Royally Ever After by Loretta Chase

Castle de Grey, Kensington
    Wednesday 17 June 1835
    â€œW e’d best do it now,” Chloe Sharp told her older sister. “Say goodbye and bawl, so that we don’t make a spectacle of ourselves, or set Mama off.”
    â€œY-yes. Oh, Chloe, I’ll miss you so!” Althea fell weeping on Chloe’s neck, heedless of the wrinkles and stains she made on two of London’s costliest dresses.
    Bride and bridesmaid stood in a dimly lit passage that ran between the picture gallery, which extended the west wing’s full length, and the smaller of the two drawing rooms. The larger, the Gold Drawing Room, occupied the center of the first floor of the Duke of Marchmont’s Jacobean mansion. There hundreds of wedding guests were celebrating Althea’s marriage to Prince Louis of Massbeck-Holveg. From the passage, though, the merriment was practically inaudible.
    This was the last time Chloe would see her sister for a long time. Her heart was breaking. Still, she made herself draw away.
    â€œThat’s enough,” she said. “We don’t want the Beau Monde to see us with tear-streaked faces and crushed bows and creases. Come out into the gallery, where we’ll have some light, and I can put you back to rights.”
    She started to open the door to the gallery, but paused as a wave of masculine laughter spilled toward them. Althea stopped, too, and caught hold of Chloe’s arm. They both giggled the way they used to do when they were children, hiding to spy on grown-ups.
    â€œBut everybody knows he was obliged to give up the girl he loved,” somebody said. Mr. Crawford? Chloe had met so many aristocrats today that their names and faces were a hopeless muddle in her brain.
    â€œWhich girl was that?” another man said.
    â€œA sweetheart Prince Louis left behind in Massbeck-Holveg,” Crawford said. “Lovers torn asunder, you know, by Fate.”
    Althea inhaled sharply, her grip on Chloe’s arm tightening.
    â€œLove, gentlemen, is a luxury His Highness cannot afford,” said a deep, drawling voice. “Three royal castles in his speck of a country, and all of them falling to pieces. He doesn’t need love: He needs new chimneys.”
    Though Chloe had never heard that voice before today, she knew who it belonged to: James Bransby, the Earl of Lovedon.
    A leader of fashion, one of Prince Louis’s dearest English friends, a favorite of the King and Queen, and famously whimsical, he was London’s most elusive bachelor.
    The men went off again, into whoops this time, as though it was the wittiest thing they’d ever heard.
    â€œCome away,” Chloe whispered to her sister. “There’s a doorway to another room—”
    â€œHe’s hardly the first of the King’s cousins to come to England for a rich wife,” Lovedon continued. “For them, this sort of thing is merely a business transaction. Naturally he’ll put aside any personal disappointments with Teutonic fortitude, like the staunch patriot he is.”
    While he spoke, Chloe was aware of Althea’s breath coming faster and faster. She gave a small, choked cry, and let go of Chloe’s arm.
    Though she wanted to push Lord Lovedon out of a window, Chloe had to tend to her sister first. She pulled Althea toward another doorway, an open one leading to one of the back staircases. Althea was sobbing again, this time in deep, painful gulps.
    Chloe half-dragged her to the door on the other side of the landing, through the recently abandoned dining room, and into a pretty sitting room. Its lone window overlooked the splendid gardens that spread out for miles, it seemed, from the north front of the house. Thanks to the afternoon’s onslaught of rain, a grey haze shrouded the glorious vista Chloe had glimpsed this morning.
    She grasped Althea by the upper arms and gently shook her. “Those men are drunk ,” she said. She was none too sober herself, she