He looked at Colin. His eyes were kind, but pitying.
“No,” Gregory said. “No. You don’t know her. She would not— No. You don’t know her.”
And Colin, whose only experience with Lady Lucinda Abernathy was the moment in which she had broken his brother’s heart, asked, “Do you know her?”
Gregory stepped back as if struck. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.”
Colin didn’t say anything, but his brows rose, as if to ask, Well, then?
Gregory turned, his eyes moving to the corner around which Lucy had so recently disappeared. For a moment he stood absolutely still, his only movement a deliberate, thoughtful blink of his eyes.
He turned back around, looked his brother in the face. “I know her,” he said. “I do.”
Colin’s lips drew together, as if trying to form a question, but Gregory had already turned away.
He was looking at that corner again.
And then he began to run.
Twenty-one
In which Our Hero risks everything.
“Are you ready?”
Lucy regarded the splendid interior of St. George’s—the bright stained glass, the elegant arches, the piles and piles of flowers brought in to celebrate her marriage.
She thought about Lord Haselby, standing with the priest at the altar.
She thought about the guests, all more-than-three-hundred of them, all waiting for her to enter on her brother’s arm.
And she thought about Gregory, who had surely seen her climb up into the bridal carriage, dressed in her wedding finery.
“Lucy,” Hermione repeated, “are you ready?”
Lucy wondered what Hermione might do if she said no.
Hermione was a romantic.
Impractical.
She would probably tell Lucy that she did not have to go through with it, that it did not matter that they were standing just outside the doors to the church sanctuary, or that the prime minister himself was seated inside.
Hermione would tell her that it did not matter that papers had been signed and banns had been read, in three different parishes. It did not matter that by fleeing the church Lucy would create the scandal of the decade. She would tell Lucy that she did not have to do it, that she should not settle for a marriage of convenience when she could have one of passion and love. She would say—
“Lucy?”
(Is what she actually said.)
Lucy turned, blinking in confusion, because the Hermione of her imagination had been giving quite an impassioned speech.
Hermione smiled gently. “Are you ready?”
And Lucy, because she was Lucy, because she would always be Lucy, nodded.
She could do nothing else.
Richard joined them. “I cannot believe you are getting married,” he said to Lucy, but not before gazing warmly at his wife.