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Hew felt once more as if he’d been tied to the mast, skin bare to the elements, but this time the lashes that fell didn’t draw blood.

These blows landed deeper. He was truly, excruciatingly aware that this woman, with her divine voice and her air of utter self-possession, was a being permanently above his grasp.

A celestial entity that he had sullied with his touch, and would sully further if he tried pulling her down to his level.

The last echo of her song lingered in the room, and May Powell stared with awe. “What was that?” she whispered, as if hesitant to break the spell.

Anne shifted the harp back into place. “The song is ‘Che faro senza Euridice,’ from the opera Orfeo ed Euridice by Gluck. That is the song Orfeo sings when he breaks the taboo to look upon Euridice when he is leading her from the shadows of hell, and so, she dies in his arms.”

“A dark subject for a drawing room,” Lady Vaughn snapped.

“It is the most beautiful, most haunting expression of love I have ever heard.” The Powell aunt spoke up.

Her voice was firm, almost masculine in its confidence and authority.

“He loves her so desperately he cannot live without her, he defies death itself to reclaim her, and then by his own eagerness and desperation loses her again. What tragedy could be more magnificent, more painful?”

Margaret Griffith gritted her teeth and gripped her fan in her fingers.

“So who is the Orfeo this Euridice wants to come carry her off?” John Jones wondered, his voice dripping with disdain. “The brother she’s contracted to, or the other?”

Hew saw the blow land in Anne’s slight sway, the white hand that tightened around the frame of the harp.

The sudden, bleak tightening of her mouth as she caught back the words she wanted to say, because she had no defense, and Jones was the type of man who would only press his attack if she made a protest.

Hew turned on him. “Why would you say that?” His voice was the low growl of approaching thunder, the boil of a coming storm. “Why would you say such a thing?”

Jones widened his eyes, his mouth in that perpetual arrogant smirk. “Honest question. Can’t see why brothers would fight over a little nothing,” he said.

A nothing. That was what Anne would be reduced to if news of the scandal got out, that she’d broken her betrothal with the nearest man at hand. Those of her own class would judge her harshly. She’d never be welcomed again in these circles she was born to—she’d never be allowed.

She could not have thought this through when she came to his room that night.

Hew could free her from Calvin, but there was only one way he could free her from disgrace.

And he could not bear for this beautiful creature, who had made one headstrong, independent decision in her life, to spend the rest of her life paying for that choice with the derision of her peers.

Hew stepped forward. The same way he had stepped forward whenever his instructors asked a volunteer from class.

The way he had stepped forward when Antoine needed help and hands erecting his new defenses.

The way he had stepped forward when his sentence was read before all his men and the next step was to bare his back for the lash.

“I had thought to save our announcement for another time,” he said, catching Anne’s gaze.

Her eyes widened, and the purse of her lips made her nose stand out, that one bold note in her sweet face, the sign of a character that could not be broken.

But her heart could be, if he didn’t do something. “Ought we tell them, my love?” he asked her.

She turned her head slightly like a dove would watch a fox approach from the corner of its eye, pretending innocence. “Now?”

She hadn’t quite grasped his intent yet—he could tell from her puzzled expression—but was playing along. His clever girl.

“I think so.” He reached her, grasped her hand.

Her fingertips were rough and slightly reddened from the imprint of the harp strings, and her palm was warm and dry.

Such slender strength in her, he could see that now.

She would bear up under rejection, humiliation, being an outcast from the world she knew. But she deserved so much better.

Much better than him. But he was the only line of defense available at the moment. He was the only gun in her arsenal.

“Mother, if you will permit me? You have already given your blessing, I know.”

His mother glared at him, striving with every scrap of her will to force him to silence.

But she knew what he was doing, and knew the result if she spoke against him here, in her own drawing room, among the most important people of her acquaintance.

Winifred Vaughn had not become a knight’s lady because she was a fool.

“It is my very great honor to inform you all,” Hew said, surveying the various expressions turned upon him—shock and surprise and, in a few cases, furious jealousy— “that Anne Sutton has agreed to become my wife.”

A murmur ran through the room. Mrs. Kemeys leaned close to Mrs. Hawkins. Mrs. Griffith turned a betrayed, accusing stare on Lady Vaughn. The Powell chaperone, the aunt or some such, looked at Anne with steady curiosity, but her gaze bore no malice.

“I thought she was to marry your brother,” Margaret Griffith burst out. Clearly, she and her mother had harbored hopes of Hew, no doubt encouraged by her ladyship.

“Our family has been in negotiations with the Suttons for quite some time to make an alliance,” Hew replied.

He curled his fingers around Anne’s and tugged her gently so she left the harp and stepped to his side.

Her hand fit so naturally in his, fingers intertwined like honeysuckle climbing a fence.

She fit at his side, too, as if her curves had been shaped for his body.

He could turn his head and brush his mouth across the top of her cheekbone, just beside her ear.

His pulse pounded in his ears. “Calvin was the proposed choice for a while, since I was away,” Hew explained to Margaret Griffith, to all the doubters who would debate his worthiness of Anne, his deserving to have her. “But when I returned, we discovered an affection we cannot deny.”

May Powell gave a little sigh, as if she found this admission very romantic. Anne clung to Hew’s fingers as if she might find anchor in him if a storm of disapproval began, if the strong wind meant to blow her away.

He tightened his grip. He would not let them bend her. He would hold her to him as long as he could.

His mother’s guests watched them like spectators at a play they couldn’t bring themselves to like. Hew’s temples throbbed. Was he making the wrong move after all? Was he binding Anne to a world that would no longer accept her, no matter how much she belonged in it?

“To affection.” The voice of David Edwards, the young engineer, cut through the murmurs in the room. “A toast.”

“Indeed. A toast.” Lady Vaughn summoned a footman and before long, liveried servants were circulating among the guests with glasses of champagne.

He doubted his mother had meant to break into her stores that night; champagne was dear, given the import tax, unless his mother was a patron of the free traders like Darch and his ilk.

Hew would ask her about it later. For now he focused on Anne, handing her a glass as one of the hired footmen approached them, trying to hold her eyes, seeking her approval for his bold action.

He'd announced, in public, that she was bound to him. He’d slid the bolt home on a betrothal as surely as if he were her jailer in prison. He could bind her to him, but he couldn’t make her choose him. He couldn’t force that.

The tilt to her chin, the elegant and forced serenity with which she accepted congratulations, and the way she avoided looking at Hew told him prison was precisely how she felt about the matter.

She looked like a proud rebel who’d felt the iron shackle close about her ankle but meant to go to the gallows with head held high, come what may.