To Wed the Wrong Sister (Preview)

Chapter One

Her mother’s scream cut through the early morning air of the Penrose estate. Genevieve sat bolt upright in bed. She quickly grabbed a dressing gown to cover her nightdress, not bothering to smooth her auburn hair as she raced down the stairs, the old wood protesting under her feet.

There is an assumed level of stress when there is an imminent wedding. Genevieve had witnessed it first-hand as the day of her sister Clarissa’s wedding grew closer. She had not, however, expected quite so much stress.

She did her best to slow herself and walk with decorum as she passed the kitchens. She knew well enough that the kitchen staff would be in there by now, and the door had splits in the wood large enough for one to look through. The servants, as few as there were, did not need any encouragement to peep through them all. Once she had passed by, she glanced over her shoulder once more, before breaking back into a run.

“Mother? What is—” Genevieve ran into the parlor where the scream had come from, only to be met with the sight of her mother sobbing and her father rubbing her arm.

“Genevieve,” he said, looking at her. “I cannot apologize enough for the disturbance. We have been unable to find Clarissa, and your mother is getting hysterical…”

“It is not hysterics!” her mother cried out. “Clarissa would not just leave on such a day! What has become of my daughter?! What if something dreadful has befallen her? What if we are late to the chapel? What—”

“Breathe, my dearest wife,” Mr. Penrose said, rubbing her back in soothing circles. “Our dear Clarissa may be of an excitable and flighty countenance, but she knew the importance of this day as well as the rest of us did. She would not have been so rash as to leave without notice.”

“Would she not?” Mrs. Penrose sobbed. Genevieve watched her father tense. He greatly disliked platitudes and empty words. As a merchant, actions had always served him in a greater capacity. But faced with his wife in such a state…

“I am sure she is fine, my darling,” he said, before turning to his daughter. “Could you check Clarissa’s chambers for us? I looked earlier, but perhaps as her sister you shall see something I did not. I shall calm your mother.”

Genevieve nodded and ran up the stairs to Clarissa’s chambers. 

Inside, one would not have known that her sister had left. Clarissa’s vanity still had her comb on it, but Genevieve could see spaces where items should have been. She frowned and moved to the wardrobe, her fingers hesitating on the handle for just a moment before she pulled it open.

Her heart stuttered.

Empty.

Or near enough to it, only the gowns Clarissa had deemed unfashionable remained, hanging like ghosts of the sister who had left them behind. They had yet to pack her trunk, as that would be handled by the staff later. She stood there for a moment longer than was necessary. It was not that she had expected to find Clarissa still tucked into her things like a child hiding in plain sight. She had known, from the sound of her mother’s voice alone, that something was genuinely wrong. And yet the wardrobe said it with a finality that the scream had not. Clarissa had not been taken. She had chosen. Genevieve’s eyes swept back to the vanity. The silver perfume bottle that had been their grandmother’s gift was gone. The small jewelry box. The ivory hairpins Clarissa had been so proud of. Small luxuries, symbols of the status their family so desperately needed. Taken with the careful deliberation of a woman who had planned this for some time.

She wheeled around, her eyes searching for anything that would indicate her sister’s presence, or told the family where she had gone. Her eyes landed on her sister’s desk. There was a fresh ink pot and quill resting next to a folded letter. She picked up the folded paper. For a moment, she hesitated, not wishing to invade her sister’s privacy. Then the thought of her mother’s anguish rippled through her and she unfolded the paper. Her heart thundered as she read the first line.

She immediately closed it again. It was not that the words were a surprise, exactly. It was that they rearranged something. She had spent years understanding that Clarissa was the one things happened to, the bright one, the wanted one, the one around whom the world obligingly organized itself. Genevieve had never minded. Or she had minded, occasionally, in the small and private way one minded things one had no right to resent. But she had never imagined that Clarissa’s story would reach out and become hers. She swallowed hard, her heart thudding so loud it was a miracle the servants had not heard it. For a moment, she simply stood there, the folded paper held between her hands as though it might burn her. Clarissa. Of all the things her sister had done in her years of impulsive, flighty, brilliant chaos, and there had been many, Genevieve had never imagined this. She had never imagined that Clarissa would look at everything Thomas Harrington was offering her and simply… 

She needed to show her parents, but nobody else. Taking a shuddering breath, she rang the bell for a maid. After a moment, the maid stepped into the room.

