Arabella feared she stared.

He seemed to hover upon the toes of his shining boots, leaning into Luc, his green eyes vibrant and mobile. “Your beauty does his admiration justice in return.” He smiled a gorgeous smile that lit up his face.

Luc’s hand slid from hers and went to the young man’s arm.

“You have come.”

“I could not miss my brother’s wedding.” He stepped around Luc and lifted her hand to his lips. “Christos Westfall. Enchanté.”

“Arabella, this is my brother.” Luc’s stance had broadened and his voice sounded fuller.

She curtsied but Christos urged her up. He angled close and his bright eyes swept her face, assessing.

“Luc, elle est exquise,” he said, drawing out the words. Then quickly: “Where did you find her?”

The corner of Luc’s mouth turned up. “In a tavern.”

“And yet her bones shout of royal blood.” Christos’s long fingers grasped her chin, tilting her head left then right. She allowed it, trying to smile, her belly a tangle of nerves. “You must dress her in purple and ermine and I will do a portrait of her. You will wear a crown, Belle. J’insist! No scepter, though. Scepters are for old whiskered kings, not princesses.”

“As you wish,” Luc said easily, but he watched his brother with the same intensity with which Christos studied her.

She drew gently from the cage of his fingertips. “I am so pleased you have come.” She held her voice level with effort. “The two of you must have much to speak of, and I have guests to greet. Please excuse me.”

She went blindly forward.

A small, strong hand grabbed hers.

“He looks just like the duke!” Ravenna whispered.

“In a manner, though slenderer and less substantial.” Eleanor came to Arabella’s other side. “Is that his brother, Bella?”

She nodded and gripped her sisters’ hands. “Stay with me. Please. I know so few of the people here and at this moment I think I may not be entirely prepared to be a comtesse.”

Eleanor returned the pressure. “Of course. But you are much stronger than even you realize, Bella. If you weren’t, you would not be a comtesse now.”

But that was not true. She was a comtesse because she had been indescribably weak, not strong. Now the man whose supposed unfitness had propelled her into marriage stood yards away, as perfectly fit a person as any other on the ship.

She greeted people she did not know with practiced poise, gracefully accepted their congratulations, and ignored their curious stares. There were elegantly garbed earls and impressive ministers and old dukes and fashionable countesses and barons and admirals and their lady wives in number, and she spoke to them all without trouble. The only man she could not speak easily with now was somewhere in the crowd with his black-sheep brother, his stance confident and a smile across his dashingly scarred face.

Eleanor and Ravenna had fallen into conversations with others. Her breaths increasingly quick and shallow, not from the gray water of the river all around but because of the panic rising in her, Arabella fled belowdeck.

Christos and Ravenna found her there.

“Belle! At last we have discovered you!” He moved with lightness and great grace. He was a beautiful man with all the character and intensity in his face of Luc’s yet none of the confident command. He sat down beside her and took her hand. “Your guests, they seek you out. Why do you hide?”

“Are you hiding, Bella?” Ravenna stood before her, hands on her hips, brow worried.

“No. Yes.” She faced Christos directly. “You and he have not seen each other in a great long time.”

“A half dozen months only. But”—he waved his hand dismissively—“months and years matter nothing when there is affinity of spirit and great affection, non?”

Ravenna nodded.

Arabella’s hand twisted in Christos’s and broke free. Desperate words that had been caged inside her rushed to her tongue. “Would your brother make plans to divorce his wife without telling her of that plan?”

“Not the brother that has been writing me letters in praise of her for the past many weeks,” he said without hesitation.

“I found letters to him, written by his man of business. They spoke of preparing a petition for divorce, and of an heiress whose portion could restore the fortunes of Combe.”

“Oh, Bella.” Ravenna’s dark eyes went wide. “Did you ask him about them?”

“She did not,” Christos said, nodding thoughtfully. “There is great fear where there is uncertain love, I think.”

Ravenna’s brows rose. Arabella could not meet her sister’s gaze.

“This heiress,” Christos said, tilting his head. “Was she named?”

“Miss Gardiner.”

His face relaxed into a smile. “Ah, then the mystery is solved, ma belle. It was my uncle who wished to make her my wife.”

Air flooded Arabella’s lungs. “Your uncle?” She tried to picture the letters. They had lacked dates and Luc’s name. “When did your uncle tell you this?”

“A twelvemonth ago.”

“But what about the divorce?”

“To excise Combe from the grip of his wife’s brother,” Christos said immediately.

Arabella sat forward. “What do you know of this?”

“What my aunt told me a year ago when I paid a call upon her, that her brother required her to remain in London while my uncle died alone in Shropshire. She is a weak soul, though benevolent. Her innocence is to my brother’s disservice, I fear.”

“But what does either have to do with the other?” Ravenna demanded.

“Ah, mon chou,” he said with a shake of his head. “You know little of the greed of men, I think.”

“Happily.” She squinted. “What’s a chou?”

“A cabbage.”

Arabella’s thoughts sped. “Why didn’t he divorce Adina if he intended to? Her child is not his.”

Christos offered an elegant shrug. “Perhaps he did not know she was with child.”

“He must have. Why didn’t you wed Miss Gardiner?”

“Ah.” He lowered his chin. “Though I would like it very much, I think—the affection and companionship of a woman with whom to share dreams—it is not for me. I am not fit for such a gift, ma belle.”

Not fit.

“Christos?” She took up his long, beautiful artist’s hand. “How exactly are you unfit?”

With a crease of his lips that shaped them into a wave, he turned their hands over together. “I have peaks, and I have valleys.” He drew back the lacy cuff of his shirt. His wrist was crisscrossed with thick, straight-edged scars, overlapping one upon the next. “The valleys, they are oftentimes quite low. No gentle lady deserves to be bound to that.”

There was a silence between them in which the shuffling of feet on the deck above, the muffled conversations of four hundred people, and the muted delights of violin and flute could be heard.

Ravenna lowered herself to a chair and placed her palms on her knees. “What can we do, Bella, so that with a mind free of burdens you can marry your duke again?”

“Oui, ma belle. Your sister—though she speaks of the mind where I would speak of the heart—we shall help. For I believe as surely as I am a man that my brother has no ill intent toward you. Rather, the contrary.”

“The tenant farmers of Combe are being extorted, I believe,” Arabella said, “but they offer me only fearful hints. No proof. I believe that the Bishop of Barris, Adina’s brother, is behind this. But I have little upon which to base this.”

“Except his hatred of my brother and his manipulation of my sweet aunt. And, unless my brother becomes the duke, he is the principal trustee of Combe.”

“That isn’t enough to prove a crime,” Ravenna said.

“Then she must find the proof,” Christos replied.

“Where?”

“In his private chambers.”

“Do you truly believe that a man who commits crimes involving thousands of pounds would hide proof of those crimes in a drawer in his study?”