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“Miss Beth! Miss Claire sent me up to—” Twindle’s voice broke off and she frowned as she took in her erstwhile charge’s dishabille. “Child! Have you had some kind of accident?”

“’Twas a—most unfortunate thing,” Beth began, groping desperately for a version of events that would not completely horrify Twindle. Since the room was only dimly lit and her arms were once again folded over her chest, hiding the worst of the damage to her gown, she was pretty sure that Twindle was reacting to her tumbledown hair and general air of disorder only. If Twindle had seen her torn gown, her old nursemaid would have dissolved into a paroxysm of questions and exclamations on the spot.

“What was?” Twindle’s frown deepened.

Before Beth could decide on how much she could safely say, the
door opened behind her, nearly hitting her in the backside. Beth shot an alarmed look over her shoulder even as she had to scoot forward to get out of the way. Of course, she thought wryly, just when she truly needed a few moments of privacy to recover her composure and change her clothes, her room
would
suddenly become a magnet for the household.

“There
you are,” Claire said in relieved accents as she entered and closed the door behind her. Her sapphire blue ball gown rustled as she moved. The sapphire and diamond necklace and earbobs with which she was bedecked glittered in the candlelight. Raven-haired, slender to the point of fragility, and still impossibly beautiful at the ripe age of nearly twenty-five, Claire was the sister she had squabbled with, loved as an equal, and done her best to look out for for as long as she could remember, while Gabby, ten years Beth’s elder, had mothered them both. Aside from Gabby’s health, which was never robust, Beth rarely worried about her: Gabby had enough quiet fortitude to look out for herself, and was happily married and the mother of a brood of three hopeful children besides. Although Claire was now Duchess of Richmond, rich and respected and married to a man who adored her and whom she truly loved, she still brought forth her protective instincts. Beth had always, always known that she, although not her sister’s equal in beauty or, regrettably, sweetness of disposition, was a far tougher character than Claire would ever be.

“Shouldn’t you be down in the ballroom?” Beth asked her sister with some exasperation, knowing that the gig was up even as Claire’s eyes fixed on her and began to widen. There now would be no explaining this away without revealing some version of the truth. Claire’s eyes were too sharp—and so was her knowledge of her sister.

“What in the world happened to you?” As Claire looked Beth over, her lips parted in horror. Behind her, Beth could sense Twindle looking her up and down, too. Beth grimaced and gave it up: dissembling in front of these two who knew her so well just wasn’t going to be possible.

She would, at least, honor her bargain to the dishonorable housebreaker and keep his presence secret. The rest, she knew, was going to
be dragged out of her one way or another, so she might as well get it over with.

“Oh, all right. If you must have it, I gave William his congé.” Her voice was flat. As she spoke, she turned and headed across the large bedchamber with its soft green walls, cream-flocked curtains and bedclothes, and elegant mahogany furniture toward her much smaller dressing room. The first order of business was to get out of her ruined gown before anyone else came bursting in. “He didn’t take it well.”

“Never say you’ve jilted another one?” Twindle, sounding aghast, fell into step behind her. “For heaven’s sake, Miss Beth, you must—”

“Lord Rosen
did this?” Claire broke in. Her voice pitched high with surprise and shock, as she, too, joined the procession. Although skeptical of Beth’s intention to actually wed the man, she had not been displeased with Beth’s acceptance of William, feeling that he offered her headstrong little sister a reliable ballast on which to build her life.

Clearly, Beth thought, Claire was no judge of character. But then, neither had she been.

They had reached the dressing room now; Twindle was only a few steps behind her, while Claire, whom she could see perfectly well through the tall pier glass at the far end of the room, stood just inside the doorway.

Stopping in front of the mirror, Beth met Claire’s eyes through the glass. With her back to the room, her hair spilling over her shoulders and her arms folded over her chest, most of the damage to her gown was yet concealed from them. But with both of them watching her like pigeons after crumbs, there would be no hiding the extent of the disaster.

Beth sighed.

“Yes, William did indeed. Could one of you unfasten my gown, please? I don’t want to ring for Patterson.”

Patterson was her maid and loyal, but Beth wasn’t ready to trust her with this. Servants’ gossip was notorious for reaching the ears of the ton. And if she was to come out of this with her reputation, such as it remained to her, intact, no word of what had happened in the library must get out.

