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enough to lay low.
    Now here was Marcus's sister, looking at him like he had just crawled out from under a rock. But she could not know he was not Marcus. Not unless she'd had a spy in Ceylon.
    Still, he looked at her carefully, sizing her up with a keen intelligence veiled by lowered lids. She was dressed in deep mourning suitable for the death of a close relative, and her astonishment at seeing him seemed disproportionate to the circumstances. But if she were truly in mourning for any recent death, she would not now be in London planning to launch her sister into the ton, which, courtesy of the voluble Mrs. Bucknell and the less loquacious but corroborating Stivers, he knew was the reason for the ladies' very inopportune intrusion into his plans. A closer glance was sufficient to disclose that the garments she wore were not only not in the current style, but well worn. Her bereavement, then, was most likely a long-standing one.
    What, then, was he to make of her reaction to his presence? Was she, perhaps, of that stamp of female who was overset by the least departure from the ordinary?
    Looking at that square jaw, he wouldn't have thought so.
    "M— Marcus?" she said. Her voice was low and hesitant, and surprisingly husky.
    "Am I really such a surprise, dear sister?" he asked lightly, releasing her hand and smiling down into her widened eyes. Still a shade wary, he looked closely into their depths. The gray irises were as cool and clear as the never-ending English rain. Their very clarity reassured him: this woman— this proper English lady— was the keeper of no secrets. In him, she saw no more than the obvious: her older brother, head of her family, a man she did not know who, now that he came to think about it, held her future in his hands, arrived out of the blue to possibly interfere in her and her sisters' lives. Looked at that way, her astonishment could be reinterpreted as at least partly consternation, and became more understandable. Clearly, whoever the mourning was for, it was not for Marcus Banning, seventh earl of Wickham. In other words, not for him.
    Relaxing slightly, he looked beyond her to where the other three females in the party stood regarding him with no more than the normal amount of surprise and interest. The gaunt old woman sizing him up with a narrowed, weighing gaze he immediately recognized as some kind of an upper servant, naturally protective of the young ladies in her charge. The beautiful girl— indeed, she was ravishing enough to make his eyes widen before he got his expression under control— who leaned on the old woman's arm had to be the second sister, Claire. And the plump, smiling youngster with the carroty hair was Elizabeth.
    Of course.
    "Marcus, is it really you?" The youngest one, Elizabeth, came forward then, hands extended to greet him, a bounce in her step, delight in her voice. Before she had quite reached him she was stopped in her tracks by a quick sideways grab by Gabriella, who seemed to have recovered her wits if not, entirely, her composure. Halted but uncowed by her sister's restraining hand on her arm, the younger girl grinned up at him cheekily.
    "It is indeed," he answered, taking her hands and smiling back at her. Gabriella had let her hand fall away from her sister's elbow with obvious reluctance, and he barely resisted casting her another assessing look. Instead, he kept his gaze focused on the youngest one. "And you, I fancy, must be Elizabeth."
    "Yes, but, remember, I am called Beth."
    "Beth, then." He was still smiling as he released her hands and his gaze flicked beyond her to the remaining sister. Though he did not look her way again, he was increasingly conscious of Gabriella's growing frown and that she watched him as a bird might a snake. "And you are Claire."
    The beautiful one smiled shyly at him. God, she was lovely. It was going to take some doing to keep the idea that she was his sister firmly fixed at the forefront of his mind.
    "Yes."
    While his