Chapter One IT MIGHT SEEM ODD to consider Hyde Park your own backyard, but Julia Miller did. Growing up in London, she’d ridden there almost daily for as long as she could remember, from her very first pony when she was a child to the thoroughbred mares that followed. People waved at her whether they knew her or not, simply because they were so used to seeing her there. The ton, shop clerks cutting across the park on their way to work, gardeners, they all noticed Julia and treated her like one of their own. Tall, blond-haired, and fashionably dressed, she always returned the smiles and waves. She was generally a friendly sort and people tended to respond to that in kind. Even more odd than Julia’s considering such a mammoth park her personal riding grounds were her circumstances. She’d grown up in the upper-crust end of town but her family wasn’t upper-crust at all. She lived in one of the larger town houses in Berkeley Square, because it wasn’t only the nobility who could afford those town houses. In fact, her family, who acquired their surname in the Middle Ages when a craftsman took on the name of his trade, had been among the first to buy and build in Berkeley Square back in the mid-1700s when the square was first laid out, so Millers had been living there for many generations now. Julia was well-known and well liked in the neighborhood. Her closest friend, Carol Roberts, was a daughter of the nobility, and other young women of the ton who kn