“You look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backward.” Indignation colored Claire’s voice as she met Beth’s gaze through the glass. “I heard that you and Lord Rosen repaired to the library, alone. Then . . . ”

Both Claire and Twindle had stepped forward to unfasten her gown, but it was Claire who reached her first, and she was actually touching the tiny hooks and eyes at the back of Beth’s gown as her voice trailed off. Through the mirror, Beth watched her sister’s eyes widen again as she realized the state the garment was in.

“Your gown is ripped. Ruined, in fact.” Claire’s fingers ran disbelievingly over the frayed edges of the delicate material, and she took in the destruction visible at the back of the gown by sight and touch before meeting Beth’s eyes through the mirror again. “Did Rosen
attack
you?”

Horror was writ large in Claire’s face and voice, and Beth was reminded of the nightmare of a previous marriage Claire had endured before wedding Hugh. Her sister had gone paper white, with a strained look around her eyes and mouth that made Beth’s stomach tighten. Claire had never fully shared the details of her years-long ordeal, but knowing her sister as she did, Beth felt certain that violence had played a large part in it.

“William didn’t actually harm me,” she hastened to say. “At least, he didn’t—oh, in the end, all it really amounts to is a torn dress. Could you undo the waist, please? I can slip right out of the rest.”

There was no point in trying to conceal the ruination of her bodice any longer; Claire was clearly beginning to realize the extent of the damage for herself, and Twindle, bug-eyed, was crowding in right behind her. Giving it up, Beth unlocked her arms from across her chest and pulled her tangle of hair to the front so that the few fastenings on her gown that were still intact were more readily accessible.

“Dear Lord,” Claire breathed, her gaze sliding over the tatters of Beth’s gown through the mirror. “The
scum
.”

“Sit down, Miss Claire.” Twindle took charge, pushing the small slipper chair beside the mirror toward Claire as every last bit of color leached from Claire’s face. “And you, Miss Beth, hold still.” Nudging
Claire aside, Twindle started undoing the hooks at the back of Beth’s gown herself while Claire obediently sat, her face now white as chalk. That Twindle was almost as horrified as Claire was evident from what she didn’t say: in anything less than the direst of straits, Twindle inevitably scolded until the victim was tempted to clap her hands over her ears and repent in sheer self-defense.

But Twindle went to work on the fastenings without another word.

“Tell me the whole,” Claire ordered from her perch on the chair. A glance in the mirror told Beth that her sister’s eyes burned, and her expression was grim. Another glance showed that Twindle’s mouth was a thin, straight line.

Beth sighed. For these two, under the circumstances, nothing would serve but the truth. Or, at least, most of the truth.

“After I told William that I feared we would not suit, he said that I
would
marry him, whether I wished to or not. He ripped my dress, then threw me down and tried to ravish me, on the theory that if he ruined me I would have no choice but to become his wife.”

“The
bastard,
” Claire breathed. Beth’s eyes widened at that. Over the course of a lifetime spent together, she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she had heard Claire swear.

Twindle snorted derisively. “Clearly he doesn’t know you, Miss Beth. The devil himself couldn’t make you do what you don’t wish to do, and never could.”

“He should be
beaten,
” Claire said. “Or brought up before a magistrate. Or at the very least be banned from decent society. When I tell Hugh . . . ”

“No, you mustn’t.” Beth rounded urgently on her sister just as Twindle finished unhooking the last of the hooks and eyes that had, until then, held the ruins of her gown together. The gown sagged forward and she shrugged it down toward her feet with an accustomed wriggle. “Don’t you see, you mustn’t tell Hugh. You mustn’t tell anyone. Either of you.”

“He
attacked
you.” Claire spoke through clenched teeth. “He cannot be allowed to just—”

“If word of this gets out I’ll be ruined,” Beth said. “You know as
well as I do that my credit isn’t good enough to survive the kind of scandal this will bring down upon us.”

“We can’t just let him get away with—”

“He won’t be getting away with it.” Beth interrupted Claire fiercely even as she stepped out of the puddle of gold silk that was the ruined dress and kicked it aside. “He will have lost. I won’t marry him, and I won’t be ruined, either. We must just pretend that I simply gave him his congé and he accepted it like the gentleman he decidedly isn’t.”