“Would you please get my parents for me?” Genevieve asked, trying to keep her voice steady. The maid nodded and stepped out of the room.

For a moment, Genevieve was left alone. She was the only one to know of the contents of the letter, and she wished she had never known it. She heard her parents upon the stairs, their footsteps urgent against the wood.

“What have you found?” her father asked as he pushed into the room. Her mother followed behind him, still tearful.

“Close the door…” Genevieve whispered. Her parents shared an anxious look before her father gently closed the door. Genevieve took a breath and quietly began to read them the contents of the letter…

 

Dearest Mother, Father, and Thomas,

By the time these words reach your eyes, I shall be far removed from the home that has sheltered and shaped me these many years, and I confess it is with a trembling hand that I commit this confession to paper. I can only beseech your forgiveness for the distress and dishonor my absence must inevitably cast upon our family’s name, yet I find I cannot, in all conscience and in all feeling, proceed with a union that my heart so strenuously refuses.

To marry a Harrington would have been, in the estimation of the world, a most advantageous and respectable match. I do not seek to diminish Thomas’s many fine qualities, nor to be ungrateful for the honor his attentions have conferred upon me. I know well what society would say, and what you would say, and it is precisely this knowledge that has tormented me these past weeks beyond all reasonable endurance.

Yet I must speak plainly, though plainness does not come easily to me in this moment: I am in love. Wholly, irrevocably, and without any prospect of amendment. Captain Richard Beaufort of His Majesty’s regiment has shown me, in every word and every action, the conduct of a true gentleman. He is steady where I am impulsive, patient where I am afraid, and it is to him alone that my affections have attached themselves, without my consent, I assure you, and entirely beyond my power to reclaim .I am sensible of the pain these words must inflict, most particularly upon dear Thomas, whose good opinion I have never ceased to value. I can only pray that time, and the natural generosity of his character, may in due course allow him to extend to me some measure of pardon.

Do not think harshly of Captain Beaufort. The fault, if fault there be, is mine alone.

I shall write again when circumstances permit, and shall not rest easy until I know you are well and that some degree of peace has been restored to our household.

Your ever devoted and most repentant daughter,

Clarissa Penrose

As she finished reading, the room seemed to fill with that ongoing, uncomfortable silence that feels as if the air has a physical weight to it, a presence that cannot be shifted or removed. Her mother covered her mouth and let out a choked sob. Her father slumped into a nearby chair, his head in his hands.

For a long moment, nobody spoke. The only sound was Mrs. Penrose’s quiet, broken sobbing, and the distant, indifferent birdsong outside the window that seemed deeply wrong given the circumstances. Genevieve became acutely aware of the letter still in her hands and set it carefully upon Clarissa’s desk, as though distance from it might lessen its contents.

Her mother sank into the chair beside her husband, her composure entirely undone. This was not the elegant weeping of a woman performing distress. This was something rawer and quieter, the grief of a mother who had not seen it coming and could not understand how she had missed it.

“How could she do this?” he whispered. “How could she do this to us… to Thomas?”

“I do not know,” Genevieve whispered. 

“We must find her,” Mrs. Penrose said suddenly, straightening. “We must send someone at once. She cannot have gone far.”

“Gone where, precisely?” Mr. Penrose asked quietly. The words settled over the room like a cold cloth. He was right. Genevieve looked back down at the letter. Captain Richard Beaufort. The name meant nothing to her. She turned it over in her mind, searching for any memory of Clarissa mentioning him, any evening where her sister had returned home with brighter eyes than usual, any afternoon unaccounted for. There were some, she realized with a hollow feeling. There had been several. She simply had not known to look.

“I do not know this man,” Genevieve said softly. “Do either of you?”

Her parents exchanged a look that told her everything. They did not.

“Then we cannot follow her,” Mr. Penrose said. “And even if we could…” He trailed off, but the unspoken conclusion sat heavily between them all. Even if they found her, dragging Clarissa back to a marriage she had fled would solve nothing. The scandal of the pursuit alone would finish them.

