Free That Silent Night by TASHA ALEXANDER Page A

insistence, of course), she pled a broken heart and convinced her parents that they must not try to force her into marriage until she had quite forgot the duke. Jeremy let it be known (quietly) that he felt an English peer ought not marry an American, a sentiment lauded by the aforementioned legion of mothers. Their daughters vied for his attention with such implacable nerve that it began to make him quite unable to enjoy all the social functions in which he used to take such pleasure. Finding this condition unacceptable in the extreme, he decided to direct all of his affections toward me, his oldest friend.
    At the time, I was a young widow, my first husband having been murdered only a few months after our wedding. Out of mourning and back in society, I had fallen in love with Colin Hargreaves, and even after I had accepted his proposal of marriage, Jeremy refused to stop pressing his own suit. Not, mind you, because he actually loved me, but because he knew I would go along with his scheme. He viewed my engagement as a gift from the dear Lord himself. Society believed him to be heartbroken and devoted to a lady he could not have, and the legion of mothers could tolerate with relative equanimity waiting for him to recover from the blow my second marriage struck.
    Colin accepted this arrangement with good humor, knowing full well Jeremy had never been a threat to our marital happiness. He also knew that one day, Jeremy would have to marry. He might play the profligate, but he would never leave his dukedom without an heir. Much as I enjoyed Jeremy’s little game, I had rejoiced when I read his telegram and knew it was over. I longed to see my friend as happily settled as I.
    Then I met Amity Wells.
    I am, perhaps, not being entirely fair. She failed to make much of an impression at our first meeting, but balls do not provide much of an opportunity for deep conversation. Our trip to Cannes was to offer us that. Yet almost from the moment I stepped into La Croisette with her, I knew we could never be friends. And I feared Jeremy would never forgive me for that.

Amity
Twelve months earlier
    India did not suit Amity. The oppressive heat reminded her too much of her grandparents’ plantation house in Natchez, Louisiana, where she had spent more than one unhappy summer while her parents retreated from New York’s Fifth Avenue to their mansion in Newport. This arrangement came at the insistence of her grandmother, Varina Beauregard Wells, who was as unhappy at the Confederate loss in the War Between the States as she was that her Harvard-educated son had abandoned all his breeding and married a Yankee. She had always objected to sending him north for an education. The fortune he earned in copper tempered her displeasure, but she was not about to let her only granddaughter grow up with coarse northern manners. Her daughter-in-law made no effort to dissuade her. Learning to simper in that charming southern way could do nothing but enhance Amity’s value on the marriage market, and Birdie Wells had every intention of seeing her daughter married to an English nobleman. So far as she was concerned, this outcome was nonnegotiable. Her husband had no interest in arguing with her regarding this or anything else about which she felt strongly.
    â€œShe must be a duchess, don’t you think?” Birdie—Amity had never been able to think of her mother as anything but Birdie—made a habit of talking about her daughter as if she were not there.
    â€œI am sure you know best, dearie.” Amity’s father loved to indulge his wife, who was delightfully unlike the southern belles his mother had traipsed before him, hoping he would take one of them as his bride. Their superficial charms were many, but none could compete with his Birdie, who spoke with a shocking degree of directness. The day they met she had looked him in the eyes and said, You are less of a fool than I expected, Wells, and he knew he had found