She could not expect him to come every time she suggested it. He had his own key to Albemarle Street and could come and go from her bed as he needed to.

  He left, clearly reluctant, and blew her a kiss from her bedchamber door. Eugenia listened carefully until she could no longer hear him moving through the house, then hurried to the slightly parted drapes to peer out to the street. Thaddeus’ carriage was already waiting to take him away, and he disappeared around the corner without a wave of goodbye.

  Eugenia let the drape fall and returned to the mirror. Thaddeus was too generous for his own good to be already spoiling her. She left the chain around her waist as she dressed herself to return to Wharton House.

  Eugenia threw a cloak over her gown and quietly slipped out onto Albemarle Street. At this hour, the streets were largely deserted, and she walked the short distance to Bond Street, where she hailed a hack to return her home to Wharton’s House.

  The butler didn’t smile as he let her in.

  In fact, he was doing everything he could not to look at her at all.

  She held out her cloak for him to take. “Is everything all right with the marchioness, sir?”

  “Yes, indeed,” the man promised. “She passed a good night, but,” he paused and glanced around before continuing, “the marquess is looking for you, and he is most unhappy.”

  She craned her neck to look around. The library door was closed, but the drawing room doors were open and the room empty. “I wonder what that could be about? I’ll go to him after I’ve said good morning to my cousins and partaken of breakfast.”

  After the exertions of last night, she was ravenous.

  Eugenia slipped up the stairs and along to her room. Once inside, she washed her face and chose a new gown for the day.

  Aurora slipped into her chamber. “You’re already changed?”

  “As you see,” she agreed, as she added a shawl around her shoulders. “I swear I may have to dismantle my bed and move it here.”

  “Is it the bed or the company?”

  “Possibly both.”

  Aurora curled up in a chair. “I’m glad you have someone,” Aurora whispered.

  Eugenia sat too. “Thank you.”

  Aurora sighed. “But it’s not fair.”

  “What is?”

  “You and Sylvia with your beaus, while I have no one special.”

  “You will.” Aurora was meant to be a wife. The prettiest of them, and the most accomplished, deserved just the right man to come along and sweep her off her feet. She’d gotten wrapped up in her affair that she’d forgotten that Aurora needed a husband. She’d make it up to her by going out with her today, and tonight they would prowl Lady Bisley’s route together and hope she caught the eye of someone tall, dark, and unknown to them both.

  Eugenia frowned as a rapid tap was beaten on her door. “Come in.”

  Mr. Bloom appeared, and not with the breakfast she had expected. “What is it?”

  “The marquess requests you come immediately,” he glanced toward Aurora, “and alone.”

  Aurora sat up quickly at hearing that. “Oh, dear, that is never good.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing important,” Eugenia promised and then nodded to Mr. Bloom. “Please tell him I’ll be down directly.”

  Mr. Bloom departed, a look of concern on his features, almost the same expression that the butler had worn upon her return to Wharton House. The marquess must be more vexed with her overnight stay at Albemarle Street than he’d originally let on. “Was Wharton out of sorts about me spending another night unchaperoned at our old home?”

  “Not that I noticed,” Aurora promised. “But I left him and Sylvia seducing each other in the drawing room and went to bed early last night.”

  “I suppose he’ll insist I take servants with me next time.”

  “That wouldn’t be a good idea,” Aurora teased, grinning.

  “No. They might report back to him about my midnight visitor.” She laughed softly and stood.

  Aurora grasped her hand. “Do you want me to come with you?”

  “You’re aware you’re still in your nightgown. I can handle Wharton.” She shoved her feet into her slippers and waved. “I’ll return shortly. Don’t eat my breakfast when it arrives. Order your own, and we’ll eat together when I get back.”

  Aurora waved her off. “Don’t lose your temper with him for simply being protective of your reputation!”

  Wharton house was usually quiet at this hour and warmed by fires lit hours ago. Even so, Eugenia shivered as she went down the staircase.