They all knew what was to follow this. The humiliation Clarissa had invited into their lives would be all-consuming. Thomas Harrington was not a man of new money. His family tree had deep roots, his wealth was known to be closer to that of a landed earl than that of an untitled gentry, and his family had been able to make allies and enemies with a single look. He had already been giving the Penroses a significant amount of social grace. Many argued that he was marrying beneath his standing. But when he looked at Clarissa, Genevieve had seen that mattered not to him. She thought of the last dinner they had shared, perhaps a fortnight past, when Clarissa had said something that made the whole table laugh. Genevieve had glanced at Thomas in that moment quite by accident and immediately wished she had not. The expression on his face had been so unguarded, so entirely unaware of being observed, the look of a man who could not quite believe his good fortune. His blue eyes shimmered in the candlelight, his dark hair framing his face, the face of a man deeply in love. To him, Clarissa was his Eurydice, and he was Orpheus, willing to follow her even into the underworld and all that lay beyond.

Genevieve had admired him greatly in that regard, wishing for a man to look at her so, but would have never interfered with her sister’s courtship.

Looking back down at the letter, however, something else also stirred in her chest. She could imagine her sister sitting in her chambers, hurriedly writing with tears in her eyes. Clarissa was many things to many people, but Genevieve had always known that her sister’s inner world was complicated in a way that hers was not. Imagining poor Clarissa sitting here in the candlelight, alone with the weight of what she was about to do, made something in Genevieve soften despite herself. She knew she ought to feel only the sharp edges of this. The betrayal, the recklessness, the profound selfishness of leaving without a word of warning to any of them. And she did feel those things. But she felt the other thing too, the ache of knowing her sister well enough to understand that Clarissa would not have done this lightly. Whatever else she was, Clarissa had never been cruel without cause. This had cost her something. Genevieve was certain of that much.

“Whatever shall we do about this situation?” Mr. Penrose asked with a sigh.

“There is nothing to do, is there?” Mrs. Penrose asked between tears. “Clarissa shall make us all pariahs by leaving like this. No one shall ever wish to associate with us! We had very little besides our good name, and now even that shall be gone.”

Genevieve wrapped her arms around her mother, and the older woman hugged her tightly in return.

“All is not lost yet,” Genevieve said softly. “Perhaps there is a way to salvage the situation. We should talk to Thomas. Surely he has a way to remedy this.”

“Your optimism knows no bounds,” Mr. Penrose sighed. “I do wish we could speak to him to find a solution, but there are precious few hours before the wedding. Indeed. Even if we were to summon him, he may expect us to have a plan already in place to salvage the situation, as it is our family who is doing his such a disservice.”

“Then we need to send someone to fetch him immediately,” Genevieve said, pulling back from her mother to look at her father. “The quicker we call him, the quicker we can all work together on a solution that is amenable to all parties.”

“Genevieve, he is to be married today, the banns have stated this for weeks. There are few ways that we have to mitigate such an impossible situation,” her father said, looking up at her.

“Well, there must be something we can do,” Genevieve implored. Her father sighed and ran a hand through his hair. His brow furrowed, and he focused on the floor. She had seen this expression on his face the many times he had been dealing with the “meat” of a problem. Difficult negotiations, suppliers that were unfit, demanding customers. She trusted that look because he always came out of it with a remedy. The room fell quiet around him. Even her mother, who had not stopped weeping since the letter was read, seemed to still. Genevieve watched her father’s face and waited. She had learned long ago not to rush him in these moments. To interrupt was to lose whatever careful architecture he was building behind his eyes. So she waited, and her mother waited, and the clock on the mantle marked the seconds with indifferent patience.

After a moment, his eyes met hers, and his expression softened.

“Actually,” he said softly. “I may have an idea.”

He stood up and gently took Genevieve’s hand in his own. It struck her, distantly, how rarely he did such things. He was not a cold man, but he was a practical one, and tenderness had never been his native language. That he was reaching for it now told her more than his words had.

“Genevieve, I am about to ask you for something I have no right to ask of you. Please, will you at least consider it?”

Her heart thudded in her chest, feeling a nervous tightness she had not expected to feel.

“Of course, father,” she whispered.

Whatever he was about to say, she found to her own quiet surprise, that she was not going to refuse him. She did not yet know why. She simply knew, in the particular way she had always known things before she had the words for them, that some part of her had already decided. She waited, and her hands were still, and she listened.

 

Chapter Two

There were few mornings Thomas Harrington could recall feeling quite so acutely aware of his own heartbeat. He had dressed carefully, perhaps more carefully than was strictly necessary, and had dismissed his valet twice before finally being satisfied with the result. It was not vanity that drove him, or so he told himself, but rather the particular anxiety of a man who understood that today was not merely another day. Today was the day his life changed irrevocably, and he found he wanted to meet it looking like a man who deserved what was coming to him.