Their eyes met. A new emotion—fear?—darkened Claire’s.

“He did not . . . ?” Claire trailed off delicately, but her eyes held Beth’s and her meaning was impossible to mistake: had the attack succeeded to the point where she had been sexually violated? Beth shook her head even as Twindle finished untying the tapes of her petticoat and looked up to catch the answer.

“I told you, the only thing he truly harmed was my gown.” As the petticoat dropped around her ankles, Beth stepped out of that garment, too. “Though not for want of effort, mind.”

“Thank goodness,” Claire said.

“Hold
still,
Miss Beth.” Twindle was now working on the strings of Beth’s stays. Under her breath Twindle added starkly, “Boiling in oil is too good.”

That clearly was meant to apply to William.

“So how did you get away?” Claire asked.

“I hit him over the head with a poker.” There was a wealth of satisfaction in Beth’s voice. The stays dropped away, and she stripped off the shredded chemise with a feeling of relief. The ruined clothes were far too vivid a reminder of how terrifyingly close she had come to a hideous fate.

“Here, Miss Beth.” Twindle handed Beth her pale blue wrapper, and she shrugged into it.

“You hit him . . . ” Claire’s voice seemed to fail. Tying the wrapper’s belt around her waist, Beth turned to face her sister. Claire’s eyes were dark and she was white as hair powder. Then her expression brightened, and a smile curved her mouth as color flooded back into her cheeks. “Good for you, Bethie. I hope you hit him
hard
.”

Beth grinned. “I did.”

“Never say you killed the man, Miss Beth?” It was clear from Twindle’s reproving tone that she considered it a real possibility, and was concerned more about the breach of ladylike behavior aspect of it than the prospect of William’s death.

“No.” Beth shook her head. “I only hit him hard enough to knock him unconscious. I thought at first I might have killed him, but, as it turned out, I didn’t.”

There was the faintest note of regret to that.

“What a shame.” Claire echoed her sentiments exactly. Then her brow knit with concern. “So am I to understand that Lord Rosen is still lying unconscious in my house somewhere?”

Here was the tricky part.

“Not at all.” Although her response was airy in tone, Beth’s mind was racing. Lying was not something she did well, and lying to Claire, who knew her so well, was especially difficult even at the best of times, which this was not. Despite the brave front she was putting on, she was still a little shivery, still a little shaky, still not quite herself in the aftermath of all that had happened. The solution, then, was not to lie. Well, at least, not exactly. “He left. By now, I would imagine, he is back at home bemoaning his cracked head.”

There. Every word she had uttered was true.

“’Tis a sad crush downstairs.” Claire’s frown deepened and she looked at Beth with growing worry. “He is certain to have been seen on his way out, even if he didn’t speak to anyone. Was it possible to tell . . . ?”

“His head was bleeding.” Beth’s tone was cheerful as she found herself on solid conversational ground once more. In the interests of making it more difficult for Claire to read any wayward quirks of expression, she reached for the brush on her nearby dressing table and then turned toward the mirror again, presenting her sister with her back as she began to tease the knots from her hair. “But only a little. Nothing that one would immediately notice.”

“We’re up to our teeth in it for sure,” Twindle put in with gloomy conviction, taking the brush out of Beth’s hand with a
tcch
of disgust
and applying it to her tumbled hair with considerably more vigor than Beth had used. “With Lord Rosen’s fair coloring, a bleeding pate is not likely to have escaped attention.”

“I feel quite certain he wasn’t seen.” Beth winced as Twindle found a particularly stubborn tangle and, grasping the hair just above the knot on the provably incorrect theory that doing so would mitigate the pain, determinedly brushed it out.

“How can you be so sure?” Claire was staring hard at Beth as if she was beginning to suspect that there was more to the tale than she was being told. “He may even have gone straight to his mother, in which case we are in the suds. She’s looking for him right at this very moment, you know. And for you, too, because he left the ballroom in your company. She was alarmed enough to seek me out to tell me that neither of you was anywhere to be found, which is what brought me up here in search of you in the first place. If Lord Rosen spoke to her before departing, she will now know the whole. And believe me, that stiff-rumped old busybody will have no compunction at all in blackening your name to anyone within hearing distance.”