The Husband Trap: A Novel

Chapter One


London, July 1816

"I, Adrian Philip George Stuart Fitzhugh, take thee, Jeannette Rose, to be my wedded wife"

Violet knew she was going to faint, or else be sick, right here at the altar in front of Adrian and the Archbishop. In front of everyone, nearly the entirety of the Haut Ton, assembled in St. Paul's Cathedral to witness what was being hailed as the wedding of the year.

One thousand people lined the aisles. Two thousand eyes locked in rapt fascination upon Jeannette Brantford, this Season's Incomparable and last year's as well as she exchanged vows with Adrian Winter, Sixth Duke of Raeburn, England's most eligible bachelor.

Trouble was, the bride wasn't Jeannette Rose Brantford.

The bride was Jeannette's identical twin sister, Jannette Violet Brantford, or Violet, as her family called her. And right now she thought perhaps she had gone a little insane.

She fixed her eyes upon her blue silk slippers, studied the intricate designs wrought upon the marble floors beneath the elegant shoes. Light swam around her in a brilliant mist. A few tiny motes of dust winking in the mix of candlelight and natural sunshine that cascaded through colorful stained-glass windows in intense shades of blues and greens.

The scents from the great bowers of blush roses and creamy white gardenias arranged for the ceremony curled inside her nostrils, their overly sweet fragrance only adding to her discomfort. She swallowed, her throat dry as sand. A trickle of nervous perspiration slid between her shoulder blades, making her long to wiggle her shoulders against the damp.

She should be a bridesmaid, she thought in dizzying panic. She should be waiting off to the side by now with the other attendants. Instead she was standing here next to Adrian in front of a pair of massive Baroque columns with their swirled bands of dark marble and mellow gold, the cathedral's great dome rising more than three hundred feet above her. Paintings of the life of St. Paul stared down at her from the ceiling, scornfully disapproving her every move, she imagined.

She willed herself to be calm.

Calm?

How could she possibly be calm when she was perpetrating the most appalling deception of her life? She kept expecting someone to notice who she really was, to stretch out an accusing finger and shout, "Fraud!"

But as her twin had accurately predicted, people saw exactly what they expected to see. Certainly her parents and the servants had earlier, accepting her as Jeannette when she'd presented herself in her sister's elegant wedding gown, a lustrous confection of ice blue silk with elbow-length half sleeves and an overskirt of snowy white organza, hundreds of seed pearls arranged in the shape of rose blossoms and trailing leaves sewn into the scoop-necked bodice. No one had questioned her identity, not even when she'd sent her sister's dresser into a tizzy by needing to have her hair arranged for a "second" time that morning, the servant forced to painstakingly rethread pearls and tiny sparkling sapphires into her upswept coiffure.