He had not always been certain that he did.

He had fallen in love with Clarissa Penrose at what he could only describe as an inconvenient speed. It had not been a gradual thing, a slow accumulation of admiration and regard of the sort that he had always imagined love to be. It had been sudden and slightly alarming, like missing a step in the dark. He could still place the exact evening. A dinner at the Ashworths’, the candles burning low, Clarissa laughing at something her neighbor had said with her whole face, unselfconsciously, as though she had entirely forgotten to be composed. He had watched her and felt something shift in his chest that he had not known how to name and had not, if he was honest, particularly wanted to. It had seemed inconvenient at the time. It had seemed considerably more inconvenient since. It did not hurt that she was extraordinarily beautiful. Honey blonde hair that was pinned up in exactly the right way, blue eyes that looked at him warmly, and a figure that seemed to have been carved like a Roman statue. It was clear the Penroses were blessed in that regard, as Clarissa’s younger sister was also beautiful, but not in the same definitive way his Clarissa was. These traits, combined with such a warm and welcoming household… he had not seen it as beneath him to court and propose to Clarissa. Quite the contrary, he had counted himself an extraordinarily fortunate man.

Eventually, he finished his dressing and descended the wooden stairs of the Harrington estate. The sun seemed brighter, the portraits of his family seemed to be smiling at him, and the wind whistled outside in a particularly pleasing tune.

He had hardly sat down to eat his breakfast when his valet entered the dining room, holding a piece of paper.

“Sir, there is…” the man hesitated.

“Speak plainly, Geoffrey,” Thomas said, standing up. “Whatever has you acting so nervously on a day like today?”

“The Penroses,” the valet swallowed hard. “They are requesting your presence at their estate. It is urgent they say, Mr. Harrington.”

Thomas froze. They wanted him at their estate, immediately. Not at the chapel at the appointed hour? There should be no reason to be summoned at such a time unless there was some sort of a problem…

He shook the thought away.

I know well what Mrs. Penrose’s constitution is. She is likely consoling her nervous daughter.

He told these things to himself, hoping and praying that it was surely just a small detail requiring his attention. Something easily resolved.

“Send for the carriage,” he said, standing up.

As he walked through his estate, he felt a presence watching him from the stairs.

“Is everything quite alright?” Lady Margaret Harrington called out. He froze. His grandmother had sharp wits and an even sharper tongue. In his excitement he had quite forgotten that she had come to his estate for the wedding. He turned to her, giving his best smile.

“Everything is quite fine, Grandmamma,” he said, trying not to sound stiff. Her steely eyes looked him up and down.

“Are you quite sure of that? You appear to be perspiring,” she said flatly. He grit his teeth and felt his smile become stiff.

“Go have breakfast, I will have the staff take you to the chapel when it is time. There is some… minor business I am required to oversee,” he said, attempting to brush off her concerns and walk toward the door again.

“I will take your word for it,” she said, stepping down the stairs. He could feel her eyes on him as he entered the carriage and was all too thankful when they drove off that she would not be going with him. Whatever matter was at hand, her sharpness would not help it.

Arriving at the Penrose estate something immediately made the hairs on his arms stand to attention. He was used to the estate feeling warm and inviting, the smell of rose or jasmine in the air, and the gentle movement of the birch and willow branches that seemed to wave the carriage up the drive.

Not today.

The trees almost seemed to be directing him backward.

Stepping out and looking at the building, there was a particular atmosphere that he could not immediately name. In the windows, the servants moved with the careful quiet of people who had been told to behave normally and were finding it difficult. He was helped out by a footman and strode toward the door. As he arrived the door opened.

“Mrs. Penrose?” he said, blinking in shock. He had expected a maid or a servant, not the matriarch herself.

“Come, come,” she said, ushering him inside quickly.

“Whyever have I been called here at this time?” he asked as she shuffled him toward the study.

“We will explain all, I assure you,” she replied. Her eyes were red. He noticed that immediately and chose not to comment on it.

The study door closed behind him.

He had been in this study many times, speaking enthusiastically with Mr. Penrose about his mercantile work. He had always enjoyed the space, the warmth of the hearth, the comfort of the leather seating.

