Avery Calderwood stood outside the posting house on the road west of York, gloved hands clasped behind his back, and regarded the empty bend as if it had committed a personal discourtesy.September sunlight rested on the dusty hedges. A clock above the inn door struck a quarter hour, then another.Behind him, his aunt Marian gave an unmistakable sigh."Must you look as though the coach has stolen your title?" she asked. "It was expected at two, and it is now 2:40.""I have not lost the ability to count.""I wonder whether she will be as obedient as you hope."Avery almost smiled. He restrained it."Miss Morland's first letter assured us that she valued punctuality. She also valued plain speaking. I expect that quality will trouble you much more."He had asked his aunt to find him a wife who wanted security rather than love. Briarcombe required a duchess, someone capable of asking whether the servants were well supplied while he buried himself in the estate ledgers. Three years earlier, his engagement to Lady Octavia Lethbridge had ended beneath demands from her family that they had called affection. He had trusted the word less ever since.Helena Morland, a schoolmaster's educated daughter, had written plainly of wanting a respectable home. He had liked the plainness; he had assumed she would accept the terms of his orderly life.Then the coach rattled round the bend. Its driver drew up with an apology shouted before the wheels stopped: a bearing at the previous smithy had needed repair.There was nothing mysterious in the delay; the coach had simply been unsafe to drive. Avery felt foolish for having imagined a hundred reasons less ordinary as a footman lowered the step.The woman who emerged wore a slate blue traveling gown that had been brushed carefully and mended so neatly the repairs were almost invisible. Chestnut hair was pinned beneath a modest bonnet. She was not dazzling in the way the fashionable ladies of London had been trained to dazzle; she looked tired from the journey, alert to everything, and unwilling to pretend otherwise.Before accepting Avery's offered hand, she turned to make certain that an older passenger's small parcel had been passed down intact. Only then did she descend."Miss Morland," Marian said, and embraced her with a warmth absent from any formal letter. "I am sorry you had such a tiresome journey.""The driver was right to stop, my lady. It would have been more tiresome to lose a wheel."Marian laughed. Avery bowed."Your Grace," Helena said, meeting his eyes—not timidly, not boldly for the sake of effect; she simply looked as though she expected him to look back."I trust the rest of your journey was tolerable?""It was instructive. The roads remind one that a timetable is a wish, not a law."