Yes, he had expected a great many things from his wedding day, but Imogen Harrington was not one of them.
Chapter Two
Tristan Somerset had expected many things from his wedding day.
He had expected the tedium of it, for one—the long hours of polite congratulation, the receiving line of distant relations whose names he was meant to remember and rarely did, the wedding breakfast with its endless toasts from gentlemen whohad known his father and felt, on this account, entitled to inflict their reminiscences upon the son. He had expected the faint, mechanical satisfaction of a duty discharged. He had expected, in some dim, unexamined corner of his mind, that he would feel rather more than he did at acquiring a wife, and had already made his peace with the fact that he would not.
Eliza would make a suitable duchess. That was the only thing that he needed to concern himself with. It mattered not that he found her as dull as dry toast. Dull meant no propensity for scandal, which was how he preferred to live his life.
He turned toward his bride, reaching with practiced ease for the delicate edge of her veil. It was a small, almost perfunctory gesture—one he had performed in his mind a dozen times already during the carriage ride from Somerset House.Lift the veil. Kiss the bride. Proceed with the rest of the day as planned.
Swift, chaste and perfectly polite. That was how things were done. That was howhedid things. He had organized the entire affair down to the choice of hymns and the precise minute at which the carriages should arrive at the breakfast, and if there was a faint, sour pleasure in such management, he did not examine it too closely.
His fingers brushed the fine fabric and lifted.
And his world—so carefully structured and ordered—tilted sharply on its axis.
This was not Eliza.
For one suspended, disorienting moment, his mind refused to reconcile what his eyes clearly saw. He had a brief, almost absurd impression that the church itself had shifted around him, that the candle flames had bent in some sudden draught, that the very stones beneath his polished boots had given a small, drunken lurch. He blinked once. Slowly. As though the gesture might rearrange the woman before him into someone she was not.
The features beneath the veil were familiar—striking in their own right, framed by light brown hair coiled in some intricate arrangement that caught the morning light from the high windows, and bright, intelligent eyes the precise color of strong tea, currently fixed upon him with an expression of unmistakable resolve.
Imogen Harrington.
Not the quiet, dutiful bride he had agreed to wed.
Her friend.
A woman he knew well enough to recognize on sight—and not nearly well enough to ever have considered in this position. He had a vague, almost insultingly indistinct impression of her: a low, warm laugh at some country house party two summers past; a quick remark about Byron at a literary salon he had wandered into by mistake; a figure in green silk standing near the windows at Lady Carrington’s rout, observing the room with the faintly amused detachment of a woman who had decided, sensibly enough, that the room was not worth observing very closely.
He had never intentionally sought her out because somehow he had known that she, with her abundant, lush curves, could make a man lose his head. Make him lose his head.
For all the potential distractions she presented, he’d never have considered her a woman capable ofthis level of deception.
His hand stilled midair, the veil now fully lifted, the gauzy fabric draped back over the small, jeweled comb that held her hair in place. The morning light caught the high arch of her cheekbone and the soft, betraying flutter at the base of her throat—the only visible sign that she was not as composed as she appeared. She was exposed to him now. Only to him, in that intimate, suspended moment before the world caught up to what his eyes had already seen.
Imogen did not look away.
If anything, she lifted her chin slightly, the smallest possible adjustment, as if daring him to speak.
To react.
To expose her.
A dozen calculations fired through his mind in rapid succession.
The ceremony was complete.
The vows had been spoken.
Before witnesses. Before God. Before the bishop, who was a personal friend of his late father’s and who had, at the breakfast last week, congratulated Tristan on theeminent suitabilityof the match with a heartiness that had nearly put him off his coffee.
There would be no quiet undoing of this. No simple correction. No discreet word with the vicar over a glass of port and the matter set right.
Annulment would require explanation.
Explanation would invite scandal.