That comfort was gone.

Mr. Penrose stood by the window. Genevieve stood slightly apart from her father, her hands folded in front of her, her expression composed in the careful way of someone who has recently had to compose it with some effort. She did not quite meet his eyes when he entered. Thomas looked between them and felt the first cold thread of unease move through him.

“Mr. Harrington,” Mr. Penrose said. “I thank you for coming so promptly. Please, sit down.”

“I prefer to stand, thank you,” Thomas said pleasantly. “What is the matter? Is Clarissa unwell? Has something—?”

“Please,” Mr. Penrose said. “Sit down.”

Something in the older man’s voice, the flatness of it, the exhaustion, caused Thomas to sit.

He was not certain, afterwards, how long he sat without speaking. It felt like a considerable time. The words had arrived in his mind in the correct order, and he understood their meaning perfectly well. He was an intelligent man, and the sentence had not been a complicated one, and yet some part of him continued to insist that he had misheard.

Clarissa. 

An officer. 

Elopement.

He was aware, distantly, of his own hands. They were resting on his knees. He had placed them there deliberately, with the particular, practiced care of a man who had learned young that the worst thing one could do in a moment of crisis was to let his body betray what his face was working so hard to conceal. He had learned it from his father, who had learned it from his, and the Harrington men had been doing it for generations, holding themselves very still in rooms where everything was falling apart. It was, he had sometimes thought, the most honest thing about him. The effort of the stillness.

He turned the information over with the detached, slightly desperate concentration of a man trying to find the angle from which it made sense. An officer. He found his mind snagging on that particular detail with an almost absurd specificity. He tried to picture the man and found he could not, which was somehow worse than if he could. A nameless, faceless officer in His Majesty’s regiment, and Clarissa had chosen him. Had looked at everything they had built together and chosen a stranger instead.

She had been happy. He was certain of that, or he had been certain, and now that certainty was quietly—methodically—dismantling itself. He thought of the last time he had seen her. She had laughed at something. She had touched his arm briefly in parting. He had believed the look in her eyes and the affection she had shown him had been out of love for him, excitement for their betrothal. Had that actually been guilt? Had that been farewell? He could not tell anymore. He found, with some alarm, that he could not trust his own recollections.

“Mr. Harrington.” Genevieve’s voice was quiet and even. “I am deeply sorry.”

He looked up at her. Her face was genuinely pained on his behalf, he realized, not merely performing sympathy. It helped, fractionally, in the way that small kindnesses sometimes do in large disasters. Then he looked at the rest of the family and saw that same look. Despite Clarissa’s actions, they all still cared for him in that deep, familial way.

All at once, he realized how they must be affected, too. He knew that their good name was something they relied on, and if Clarissa had taken that with her, there was little for this family. There would be few prospects for Genevieve, and who could say how this would affect Mr. Penrose’s businesses? Beneath the care and consideration, there was anxiety and embarrassment.

He straightened. Whatever was happening inside him would have to wait. There were other people in this room, and they were suffering too, and he was not the kind of man who forgot that.

“This is not your fault,” he said, looking at Mr. Penrose. “I want that to be clearly understood. Whatever Clarissa has chosen to do, this is not a reflection on your family, nor on anything you might have done differently.”

Mr. Penrose closed his eyes briefly. The relief on his face was painful to witness.

“You are a good man,” the older man said.

“I mean it sincerely,” Thomas said. “And I would never…” he paused, selecting his words with care, his throat drying as if rebelling against the very thought of what he was to say. “I would never wish Clarissa to enter into a marriage against her heart. Whatever pain this causes me today, I would not have wanted that for her.”

He swallowed hard and looked down at his hands. If she had just told him, to his face, that she was in love with another, perhaps he could have ended things in a way that benefited them both instead of leaving their families in shambles. If she had been honest, perhaps he could have pieced together his heart.

The silence that followed was of a different quality from the one before. Something had shifted. Mr. Penrose moved away from the window, and Thomas had the distinct impression of a man steeling himself for a second blow after the first had already landed.

“There is another matter,” Mr. Penrose said. “And I ask that you hear me out entirely before you respond.”

Thomas studied him. 

“Very well.”

“You came here today intending to marry. Your need for an heir, for the continuation of your family’s estate, none of that has changed with this morning’s news,” Mr. Penrose said delicately.