  The butler materialized and pointed her down the hall. “He is waiting for you in the study, madam.”

  Eugenia hurried there, keen to have any discussion over so she could return to her room and breakfast tray.

  She knocked and barged right in. “You wished to speak with me, my lord?”

  “Indeed.”

  Wharton appeared rather untidy. His cravat was badly tied and his coat absent. He looked like he hadn’t combed his hair that day. “You need to find a mirror, my lord.”

  He turned furious eyes on her. “Do not pretend to care about me or anyone else, madam.”

  “I beg your pardon,” she replied, taken aback by his hostility. Obviously, he’d confused her with someone else. He’d referred to her as madam, too. “It is miss or Eugenia. I’ve already given you leave to use my given name.”

  He blinked at her, and then he set his jaw as his face grew red. “Miss?”

  Never had she seen him so furious. Oh, she disagreed with him on occasion, and they’d had some heated debates before moving in, but they’d been getting along just fine until now.

  He jabbed a finger in her direction. “I always knew you were keeping something from me.”

  Eugenia blinked. Dear God, Wharton had found out about her affair with Thaddeus Berringer. “It wasn’t important for you to know.”

  He blinked several times. “Not important? Madam, there is a vast deal of things in life I consider important. The secret you’ve been keeping changes everything.”

  Eugenia closed her eyes briefly. Wharton was going to make trouble for her, and for Thaddeus, too. He’d force them to wed unless she could make him see just how bad that idea was. She squared her shoulders and looked him in the eye. “I knew what I was doing. I suggest we sit down, you and I, to discuss this matter rationally. There’s no need to involve anyone else, is there.”

  “Are you suggesting we cover it up?”

  She nodded. “It’s the best thing to do, really. There’ll be a scandal otherwise.”

  Wharton was suddenly in front of her. “I’ll want more details later, but it is beyond my understanding. I heard you confided everything to your cousins, and them to you.”

  Aurora, of course, knew, but Sylvia… She gulped. “I would have. Eventually.”

  That didn’t seem to please him, either. “Well, you won’t be able to hide the truth now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Wharton pulled a sour face. “You have a visitor, and I guess you won’t need an introduction or a chaperone to be alone with him—nor any gentleman ever again, either.”

  Wharton shook his head, still clearly upset with her, and she was at a loss to understand what her affair with Thaddeus had to do with chaperones. But he suddenly caught her by the elbow and marched her to the drawing room, despite her protests that he was hurting her.

  He did ease his grip at the drawing room door. He opened it and led her in at a slower pace.

  She looked up and saw a drab, rounded man across the room jump to his feet and bow.

  “At last,” the man cried before hurrying toward them.

  Eugenia recoiled. “I beg your pardon?”

  The fellow stopped, hands clenching at his waist. “I’m not surprised by your reaction. It has been many a year, hasn’t it?”

  Eugenia would have taken a step back if Wharton hadn’t been holding her in place. She looked up at him. “I don’t know this gentleman.”

  Wharton’s jaw worked. “Only now do I understand why you’ve always denied the need for a chaperone,” Wharton muttered. He shook his head. “Look at him again. Look closely.”

  “My cousins are my chaperones,” she murmured, but she did glance at the man again.

  A look of profound adoration lit up his face as their eyes met. His were a murky green, like her own. The stranger was a little over her height, portly, and in need of a new waistcoat to contain his girth. His hair brown hair was thin and peppered with gray at the temples. He had a scar on his chin as if he’d tangled with the wrong man some time ago…

  …or a clumsy woman with a garden hoe.

  A memory of another man with the very same scar teased her mind, and she squinted at the stranger a little harder. Only in her memory, the scar had been just starting to turn from red to pink as it healed.

  “Do you remember me now, blossom?”

  Blossom? That nickname on the stranger’s lips sent her pulse roaring in her ears.

  The scar…

  A wound she’d made to a man she’d once loved…and married…and then lost forever.

  “No!” She reached for Wharton’s arm to support herself. “It cannot be.”

