Page 1 of Lady Waldrey’s Gardening Almanac for Cultivating Scandal (Love from London #3)

L ife, Candace decided, could not get more miserable than this. She walked briskly through the park, her lady’s maid, Hortense, trailing behind her.

People were starting to notice; people were starting to whisper .

Perhaps Candace could have avoided attention had everyone around her not been pairing off and marrying almost as fast as Madame Aubert could sew their wedding gowns.

When Percy had married before she did, that was forgivable.

He was the man of the house and a marquess to boot.

Besides, everyone who knew Percy knew he did whatever he pleased.

He didn’t care about the order of things, especially not weddings.

But now—oh, calamity! The Viscount Thomas had proposed to her younger sister, Sophia.

Younger sisters, as a rule, were not supposed to wed until the elder ones did.

Though this principle had largely been abandoned because of love matches everywhere, it certainly seemed to apply in the case of the Waldrey sisters.

For surely a younger sister should not be married before the elder, when the elder had already been engaged a year!

Not even Percy knew the whole story behind Candace’s engagement.

As far as he was concerned, one morning, the Marquess Shelbourne had shown up and asked for his blessing.

The man hadn’t even proposed to her properly—just thrust a paltry bouquet and a ring box in her direction, with no words at all. The engagement had just been done.

The second Shelbourne actually had to commit, it was as if every romantic notion had flown from his head—much like birds from a tree when a rifle is fired.

He’d stuck around long enough to buy her a ring—a hideously ugly thing she never would have chosen for herself—and then he’d fled to Paris.

He hadn’t even bothered to say goodbye in person!

He’d sent a messenger round with a note.

Candace smiled and nodded at the two ladies heading her direction, trying not to notice that they didn’t even wait until she passed to start murmuring together beneath their parasols.

She was living the greatest of lies and she didn’t know how to stop.

When their engagement had been announced in the papers, everyone had claimed theirs was the most romantic love story.

The Marquess of Shelbourne—the dashing, tall, flaxen-haired paragon of everything a man should be—was to marry the Diamond of the Season.

They made such a striking couple that society as a whole had forgotten appearances were often deceiving.

Perhaps Candace had forgotten that, too.

She brought her hands together to wring them, then caught herself, dropped them by her sides, and increased her pace.

Home was the only place that was truly safe now.

Except not even that was true. Percy and Adelaide would be there, fairly drunk on their love for each other.

It was a spritz of lemon on a papercut, the fact that Adelaide was now a married woman and could act as Candace’s chaperone.

She snorted a laugh. As if anyone was needed to chaperone her and her books, her and her letters! It would be funny if it weren’t so terrible, so lonely. Rejected—she had been rejected,thrown away like a worn-out shoe.

If only she hadn’t become so caught up in the glittering social whirl of her first Season!

Candace had been wooed by many men she could now see were twice—no, four times—the man that Shelbourne was.

If only she hadn’t fallen prey to his honeyed words and scintillating murmurs.

If only she’d never gone out to the gardens with him. ..

No....would not think of that . She’d thought that humiliation had been grim. This was far worse.