“No,” Thomas agreed, carefully. “It has not.”

He thought of the Harrington estate. Of his grandmother’s home. Of the portraits lining the gallery, the weight of a name that expected to be carried forward. Of a distant cousin in Northumberland, he had met precisely twice and had no wish to see inherit everything his family had built.

“Then,” Mr. Penrose said, “I would ask you to consider a proposal.”

He said it plainly, without embellishment, in the manner of a man who had learned long ago that plain words served better than dressed ones. He gestured to his younger daughter, who had not moved from her place by the fireplace.

Thomas looked at Genevieve.

She was looking at the floor. Then, as though feeling his gaze, she looked up, and their eyes met for what he realized was perhaps the first time they had ever truly done so. She was pale. She was frightened, he thought, though she was hiding it admirably. She did not look away.

He turned back to Mr. Penrose.

“You are asking me,” Thomas said slowly, “to marry Genevieve. This morning.”

“The contract between our families need not change. The chapel is arranged. The guests are expected.” Mr. Penrose’s voice was steady, but his hands, Thomas noticed, were not. “I am aware of what I am asking. I am aware that I have no right to ask it.”

Thomas stood very still for a moment. Then, almost without meaning to, he sat back down.

He knew Genevieve Penrose in the way that one knows the younger sister of one’s intended. That is to say, barely at all. She had always been present at dinners and gatherings, quiet and pleasant, the sort of person whose absence one would notice but whose presence one rather took for granted. He could not recall a single conversation with her alone. She had always simply been there, on the periphery, polite and undemanding and entirely unexamined.

He felt a sudden and uncomfortable guilt about that. He looked at her now with the deliberate attention he had never previously thought to offer her, as though seeing her properly for the first time, which he supposed he was. She was composed in a way that struck him as remarkable, given the circumstances, her hands still, her chin level, her expression giving away very little. He was aware she was a woman grown, but her auburn hair, green eyes, and gentle features made her seem more innocent than others her age. An innocence that should not face a situation such as this. There was something quietly determined in the set of her that he had not expected. He wondered, with a discomfort he did not entirely understand, what else he had failed to notice. She was not Clarissa. He was aware of that with a clarity that was almost unkind in its precision. She did not fill a room the way Clarissa did, did not pull the light toward her. But there was something in the steadiness of her, the way she was simply present and undemanding in the middle of all of this, that he found, against all expectation, that he could look at without flinching. That was not nothing. That morning, it was most certainly not nothing at all.

“Does she—” he began. “Is Miss Genevieve amenable to this arrangement? Has she been consulted?”

“She has,” Mr. Penrose said. “And she is.”

Thomas looked at her again. She gave a small, precise nod that told him nothing about what she actually felt, and he found he respected her enormously for the composure of it.

He thought about what this morning had done to the Penrose family. He thought about what Clarissa’s flight would mean for their standing, for their name, for the quiet respectability that was the only currency they had. He thought about Genevieve specifically, young, blameless, entirely uninvolved in any of this, and what it would mean for her marriage prospects to be the sister of a woman who had fled her wedding to a Harrington.

He thought about the Harrington estate.

He thought about Clarissa, which he immediately stopped doing because it created a deep ache in his chest that he did not know how to resolve. He looked at Genevieve once more. She was still watching him with those steady green eyes, not pleading, not performing, simply waiting, as though she had already accepted whatever he decided and was merely present for the announcement. Something about that quiet patience settled something in him he had not expected to find settled today.

“I will agree,” he said at last. “On one condition.”

Mr. Penrose straightened. 

“Name it,” the older man replied. Thomas glanced over at Genevieve, who was watching him, like a small animal watching something that it could not decipher if it was a friend or a predator. He knew her life was in his hands.

“I would like to speak with Miss Genevieve,” Thomas said. “Alone. Before any agreement is final… If she will permit it.”

Genevieve looked at him steadily for a moment. She glanced at her parents, silently asking for reassurance. A soft blink from her father was the only small, quiet signal that she received. She turned back to him.

“Of course,” she nodded.

“The drawing room should be empty,” Mrs. Penrose said.

“We shall go there then,” Thomas said, standing up. He gently held out his arm for Genevieve. Gingerly, she wrapped her arm around his, the warmth seeping into his skin.

He needed to hear it from her if she was truly willing. His heart could not take another mistake.