  Chapter 16

  “Devil take it, it’s true,” Wharton cursed, shaking off her grip to walk away from her.

  “It’s not possible,” she whispered, staring after him.

  Wharton spun about, his eyes ablaze with anger. “But you do know this man.”

  “Have a care how you speak to my lady, my lord,” the stranger warned, clearly believing he had the right to defend her. “I won’t have anyone shouting at my wife.”

  “Be quiet, sir,” Wharton ground out. “I will have the truth from her own lips. Well, Eugenia? Do you know this man or not?”

  Eugenia studied the stranger. “Perhaps, but…”

  “Well, there is no doubt in my mind that you do recognize his face, and also clearly do not want to admit it,” Wharton said in a deathly cold voice. “How could you not tell us that you were married, Eugenia?”

  “Because Robert is dead!” she cried as she stumbled back, tripping over her own feet in her haste. She fell hard and cried out in shock, aghast at her own clumsiness in front of a stranger.

  Aurora burst into the room just as the man bearing the passing resemblance to her late husband, Robert Bagshaw, reached for her hands.

  Eugenia slapped him away. “Don’t you dare touch me!”

  “I only want to look after you, blossom.”

  Aurora helped her stand.

  “And don’t call me blossom, either. Ever.”

  “Yes, my dear,” he said, lowering his head but smiling softly. “Anything you say, my love.”

  Submissiveness had not been the nature of the Robert Bagshaw Eugenia had known and married years ago. He had changed.

  She stared at the man she felt was a stranger, confused by him. If they’d passed on the street, she’d never have looked at him twice.

  Aurora smoothed a hand down her back. “What happened?”

  “I tripped over my own skirts,” Eugenia admitted to her cousin. “I am not hurt.”

  “I apologize if my outburst of temper had anything to do with your fall,” Wharton said quietly. “I did not mean to seem so intimidating that you might fear I’d strike you.”

  “Forgiven, my lord,” she promised, because she felt he really meant it. He was in as much shock as she. He might shout out his opinions sometimes, but he’d never struck her as a violent man.

  The stranger looked on, wearing Robert’s face, albeit looking more than four years older than when she’d last seen him, and smiling as if all was perfectly normal for him to have returned from the grave.

  But it wasn’t. Her husband could not be alive and be so changed.

  Aurora turned her away from the men to whisper, “I heard it all from the hall. Why did you not tell us?”

  “It’s a long story,” Eugenia muttered, embarrassed by her fall and the fact that her cousin had discovered her long-held secret. Her greatest disappointment and loss.

  How had it taken her so long to recognize the stranger as Robert? Did she really remember the man she’d fallen in love with and impulsively married so little after all these years?

  But it was impossible to her that he could be Robert, back from the dead. She’d been told of his demise from a reliable source she’d never doubted. “I need to sit.”

  Aurora guided her to a chair, warning off the stranger who came forward to solicitously be of service to the woman he seemed to think was his wife.

  Wharton held the stranger back, murmuring for the man to be patient.

  “My dear, you shouldn’t upset yourself that you didn’t recognize me,” the fellow started, then fell silent as she glared daggers at him for daring to speak with her. “Too much excitement is not good for your nerves.”

  The warning also rang false in her head. Robert had liked her excited. He’d have laughed and encouraged her to exert herself when he’d been alive. Even the day she’d nicked his chin in her frustration with her overgrown garden, he’d laughed off the injury and told her to try again. Although he had stepped back much farther than the first time she’d swung the scythe.

  Whoever this man was, he was no one she’d ever met before.

  “Summon the watch, my lord. This man is an imposter.”

  Sylvia burst into the chamber then, looking frantic. “What’s going on?”

  Eugenia stared between her cousins, still at a loss for words to explain that she’d once had a husband and that he’d died.

  Wharton came close to his future bride and placed a gentle hand on Sylvia’s shoulder. “It appears your cousin is a married woman.”

