She took a seat in the well-appointed drawing room of her bosom friend Lady Olivia Wodehouse, the Duchess of Hadleigh. Her faithful companion, Ferdinand the Ferret the Second, nicknamed FF II, leapt onto the cushion beside her. Curling into a furry white crescent, he settled in for an afternoon nap.
From adjacent chairs, Olivia, Mrs. Pippa Cullen, and Lady Fiona Morgan, the Countess of Hawksmoor, were exchanging looks. These days, Glory’s closest friends did that a lot…as if they knew something that she did not. Those knowing glances made her feel a bit left out. Truth be told, she’d felt that way since the other ladies had been felled by love, toppling like dominoes one by one. With her twenty-first birthday approaching, Glory was the only member of the group left standing.
She didn’t mind, for she had better things to do than fall in love. For the past three years, she and her friends had been part of a covert investigative agency founded by their indomitable leader, Lady Charlotte “Charlie” Fayne. On the surface, the Society of Angels was a genteel female charity. The polite world believed that Glory and her fellow “Angels” were volunteering their efforts in the usual fashion: writing pamphlets, raising funds, and bringing baskets to the poor. The Angels were indeed helping others…just not in the way people assumed they were.
Charlie conducted discreet investigations on behalf of women in dire straits. The clients believed that Charlie had a network of “contacts” who helped with their cases. The subterfuge was necessary to protect the Angels’ reputations, and ironically, society’s beliefs about female limitations worked to their advantage. Thus far, no one had suspected that young ladies were capable of conducting investigations and solving crimes.
Charlie had trained her charges thoroughly in the art of detection. Glory and her friends had practiced their skills, from clandestine surveillance to combat. They had worked on cases involving everything from blackmail to murder. And just as they were coming into the prime of their abilities, three-quarters of the group had decided to become wives.
And mamas, to further complicate matters.
“Gloriana Cavendish, you are not going to a club in Covent Garden by yourself. And one crawling with the criminal element, for heaven’s sake.” Olivia, a petite brunette who wore her hair in fashionable looped braids over her ears, rolled her green eyes. “It wouldn’t be safe for any of us to go alone. Unfortunately, no one is free to accompany you tonight. Or rather, I am free, but I would not be of much use hobbling around on a sprained ankle.”
She gestured at her foot, which was propped up on a velvet stool.
“Does it hurt, Livy?” Pippa, a sunny blonde, asked with sympathy.
“My pride is injured more than my ankle,” Livy said ruefully. “I have bested villains in combat, yet here I am, felled by a toy my two-year-old left on the nursery floor.”
Pippa placed a hand on her midsection, where the pleats of her butter-yellow carriage dress had been let out to accommodate her pregnancy. Her blue eyes turned dreamy.
“I hope Cull and I have a girl,” she said. “Then our daughters could be playmates.”
“Perhaps they could wear each other out?” Livy looked hopeful.
“Better yet, they could have adventures together.” Glory made her selection from the refreshment tray on the coffee table, adding pointedly, “The way we used to when we were girls.”
The way we did until recently. Now everything is changing. And I am not certain I like it.
Feeling peevish and guilty because of it, Glory munched on some biscuits and cheese. She loved her friends unconditionally and wanted them to be happy. But she also wished that things weren’t changing so rapidly.
An unconventional girl, she had never fit in with her peers. She’d grown up in a small village in Dorset, where her curiosity and love of adventure had made her stick out like a loose nail. The schoolmaster and village children had tried to hammer her into place; when they failed, they labeled her a peculiar hoyden and washed their hands of her. Pride had kept Glory from showing how much the rejection had hurt. She’d kept her chin up as her mama and Aunt Hypatia had taught her to do and carried on.
Then, when she was just shy of nine, Papa had entered her life. After a whirlwind romance, he’d married Mama and taken the family to London. As the newly minted daughter of a duke, one would think Glory would fare better socially, but she proved even more awkward with her new peers. It didn’t take long for the well-bred misses to begin whispering about her.
“Why does she keep a ferret, of all things? Why not a normal pet like a cat or bird?”
“Goodness, what a muddled excuse for hair she has, neither a proper shade of red nor brown. And did you see her freckles? Hasn’t she heard of a fading lotion?”
“There is no lotion that can fade her un-English looks, alas.” A sly pause. “I suppose she gets it from His Grace.”
The latter was a reference to the fact that Papa had Chinese heritage from his mama’s side, and the resemblance between him and Glory was too obvious to be ignored. Before their wedding, Glory’s parents had told her the truth: they’d met years earlier and had a brief affair that had resulted in Glory’s conception. Papa had left without knowing that he’d fathered a child, and Mama had married Paul Foley, Aunt Hypatia’s brother.
Glory had grown up believing that Paul was her father, and she’d mourned the gentle, middle-aged scholar deeply when he died. Yet from the instant she’d met Rhys Cavendish, the roguish Duke of Ranelagh and Somerville, she’d felt an inexplicable sense of kinship. In truth, she hadn’t been all that surprised to learn that she was his daughter in blood. Her parents, however, had wanted to protect her from the scandal of illegitimacy, and officially, she remained the duke’s daughter whom he’d adopted after marriage.
Even so, rumors about Glory swirled as fiercely as the surf along the Dorset coast. She had resigned herself to being an outcast…until she met Livy and Fiona at age nine. The girls turned out to be her sisters in spirit. Livy and Fi didn’t care about Glory’s unusual interests, origins, or looks; they liked her for who she was. Dubbed “the Willflowers” for their spirited ways, the girls had bonded over countless adventures, and for the first time, Glory had experienced the bliss of belonging.
Now, however, it was as if her bosom friends had joined some secret club to which she did not belong. They were all swooning over their husbands while she hadn’t the slightest clue what romantic love felt like. Certainly, no fellow had held her interest more than a case. To be fair, she wasn’t precisely an object of desire to the opposite sex either. Not with her freckles, reed-like figure, and peculiarities.
“Ugh.”
The faint gargle stirred Glory from her thoughts. It came from Fiona, a redhead known for her beauty and charm. Currently, however, her face was an alarming shade of green.
Worried, Glory asked, “Is something the matter, Fi?”
“No. Well, yes,” Fi choked out. “What kind of cheese is that?”
Glory looked at the blue-veined crumbles on her plate. “Roquefort, I think?”
