Emily wanted was to keep the twins out of trouble. Why couldn't they see that?

"Excuse me, excuse me," she muttered reflexively as she moved through the crowd, craning her neck to seek her sisters.

The small part of her that was not merely irritated, however, was tied in a sick knot of worry. Emily had never shared the events of that evening with her sisters—she didn't want them to carry around those sorts of fears—but searching for someone in a ballroom would always bring back the way she'd felt searching for Grace…searching, but never finding her.

It wasn't the same, of course. It wasn't the same!

But sometimes it felt the same.

She was so lost in these layers of feeling—annoyance upon fear upon grief upon utter frustration—that she didn't even see the man until she'd crashed into him hard enough that she would have fallen on her behind, right there in the ballroom, if he hadn't been so quick to seize her about the shoulders.

"Oof," she said.

Emily was the kind of well-bred young lady who had had the rules of comportment so sufficiently drilled into her that she had, in times past, reflexively apologized to bookshelves and settees after bumping into them. Yet she found that the word sorry died on her lips in the face of the gentleman's glare.

And his size. Emily was unaccustomed to looking up to meet a gentleman's gaze; it was far more usual that she had to look down. But this man was so tall that she not only had to look up, she had to tip her head back to do so.

Only to be met with fire when he glared back down at her.

"You really must watch where you are going," he snapped.

Her mouth dropped open and, again, decades of propriety fled her mind.

"Excuse me?"

"I said," he began tersely and Emily—shocking even herself, truly—interrupted him.

"No, no, I heard what you said." Her eyes were wide. She surely looked like some gaping country bumpkin, but she simply could not help herself. The rudeness of the man! "I am merely shocked at what I heard."

Now it was his turn to act surprised. "I beg your pardon?"

In the back of her mind, Emily recognized that this was likely the moment when she ought to retreat. She should play the demure young lady, as she always did. She could blame her initial words on the shock, could salvage this moment.

But the rest of her, the parts that had already been bubbling over with emotion, felt that if she had to bite her tongue one more time, she was going to scream.

"It's just that the traditional response, after colliding with someone in a ballroom, is my apologies."

The man frowned fearsomely down at her, but Emily found, oddly enough, that she was not afraid. He would likely be handsome, she imagined, if not for that scowl. He had thick, dark hair that waved pleasantly over his brow and intense eyes that were so rich a brown they were nearly indistinguishable from the black centers. But his eyebrows were a bit heavier than classical good looks dictated, and his determination to use them to make himself intimidating did not help.

"You didn't apologize either," he pointed out, the tiniest note of sulkiness in his tone.

"But neither did I offer you…let's call it advice about watching myself," she pointed out reasonably.

This was, she decided, the moment when he should retreat. But perhaps this giant of a man was consumed by the same temporary madness as she, for he did not do so any more than she had.

"It was," he said archly, "good advice."

"Advice that you might likewise follow," she countered.

"I was scarcely moving," he returned. "Whereas you were surging ahead like this was a racetrack, not a ballroom."

She raised an eyebrow. "Are you comparing me to a horse, sir? I feel if we are tallying poor behavior, that ranks higher than a misstep." Strangely, she did not feel insulted, however. She felt rather…invigorated.

"You are being purposefully difficult, miss," he retorted with a scowl. "I was doing no such thing, and you know it perfectly well. You are merely, for a reason I cannot divine, looking for some way to extend this peculiar encounter."

"Could you divine, perhaps," she asked, a hint of mockery in her tone, "that I am trapped in this encounter as your hands are still upon my person?"

His hands were, in fact, upon her shoulders. He looked at them for a long moment like they belonged to a stranger before snatching them down to his sides.

"I—my apologies," he said stiffly.

"So you can apologize!" she exclaimed.

She was being ungracious, she knew, wretchedly so. But he had been ungracious, too, and highly irksome. And wasn't it quite enough that gentlemen got to go around, doing whatever they pleased with their lives, without also refusing basic politeness to young women they nearly knocked to the ground? Was that really too much to ask?

And, argued a tiny voice inside her—and frankly, Emily had a bone to pick with that tiny voice, too, come to mention it—she was enjoying this conversation just the tiniest bit.

"I can apologize," the man said crossly, "when I have reason to do so. But no matter what you women seem to think, I am not on this Earth merely to make good on your conversational whims. I have things to do, miss, things that do not include being lectured on deportment. If you do not have better ways to spend your time, might I recommend watercolors? I have heard that ladies find that enormously diverting."

