Page 3 of Bound By her Earl

“Grace?” she called, her voice shaking. “Are you there?” Her fingers shook, too, where they held Emily’s tight.

There was no response. Even so, the girls kept calling, kept straining their eyes to peer into the dark. By the time Diana returned with half thetonbeside her, Grace’s father, a whey-faced Duke of Graham, in the lead, Emily had come to fear that there neverwouldbe a response, not from Grace.

CHAPTER 1

Three Years Later

“Inever should have found them a governess,” Emily muttered to herself as she searched for her sisters. “Let alone one that encouragedindependent thinking. I should have locked them in the cellar and let them out when they were five-and-twenty. Nay, thirty.”

Emily herself might only have been two-and-twenty, but she felt confident that the twins would require more time to become respectable members of Society who did not seek to sow chaos at every turn. The events of this evening were, she felt, ample evidence of that notion.

Tonight was, after all, only the twins’ second night out in Society; they’d debuted only days earlier. In advance of that debut, Emily had reminded them again and again (and again and again andagain) to comport themselves in a manner that wouldnotbring scandal down upon their house and name.

Amanda and Rose had managed the thing perfectly. They’d been pleasant and popular, had danced with a variety of gentlemen, and had avoided insulting anyone or speaking too outlandishly on any of their radical viewpoints. And Emily, who was apparently the worst kind of idiot, had patted herself on the back. A job well done, she’d considered it. Clearly the girls knew how to behave.

So, tonight, she’d only impressed the importance of propriety upon them once.

It had not been enough, apparently.

They’d given her the slip within ten minutes, their manner too coordinated to have been circumstance. They’d been retrieving their cups of punch when Amanda had made a distressed sound over her hem. She’d handed Emily her glass and bent to fuss with her skirts. Just then, Rose had spotted a friend. She’d needed to check her coiffure. When Emily had turned back to Amanda, she was gone. When Emily turned to ask Rose where Amanda had hied off to, Rose wasalsogone.

And Emily had been left juggling three cups of punch.

“Too clever,” she groused now as she searched the crowd for them. If her sisters had been as tall as Emily was, this would have been easy. Alas, Emily topped them both by several inches. The girls blended easily into the crowd.

“Too clever,” she said again. “And can they use those powers for good? No. I should see about marrying Amanda off to somekind of intelligence officer. If we’re lucky, that will improve the nation’s security. If not, well, at least he’ll have experience dealing with slippery characters.”

Emily recognized that she was working herself into quite the state. And most of this had to do with irritation with her sisters. Could they never just listen to her? She was constantly trying her hardest—had been doing so since she was a child herself, really—to provide a good model for them and was always working to be proper and helpful and motherly though she knew she could never truly make up for the mother they had lost.

Emily would normally have commended the twins on knowing their own minds; Emily’s dear friend Diana Young, the Duchess of Hawkins, was not the type to listen to the demands of others, and Emily adored her for that.

But all Emily wanted was to keep the twins out of trouble. Why couldn’t theyseethat?

“Excuse me, excuse me,” she muttered reflexively as she moved through the crowd, craning her neck to seek her sisters.

The small part of her that was not merely irritated, however, was tied in a sick knot of worry. Emily had never shared the events of that evening with her sisters—she didn’t want them to carry around those sorts of fears—but searching for someone in a ballroom would always bring back the way she’d felt searching for Grace…searching, but never finding her.

It wasn’t the same, of course. It wasn’t the same!

But sometimes itfeltthe same.

She was so lost in these layers of feeling—annoyance upon fear upon grief upon utterfrustration—that she didn’t even see the man until she’d crashed into him hard enough that she would have fallen on her behind, right there in the ballroom, if he hadn’t been so quick to seize her about the shoulders.

“Oof,” she said.

Emily was the kind of well-bred young lady who had had the rules of comportment so sufficiently drilled into her that she had, in times past, reflexively apologized to bookshelves and settees after bumping into them. Yet she found that the wordsorrydied on her lips in the face of the gentleman’s glare.

And hissize.Emily was unaccustomed to looking up to meet a gentleman’s gaze; it was far more usual that she had to lookdown. But this man was so tall that she not only had to look up, she had to tip her head back to do so.

Only to be met with fire when he glared back down at her.

“You really must watch where you are going,” he snapped.

Her mouth dropped open and, again, decades of propriety fled her mind.

“Excuse me?”

“I said,” he began tersely and Emily—shocking even herself, truly—interrupted him.

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