ON ARRIVAL AT ALVERLEIGHHouse in Mayfair, Marcus dropped his luggage and valet off, and checked that everything was all right there.He kept the town house perpetually open, running with a skeleton staff, in case any of his brothers or Aunt Maude wished to stay there.
His cook had already taken charge of the kitchen, but for his first evening in town he decided to eat at his club.He was bound to find one or two acquaintances and possibly even a friend there, though he didn’t have many close friends.
The trouble was, by eating at his club, the word would go out that he was in town, and that would, he knew, result in invitations.
He was, after all, a single earl in possession of a large fortune, as it said in that wretched novel from which his aunt incessantly quoted.
But he wasn’t in want of a wife, and invitations could be refused.
As expected, before he even got to the pudding course—plum duff with custard—he’d been invited to a party that very night, and two more acquaintances had promised him invitations to upcoming events.
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BY THE END OF THE FIRSTweek, despite his intention of avoiding the marriage mart, he’d attended several social events.He’d met many perfectly pleasant eligible young ladies, and their mothers had delicately hinted—and others much less delicately—that his attentions would be most welcome.
He deflected the hints as gracefully as he could.Though he wasn’t the kind of man that grace came naturally to.Blunt was more his style.
Almost any one of them would make him a suitable wife—on the surface, at least.But they were all so very young.His aunt’s words came back to him.If you wait much longer the new crop of gels will be young enough to be your daughters.
They already felt like it.
They all showed him the pretty society manners he had learned to distrust, fluttering fans and eyelashes at him, and trying to entice him with sweet smiles.Hanging on his every word and laughing at the mildest pleasantry, treating him as if he were the wittiest man in London.Which was ridiculous.And irritating.
Choosing a wife that way was like entering a lottery.Courtship was all for show.You never knew who you might end up with.
He’d met a number of widows, too, who’d also subtly indicated they were open to an offer of marriage—and several who, much less subtly, indicated they were open to less respectable offers.He had nothing against widows, and most of them seemed quite pleasant, but he had no plans to take a mistress, not from members of theton, anyway.
He wasn’t a talkative man, and he didn’t find it easy to make light conversation.The young ingenues were either dreadfully shy and it was hard to pry a word out of them, or they prattled happily of people and events he knew nothing about and cared even less.
And the widows tried to flirt with him.Marcus was hopeless at flirting.He was a dull dog, and he knew it.
He stood sipping wine, his bored gaze running over the crowd crammed into somebody’s ballroom and listening with half an ear to Barney Wimple, a friend from his schooldays, relating some tale about the triumphs of the recent hunting season.
Marcus had no interest in hunting.It was the one thing he and his father had disagreed on.That and marriage.
The amount of attention Marcus had been getting since he arrived in London was already verging on the unbearable.And Aunt Maude had written to say she had recovered from the journey from Bath to Alverleigh and was now following him to London.Her presence would only make it worse.He didn’t want a wife, and he wasn’t looking for love—most emphatically not.
His aunt was correct in her assumption that his parents’ tempestuous marriage had given him a distaste for a love match.Not to mention the disastrous experience of Lady Anthea, which thankfully—and miraculously—his aunt knew nothing about.
His brothers might have managed happy marriages, but Gabe and Harry had been raised initially by Great-aunt Gert and later Aunt Maude.They’d never had to live with his parents’ constant drama, and Nash, who had, was blessed with the kind of personality that enabled him to vanish whenever things got ugly.
Marcus, being the heir, had had to stand there and endure it.
And if those memories weren’t enough, there was the lesson he had learned from Lady Anthea Quenborough.
Both Marcus and his estranged half-brother Harry had—unbeknownst to either of them—fallen madly in love with the beautiful Lady Anthea, the dazzling toast of that year’s season.Charming, modest, sweet-natured, she’d been courted by dozens of high-born young gentlemen.
Harry, young and impulsive and seemingly her favorite, had asked her father for permission to court her.
And had received a thorough, vicious horse-whipping in answer.
Her father and brother had dumped the bleeding, barely conscious Harry on Lord Alverleigh’s London doorstep, proving they knew Harry’s true parentage.
It seemed that Lord Quenborough had no interest in acquiring a relatively penniless Earl’s by-blow for a son-in-law.
He made it clear, however, that he would smile on the legitimate son and heir of an Earl—Marcus.
Later Marcus later learned that not only had Lady Anthea repeatedly seduced Harry—which had prompted that honorable young fool to seek permission to marry her—but that she’d actually watched her father horse-whipping him with every sign of enjoyment.