Emily's mouth was open again. Of all the rude and condescending and self-important things…

Except then the full significance of his statement hit her. Goodness. She did have better ways to spend her time. Hadn't she been rushing for a reason? She needed to find the twins before one or both of them (why was she pretending; it was always both) did something indefensible, like setting fire to the building.

It wouldn't be on purpose, of course. The twins weren't malicious.

They just had a seemingly inexorable penchant for chaos.

So instead of continuing to quibble with the gentleman (even though she really, truly, deeply wished to do so) she raised her nose pertly in the air. This tended to have more effect on gentlemen who weren't quite as massive as this man, but was, she felt, still worth doing.

"You are quite right, sir," she said in a prim tone that suggested she did not think he was right, but rather that she thought he was awful yet merely not worth the time of telling him so. "I shall be on my way at once."

She sidestepped him neatly, feeling a rare rush of gratitude for her long legs, and swept past him, not even looking over her shoulder for a last glance.

He, she decided, was certainly looking over his shoulder after her. And as long as she did not check, she could continue to enjoy this fantasy.

Her ire, though intense, faded quickly as she caught a glimpse of the pastel purple of Rose's skirts. She was huddled in close to Amanda in a manner that always promised trouble.

"What are you two doing?" Emily asked in a furious whisper as she approached her sisters. Amanda quickly hid her hands behind her back. "What do you have there?"

"Nothing," Amanda said.

Emily counted it among her blessings that the twins were terrible liars.

"What do you have?" she repeated, putting more menace into her tone.

Rose sighed in disappointment as Amanda returned her hands to her front, uncapping them to reveal…

A frog.

Emily didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or groan. In the end, she did none of those things. Instead, she stepped closer, blocking the sight from the rest of the room. Her first instinct had always been to protect her sisters—and always would be.

"Why," she asked, the question sounding vaguely desperate, "do you have a frog in a ballroom?"

"We found him on the veranda and didn't want him to get squished," Rose supplied as if this were a reasonable answer.

"Why were you on the veranda without a chaperone?" Emily asked.

Amanda pouted. "Well, Emmy, you know you're not a proper chaperone, don't you? You aren't married."

If Emily hadn't been terrified of losing sight of the frog—a frog! In a ballroom!—for a single second, she would have closed her eyes at that comment. Yes, despite her best efforts to fashion herself into a proper chaperone for her sisters, she remained unmarried. She knew Amanda didn't mean to be unkind by reminding her of this failure, but it did still sting a bit.

"Besides," Amanda continued blithely. "There were plenty of chaperones out there. We went out there to talk to Lady Averton, after all."

"Lady Averton is seventy-four years old," Emily said, confused. What business could her sisters have with a woman some fifty years their senior?

"Yes," said Amanda happily. "And she smokes. She had a cheroot. A cheroot, Emily!"

Emily stifled a sigh and began composing a mental lesson for the next day: Things One May Do When One is a Very Old and Very Rich Dowager but which One May Not Do When One is an Eighteen-Year-Old Debutante Who Wishes to Marry. It was part of an ongoing series of lectures that Emily had begun in a so far fruitless attempt to preserve her own sanity.

But now was neither the place nor the time.

"Right," she said tiredly. She was so exhausted. Was it normal to feel this tired at her age? Certainly, it wasn't. "Fine. Well, in the future, please put the frog somewhere that is both safe and outside. For now, let's return him to the outdoors, so he can resume his happy, froggy life."

"I have a partner for the next dance," Amanda said, having the decency to at least look a bit abashed about this.

Emily turned to Rose, only to find the other girl had the same look on her face. "As do I," she said.

"What were you planning on doing with the frog while—?" She cut herself off. Did it matter? She put out her hands, cringing slightly. "Fine. Fine. Give it to me."

"Goodbye, little froggy," Amanda whispered, pressing a kiss to its little head. Emily's gorge threatened to rise, but she accepted the slimy package, careful not to let it escape her grasp in the transfer. The last thing she needed was for the blasted frog to get loose in the ballroom.

She struggled to keep a pleasant look on her face as her sisters' dance partners retrieved them, trying hard to ignore the squirming movement from between her cupped hands. When her sisters were occupied with the quadrille, she heaved a sigh of relief before laughing at herself.

Oh yes. Now all that remained was the simple matter of smuggling a frog from a ballroom undetected. She shook her head. Say what one would about her sisters, but life was never boring when they were around.