When she was seven, she dared her brother Samuel to climb onto the roof. He, six years older, informed her that he wasn’t a trained monkey and it wasn’t his job to entertain her. She called him a fraidy-cat-mudfor-brains. Then she climbed out onto the steepest part of the roof.
Lucien was the only one agile enough to fetch her down.
He became the one, too, who fished her out of fish ponds and tracked her to the gamekeeper’s cottage or the blacksmith’s when she went missing. None of her siblings ever had the least idea where to find her or what to do with her.
The cricket incident was typical.
She was eight years old. The boys were organizing a cricket game. She stormed up to him.
“I want to play, Lucien. Tell them to let me.”
“Girls don’t play cricket,” he said. “Go back to your dolls and your nursemaids, brat.”
She snatched up a bat and swung it at him—or tried to. She swung as hard as she could, and kept on going. Round and round she went, like a whirligig, and down she went, on her arse.
And there she sat, her disorderly golden hair standing on end and her vivid blue eyes wide open and her mouth open, too, so startled she was.
He laughed so hard, he fell down, too.
She was annoying, sometimes infuriating, generally impossible. And she was a bright, bright spot in his life.
One
London
Wednesday, 1 April 1818
Lucien Charles Vincent de Grey, the eleventh Duke of Marchmont, stood on the threshold of the morning room of White’s Club, surveying the company through half-closed eyes.
Women tended to read deep meaning in those sleepy green eyes, when in fact there wasn’t any deeper thought in his mind thanI wonder what you look like naked.
Women often got the wrong idea about him. The way his pale gold hair shimmered in certain lights lent his features an ethereal quality. The tendency of one wayward lock to fall over his forehead was deemed poetic.
Those who knew him knew better.
The twenty-nine-year-old Duke of Marchmont was neither ethereal nor poetic.
He avoided deep thoughts and allowed no strong feelings to churn inside him. He took nothing seriously. This included dress, women, politics, his friends, and even—or perhaps most especially—himself.
At present, no woman stood in danger of being deluded, because none were in the vicinity. This was White’s, after all, the exclusive preserve of five hundred privileged men.
Several of them had gathered at the famous bow window where Beau Brummell had once presided. Even at present, when the Beau languished in France, hiding from his creditors, seats in that holy place were reserved for a select few.
At the moment the occupants included Brummell’s great friend the second Baron Alvanley, as well as the Duke of Beaufort’s heir, the Marquis of Worcester. Arguing with them were Lord Yarmouth, Lord Adderwood, and Grantley Berkeley. Of the group, only Adderwood—thin, dark, and perhaps the most level-headed of the lot—had not been one of Brummell’s boon companions. He was Marchmont’s. They’d been friends since their schooldays.
Though he broke half a dozen of the Beau’s rules daily and, worse, believed it didn’t signify, the Duke of Marchmont was one of the Chosen.
He didn’t know or care why they’d chosen him. Truth to tell, he considered Brummell an annoying great bitch, and preferred sitting in the bow window when the rest of that lot weren’t about, practicing their wit—such as it was—upon passersby in St. James’s Street.
Who the devil cared whether this carriage’s panels were too dark, or that fellow’s coat was an inch too short or that lady’s bonnet went out of fashion last week?
Not the Duke of Marchmont.
He cared about very little in this world.
His sleepy green gaze slid from the collection of wits and dandies at the bow window to a quiet area across the room, where a fellow dozed in a well-padded armchair. As though he felt the ducal regard, the gentleman opened his eyes. Marchmont made the smallest movement of his hand, a gesture universally recognized asGo away. The gentleman quickly got up and left the room.
His Grace had scarcely folded his six-foot frame into the chair when he became aware of a buzz of excitement emanating from the bow window contingent. Their attention, he noticed, was not directed at passersby in St. James’s Street but at the leather-bound betting book.
