Tess was talking, and he pulled his attention back to her with a jerk. “Because if you don’t, I’ll allow Annabel to continue in the mistaken belief that she could become Duchess of Holbrook with a mere crook of her little finger.”

His eyes widened, and he looked down the table. At that moment, Annabel looked up and smiled. There was nothing overt about her smile. She was, quite simply, one of the most beautiful women Rafe had ever seen, with her buttery hair that gleamed with the dull gold of old silk in the candlelight, her eyes tilted slightly at the corners, marked with sooty eyelashes. Even in drab mourning clothing she was formidable. But he hadn’t the faintest inclination to marry her, magnificent or not.

“She would make a lovely duchess,” her sister told him.

Rafe narrowed his eyes at Tess. “I see you have some of your father’s bravado.” There was Annabel, glowing like a piece of expensive jewelry, down the table. And then here was Tess. Her clear blue eyes had the same tilt as her sister’s, but they spoke of intelligence, courage, and humor, rather than pleasure. “You have no plans to become a duchess, do you?” he asked, wondering as he said it whether the brandy had gone to his head the way the champagne had to hers.

She shook her head.

“You would really terrify me,” he said frankly. “In fact, should you have made up your mind in that direction, I might have had to flee to the North Country.”

“A remarkable compliment,” Tess said. “I think I would be more moved by it had you not mentioned the prospect of flight.”

Just then Brinkley entered the dining room and stooped at Rafe’s side. “Mr. Felton has arrived from London,” he said. “He has agreed to join you for supper. I suggest that we place him beside Miss Essex.”

“A friend,” Rafe explained, turning to Tess. And then, to Lady Clarice, “Yes indeed, Mr. Felton. We were at school together, although that was many years ago now.”

“Not so long,” Lady Clarice said archly. “You’re not more than your midthirties, Your Grace, and I won’t have you pretending to be an elder statesman!”

Tess blinked. Perhaps the earl was right, and Lady Clarice pictured herself a future duchess. Well, if Annabel rushed to imagine herself in the position, why should not every widowed or single lady in the vicinity?

She caught the duke’s eye. He gave her a crooked smile as he leaned closer to Lady Clarice, who had declared the need to tell the duke something tremendously humorous that happened at the last Silchester assembly.

A footman began placing a setting to the left of Tess. She finished her plaice, listening to Lady Clarice prattle to Rafe of an agreeable interlude in which a dear, dear friend of hers had quite lost the anchoring on her bodice whilst in the midst of a crowded room, or so Tess understood. From Lady Clarice’s relish in repeating the episode, one grasped immediately the idea that the friend in question had neglected to put on sufficient undergarments.

Then the door opened again, and Brinkley ushered in Rafe’s new guest. It must be the champagne, Tess thought rather foggily, a second later.

The man who entered the room after Brinkley looked like a fallen angel. The candelabra on the table bounced light from his sleek hair, off his austere face, off the severe line of his nose. He was wearing a black coat with velvet lapels. He looked every inch a duke, every inch a patrician, a wealthy creature of privilege. And yet there was a sense in which he was like one of her father’s stallions: large, beautiful, a man who dominated the room merely by entering it. A man whose eyes showed a combination of restraint and a faint boredom, a sleek man.

A rather terrifying fallen angel, really.

Chapter 6

L ucius Felton was, like most men, enamored of habit. When he journeyed to the Duke of Holbrook’s house, as he did every June and September to attend the races at Ascot and Silchester, he expected to find the duke sprawled in a chair with a decanter at his elbow and a copy of Sporting News in the near vicinity.

Sometimes the Earl of Mayne joined them; either way the talk circled comfortably around horses and brandy. All tedious subjects such as women, financial affairs, and family were avoided, not from some trumped-up idea of secluding themselves from the world, but because those subjects were tedious. By their advanced age of thirty-some, women had proved to be (except in certain circumstances) fairly wearisome companions.Money came to all three of them with supreme ease, and money is only interesting when it is in short supply. As for family…since his own had eschewed contact with him for years, Lucius viewed the turmoils of other people’s families with some, if lethargic, interest. But after Holbrook had lost his brother, they had stopped discussing family as well.

Thus when Lucius descended from his carriage at Holbrook Court, he viewed with some severity the butler, who conveyed to him the news that the duke had unexpectedly become guardian to the four nubile young daughters of Lord Brydone, and with even less pleasure did he receive the news that Lady Clarice Maitland and her devil’s spawn of a son were at the table. The presence of Mayne was the only mitigating light in this dismaying turn of events. Mayne must be planning to run his filly Plaisir in the Silchester Gold Plate, which would provide a good opportunity for Lucius to test the paces of his own Minuet, running in her first race.

But as Lucius pulled on a clean shirt in the chambers assigned to him (not, he noticed with disapproval, the room to which he was accustomed because that apparently had been given to one of the nubile young misses), he rather thought that he might skip the Silchester and leave his stable master and jockeys to do the job on their own. He had several sweet deals brewing in the city. And if the duke’s house was no longer a bastion of male comradeship and comfort—and the presence of females had undoubtedly changed it to something more starched-up and far less comfortable—he might as well abandon his intent to attend the race and return to London in the morning. Or at least to the estate he owned an hour or so from here. He hadn’t visited Bramble Hill in some four months.

His manservant Derwent bustled in the door, having obtained a bowl of shaving water from the kitchens. Derwent had taken this news even more poorly than had his master; the company of women was distasteful to Derwent at the best of times, and the presence of so many marriageable ladies in the house had thrown him into a flurry of acid comments.

“Apparently they haven’t a stitch to their backs,” he said, brushing up a warm froth of soap, preparatory to shaving Lucius’s face. “One can only guess at the endeavors the poor duke will have to go through to hoist four females onto the market, and none of them marriageable in the least.”

“Are they unattractive, then?” Lucius asked, gazing at the ceiling so that Derwent could shave his neck in a clean stroke.

“Well, Brinkley didn’t describe them as strictly unattractive,” Derwent said, “but they came with only one or two garments and those most repellent, if you can believe it. And Scottish, you know, without dowries. The accent is fatal on the market. The poor things would have to be very lucky to take.”

Derwent gazed anxiously at his master. One didn’t have to think hard to realize that the Duke of Holbrook would be desperate to bestow his wards on all and sundry…including his oldest friends.

Felton was lying back calmly, but Derwent had a sense of doom. Doom. His left eye was twitching, and that always signaled an unfortunate turn of events. His eye had twitched unmercifully the day that the Duke of York fell off his horse in the midst of a victory parade two years previous; and then there was July of last year when the master entangled himself with Lady Genevieve Mul-caster. Derwent had been unable to see to his left side for a month and was nearly struck down by a wagon and four horses on High Street.