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live as a companion to your sister Caroline.
    â€œI want you to lie down now. I’ll send the maid up with cucumber slices and a cool cloth for your eyes. And I want you think about what you are going to do. I want you to consider what will happen to us all if you do not marry Lord Westhampton. I want you to remember this Season and all we have done for you so that you could get a good offer and have a good life. Then decide whether you want to shame your family this way. Whether you are really willing to refuse to do what you are expected to do. What you have to do. I am sure you will come to the right decision about how to answer Lord Westhampton.”
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    Even now, Rachel thought, closing her eyes, she could feel the pain she had felt all those years ago, the numbed, emotionally battered state in which she had stumbled to her room and lain down on her bed. Exhausted with grief and plunged into despair, she had cried until she could cry no more, while the maid fussed and dried her tears and did her best to repair the damage her outburst had done to her face.
    She had lain there and thought, as her mother had told her to do. She knew, bitterly, how foolish she had been, how much she had lived in a dreamworld. And she faced the void of her future, living immured in Darkwater, the object of her father’s displeasure, constantly reminded of what an undutiful daughter she was and how she had failed the family. She could not marry Anthony without her father’s permission, at least until she was twenty-one, and she knew that her mother was right—her father would not give her permission to marry Anthony, the man who had ruined her father’s plans for gaining a wealthy son-in-law. And she knew, too, with sinking despair, that her mother was right about the state of his finances. Lady Ravenscar always knew such things. Besides, it explained why, despite his love for her, he had not asked for her hand. He had known that he would not be acceptable to her father; probably he, too, must make a good match.
    Her dream of love died that afternoon. She faced the world as it was, the world in which a daughter married as she ought, as her parents desired. She saw reality, in which love did not hold sway, but only cold, hard reason. Her whole being ached at the thought of joining that world. But in the end, she had risen and let her maid dress her in the afternoon dress her mother had chosen, had let Caroline’s Lucy do her hair up and hide the telltale redness around her eyes with just the barest touch of rice powder. Then she had gone downstairs and accepted Lord Westhampton’s proposal of marriage.

3
    M ichael jerked awake. He lay still for a moment, drifting back to reality—sweating, heart pounding, hot blood racing. He had dreamed of Rachel. He could not remember the details of the dream, but the feeling was clear—the same mingling of excitement and pleasure, underlaid with sorrow, that was always there when he dreamed of his wife.
    Being with Rachel was a different thing entirely. The same feelings were inside him, but amplified many times more and shot through with the thrum of nerves and uncertainty. In his dreams, at least he was able to talk to her without turning into a stiff priggish fool, as he did in real life. In dreams he was able to kiss and caress her to the point of thunderous, pulsating lust. The sorrow came as his mind swam back to the surface of consciousness and reality seeped in.
    It was always worse after she had been here for a visit. Then the dreams would come frequently and with intensity. They tended to fade with her absence. It was easier to live without her, as he had discovered after they had been married for a year or so. Great as the joy was in being with her, the pain grew to an excruciating point, until he could no longer bear living with her, being with her every day, aching with love and passion for her, yet never fulfilled. Never truly being her husband. It was