  “No!” Sylvia’s eyes were wide with shock when they locked on Eugenia’s face, and she felt very small and terrible for not having told the truth long ago. Why hadn’t she?

  “Not to him,” Eugenia promised. “I was married, but he died. Drowned.”

  “I’m hardly dead now, am I, my dear,” the stranger murmured. An oily smile she didn’t trust appeared on the stranger’s face as he approached Sylvia with his hand outstretched. “Mr. Robert Bagshaw, of Dover.”

  Eugenia closed her eyes. Robbie had come from Dover, too. “You lie,” she insisted.

  “Now, now. Let us not quarrel at our reunion after so many years apart. I’ve returned to do my duty as I promised in my letters. I’ve kept all of yours by my side all these years. His lordship has them as proof of our intimate connection.”

  Sylvia gasped. “You really were married?”

  Eugenia winced, ducking her head a little. “A long time ago.”

  “I will require additional proof,” Wharton announced, his jaw set in a hard line.

  “I’ve given you everything necessary,” the fellow answered. “The love letters, proof of the marriage. She is my wife, and no man may come between us, or so the church and law promise.”

  Wharton seemed to pause. “Indeed, it does.”

  Eugenia gripped the arm of the chair for support—and for reassurance that she wasn’t trapped in the most dreadful dream. He had her love letters to Robert and the marriage license, but she couldn’t be married to such a man.

  Aurora’s arm slipped around her back and was too familiar to doubt she was in anything but a waking nightmare. She put her head in her hand to hide her flaming face. “That cannot be my Robbie.”

  “Yet he swears he is. You recognize him, don’t you?” Sylvia whispered as she crowded close to her side.

  “A similar face,” she argued. “While I admit a resemblance is there, my husband died.”

  Sylvia exhaled slowly. “When were you married?”

  Eugenia met her cousin’s gaze. “Just before you wrote to me, suggesting we pool our resources and live together.”

  “A happy day our marriage was for both of us, eh, Mrs. Bagshaw?” the imposter interrupted. “We were both so impatient for the banns to be called and, of course, to have our wedding night. I remember… Well, that is best for us to talk about another time.”

  Eugenia shuddered at the thought of being a wife to a man she barely recognized.

  Sylvia, in uncommonly firm fashion, spoke to the stranger. “If you don’t mind, sir, I am speaking with my cousin. Kindly do not interrupt us again.”

  Wharton took that as a sign to draw the imposter away from them.

  “Thank you,” Sylvia said to Wharton. Then she grasped Eugenia’s hand tightly and whispered, “I wrote when I heard your brother had died. Did he know Mr. Bagshaw?”

  “No. We met a little after his death. I was three and twenty, and alone, but suddenly found myself very much in love.”

  “To Mr. Robert Bagshaw?” Aurora queried, as she seemed to study the man now speaking with Wharton across the room and craning his neck to see them still. “Do you love Robert still?”

  “I have always felt so much sadness for what might have been,” she promised. But as Eugenia searched her feelings, the deepest recesses of her heart, she found no bright spark of recognition or yearning in her for the gentleman standing across the chamber claiming to be her spouse. “He might wear my beloved’s face, but I do not love that man.”

  “That is good enough for me,” Aurora promised. “You have always been guided by your intuition, and it has never failed you before.”

  “Perhaps you’ve merely forgotten your feelings,” Sylvia murmured, but there was an edge to her tone that she suggested she disbelieved her own words.

  “I forget nothing.” Eugenia had never forgotten the bright moment of love she’d experienced as a young woman in Hastings when a dashing young man had charmed his way into her heart, despite her grief for her brother’s passing. Her first and only true love. Her secret loss all these years. She’d been swept off her feet and agreed to a marriage almost immediately with Robbie Bagshaw from far off Dover. Back then, he’d seemed almost worldly compared to her.

  But now, looking at a man who resembled her departed love, albeit wearing an older version of the face she’d once thought so handsome, she keenly felt the absence of any tender feeling.

  Robbie was gone. Dead nearly four years.