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with infamous and immoral behavior. How could her father have struck a marriage bargain with such a man? Did he bother to check anything besides the marquis’s balance sheets?
    That afternoon a soft tapping came at her chamber door. By the time she roused, rubbed her swollen eyes and slid from the bed, the tapping had become an earnest pounding. When she reached the door and turned the key, Ella burst into the chamber.
    “My lady! What’s ’appened?” Ella searched Brien’s tear-reddened face. “Whatever it was; it stilled yer tongue. Back into bed wi’ ye.” She tucked Brien back into the covers and wetted a cloth to comfort her swollen eyes. “Now, don’t ye move.”
    Brien lay propped on the pillows with her arm over her eyes.
    Ella’s arrival and bustling concern had given her a much-needed jolt back to reality. And the reality she faced was dire indeed.
    Her father had sold her to a greedy, conniving rakehell of a man in exchange for a grandchild to carry on the family name. He wanted an heir and she was merely the means, the vessel through which he would realize that abominable ambition.
    Every muscle in her body went taut with resistance.
    She would never submit to such a barbaric arrangement.
    Something had to be done, something to rid her of the preening Raoul. She thought of confronting her father with what she’d heard and demanding that he break the marriage agreement.
    There would be financial consequences, of course The marquis would demand damages and her father would be furious. Once the conniving Frenchman was paid off and packed off, her father would likely turn his considerable anger on her. And there would be social consequences as well . . . the disgrace of a broken engagement, coming so quickly on the heels of the betrothal announcement. There could be no public explanation, so she would be a social pariah . . . stricken from guest lists and shunned by proper society for decades to come.
    Good. She slid from the bed to stand defiantly on her own two feet. She had no desire to experience another night under the quizzing glass of society. She would be quite content to live out her days as the earl of Southwold’s plain, spinsterish daughter.
    A complication struck her with such force that she swayed and had to steady herself against the bed. No matter how successfully she escaped Raoul Trechaud, her father’s motive for matching her with him still remained. He wanted a grandchild, an heir of his own bloodline, and she was the only vessel qualified to produce one. What was to keep him from finding her another husband?
    Surely not. She began to wring her hands. Where would he find someone willing to overlook the scandal of a broken engagement? Someone to “plow and plant” a plump social outcast and turn her into one of England’s noble brood mares? A sick feeling appeared in her stomach. Turn over any rock between Portsmouth and Edinburgh. The country was full of men to whom piles of coin would be incentive enough to abandon decency and honor and overlook a woman’s implacable loathing for matrimony.
    Her blood drained, leaving her face pale and her hands icy. She had no intention of jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.
    Before she spoke to her father, she had to be certain she would not only be rid of Raoul, but would be ineligible for pairing with any other fortune hunter as well.
    What did it take to make a woman truly unable to marry?
    Constitutional weakness? Deformity? Illness? Mental derangement? In the history of England’s nobility there were examples of women in just such sad conditions, who had been forced to marry and produce offspring for “dynastic” reasons.
    She was certainly of age . . . healthy . . . of sound mind . . . of demonstrated good character. What impediment could she possibly produce that would make her utterly ineligible to marry?
    She paced intently, going over and over the possibilities, refusing to dismiss any prospective solution, no matter how