Page 1

Chapter One

Bertrand Lamarr, Viscount Watley, slouching comfortably, if somewhat inelegantly, in his favorite leather chair, his legs stretched out before him, his feet propped on the hearth and crossed at the ankles, lowered his book. The library at Elm Court, his home in Sussex, was his favorite room. His father, the Marquess of Dorchester, owned the house, but he lived with his second wife at Redcliffe Court in Northamptonshire, the home and estate he had inherited with his title thirteen years ago after his uncle died without direct male issue. Bertrand had lived there too for several years, but after completing his studies at Oxford, he and his twin sister, Estelle, had returned here.

The library looked cozy in the light of the lamp that stood on the table beside him and the flickering flames of the fire in the hearth. Heavy velvet curtains were drawn across the window, shutting out the darkness and the raw chill of the late-autumn evening. They also hid the cushioned window seat where Estelle had often sat sideways so she could see both into the room and out across the lawn and flower garden, her knees drawn up before her, an open book propped against her thighs.

But she was not sitting there now. She had married Justin Wiley, Earl of Brandon, two years ago and gone to live with him at Everleigh Park in Hertfordshire. Bertrand had spent a few weeks with them earlier in the year, after the premature birth of their first child. He had stayed through the weeks of anxiety that followed. David had fit inside his father’s hand at the beginning, and they were all horribly aware that early babies rarely thrived. But David had stubbornly clung to life and begun to grow, and after a few weeks Bertrand had felt able to join Owen Ware, his old friend from Oxford, on a planned visit to Ravenswood in Hampshire, principal seat of the Earl of Stratton, Owen’s elder brother. Soon after returning home from there, he had gone to spend a week with Jane and Charles Morrow, his maternal aunt and uncle, who had raised him and Estelle following the death of their mother before they were even one year old. Their father had fled from home in the extremity of his grief and not come back, except for the occasional fleeting visit, in more than sixteen years. Though then, of course, it had been to Redcliffe he returned, not here.

The whole summer had been busy and emotionally draining in more ways than one. He was very happy to be home again with no one to answer to except himself. He enjoyed company, but he did not crave it.

He returned his attention to his book. Reading had always been one of his greatest pleasures. He could lose himself in a book for hours at a time, totally absorbed, unaware of his surroundings. This evening, however, he was finding it difficult to concentrate. He liked to read the ancient classics in their original language, Greek in this case. Literature, he felt, always lost something in translation. He determinedly focused his mind upon the page open before him, but after another minute or two of staring at it he snapped the book shut, let it drop to his lap, and drummed his fingers on the arms of his chair.

God, but he was so damned lonely.

It was a thought that shook him. When anyone asked, knowing he lived alone, he always explained that there was a world of difference between solitude and loneliness. He liked solitude and reveled in it when life became too busy with other activities, as it sometimes did. He was never, ever lonely, he had always asserted.

But he was lonely now.

Estelle had raised the question of loneliness with him while they were strolling in the parterre in front of the house the day before he left Everleigh Park.

“Do you remember the conversation we had just before I met Justin?” she asked him. “We were sitting in the library at Elm Court and you asked me what I was looking for in a husband.”

“I do remember,” he answered. “You told me you were looking for someone perfect.”

She laughed. “But the first time I saw Justin,” she said, “I considered him the most abominable man I had ever met. Taciturn and rude and overlarge and ugly too. It was an opinion that grew more intense with subsequent meetings.”

“Until you fell in love with him,” he said.

“Until then,” she said, squeezing his arm as they both laughed. “And I fell hard. But what about you, Bert? Do you miss me? Are you lonely? What are you looking for in a wife? You could not answer the question when I asked it at the time.”

“Yes, I miss you,” he had said. “And no, I am not lonely. And I still have no answer for the other question. Besides, who says I am looking for a wife?”

“I do,” she had said. “I have absolutely no intention of having a curmudgeonly bachelor for a brother for the rest of my life. Not that you are that yet. But we are not so very far off thirty, are we? Soon we will be a pair of ancients. Bert, is there no one?”

“No one,” he said so quickly that she looked at him suspiciously.

“There is someone, then,” she said.

“Do you not listen, Stell?” he said, exasperated.

“Oh, I will not allow you to deny it,” she said. “This is your twin here, remember? Do tell. Is she someone you met in London before you dashed up here after David was born? One of the newest young beauties with which the Season always abounds, perhaps?”

“No,” he said quite truthfully.

He spent a few weeks of the spring in London almost every year. He enjoyed wandering about the galleries and museums and historic buildings and attending the theater and the opera. He liked the energy of the social Season and the company of friends and relatives he would not see much otherwise. He even enjoyed the balls and picnics and soirees and private concerts and other entertainments with which the Season teemed, provided he was not obliged to attend too many of them. But he could not imagine finding a bride there, a lifelong companion and friend and soul mate. There would be no chance in the frenzied atmosphere of the great marriage mart to develop the sort of relationship that would give him sufficient assurance of lifelong contentment, even happiness. Besides, he had never been more than mildly attracted to women who were simply beautiful, the sole criterion by which most men seemed to make their choice, unless they were compelled to marry for money.

No, he had not met anyone in London.

But Estelle had not trusted his denial. They were not identical twins, of course. Nevertheless, there was a bond between them far closer than that shared by most brothers and sisters of Bertrand’s acquaintance. They could not exactly read each other’s mind, but they could sense things about each other without having to be told. Things that went deeper than the mind itself.

“Who is she?” she asked, tipping her head to one side and continuing to look at him as they wandered through the parterre.

“She is nobody,” he said. “There is nobody.”

“Oh, there is somebody, you provoking man,” she said with a sigh. “But keep your secret if you must. I will be patient. Not, it seems, that I have any choice.”

And of course she had been right. There was someone. Correction: There had been someone when they spoke. By the time he returned home from Ravenswood a month or so later, there no longer was.

Quite the opposite, in fact.