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believe I have agreed to such folly.”
    Mama stepped back, one hand wiping at the tears on her cheeks. “Will you tell her? Will she know she has the power to ask?”
    He appreciated she had not demanded that of him. It was a small vote of faith in him, even though she little knew him as a grown man. He lifted his chin. “I don’t like it. It says I am ready to give up before we have begun.”
    Perhaps some of the warmth fell from her face, but she did not reprimand.
    “But, yes. If I am to be held to such a promise involving her, then she must know of it.”
    Mama’s mouth pursed again, but this time he thought it was from holding back new tears. She nodded, and gave him a stiff, approving little nod.
    A long silence stretched out, with some of the old awkwardness rearing its uncomfortable head now that their strange pact was made. Mama finally broke it. “Will you take tea with me?”
    “I cannot. I must call on another now.”
    “Miss Hamilton?”
    “No. Miss Bremcott.”
    “Ahh. The scorned female,” Mama said. Was there sympathy in her tone? For him, or for the lady? And was there a hint of amusement despite her sad eyes, underneath it all?
    He called for his hat and horse, not caring to discover any further unwished-for revelations about his mother’s nature.
     

Chapter 4
     
    “But…but, Geoffrey!” Jacqueline said, a sob in her throat, tears threatening to spill from her eyes. He gritted his teeth, hoping she would not let them fall. He’d had enough tears already, now that he’d called upon Mama.
    Alessandra had not cried, not once, a point he was realizing was rather in her favor.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, not exactly sure why he was apologizing, since he’d never actually said any words of commitment to Jacqueline. There’d been no formal betrothal. “But it must be this way, you must see that.”
    Though he had seen it coming, to his chagrin she began to weep.
    “Jacqueline, it is not as though this will reflect on you in any way,” he said, resisting his natural inclination to bow and take leave, and instead putting a comforting arm around her shoulders and pulling her to a settee. They had known each other so long. He counted her as a friend, at the very least.
    “But everyone knew we would wed one day.”
    She must have realized at once by the stiffness that came into his touch and the way he said “I do not concern myself with what ‘everyone’ knows” that she had revealed an unmaidenly presumption. She quickly amended, “What I mean to say is, I love you, not old Viscount Aldford,” she cried into a handkerchief that Geoffrey had given her from his jacket pocket.
    He compressed his lips. He had grown up with the idea that he was to offer for Jacqueline. It had been, in their mutual parents’ estimation, a gracious happenstance (that was quite possibly arranged by the Supreme Being) that their country estates shared borders. It was evident to all that those estates ought to be engaged in one big, legal, happy union.
    Although it had long been logical to Geoffrey as well, the traitorous thought had run unbidden a number of times through his head that he did not care one whit whether the properties were joined, and he had been putting off that union in all contentment, despite the increasingly pointed hints from Papa for the last two years. And am I a shade annoyed to find Jacqueline’s preference of myself is perhaps because I am a dozen or so years younger than another suitor who waits in the wings?
    “Viscount Aldford is at least ten years older than I,” Jacqueline went on. She quaked, clearly distressed. “He can’t dance. His teeth are not good. And his estate is…is too far from London.” Geoffrey had heard the hesitation, and thought perhaps she’d changed her words of “too far” from “smaller and creates less income than yours.” Still, he couldn’t blame her too much if she’d thought that, for a woman had to make the best match she could. And yet my