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depths.
    â€œYes.… Thank you … for coming.”
    Justin made a slight bow of his head, turned, and started for the door, his elegant long-legged strides carrying him away without a moment’s hesitation.
    A shudder slid through the earl’s pain-racked body. He might have made the girl his mistress, but he would never have mistreated her. He strained to listen to the hollow, echoing footsteps retreating down the hall.
    For the first time, it occurred to him that the bargain he had made with Ariel Summers might also appeal to his coldhearted son.

C HAPTER T HREE
    L ONDON , E NGLAND , 1804
    Lord Edmund Ross, Earl of Greville
    Dear Lord Greville,
    It is a fine day here in the Sussex countryside. The trees have leafed out and the sky is the clearest, most startling color of blue. Unfortunately, by necessity, most of my time is spent indoors. The tutors you have arranged are very fine indeed, though they are difficult taskmasters. Still, I am determined. I study late into the evening, then rise several hours early to begin anew the following day. Reading has become my favorite pastime. In the beginning, it was difficult, but oh, what wonderful doors it has opened! There are novels and plays, incredible poems and sonnets.
    I vow, such a gift is, in itself, worth the price of our bargain.
    Justin Bedford Ross, Fifth Earl of Greville, read the letter he had pulled from the stack he kept locked in the bottom drawer of the desk in his study. He had read them all more than once, some with faint amusement, others with a trace of pity, an emotion he rarely felt.
    After his father’s death, from the day Justin had moved into the old stone mansion in Brook Street, he had been inexplicably drawn to the innocent ramblings of the young woman his lecherous father had intended to make his whore.
    Justin’s jaw tightened at the image of the earl that rose into his mind, a licentious, arrogant man who thought only of his own selfish needs. He couldn’t help feeling a shot of satisfaction at the odd turn of fate that had made him his father’s heir. For most of his twenty-eight years, his father had ignored him. As far as Edmund Ross was concerned, Justin Bedford was simply a costly mistake, a bastard spawned off one of his numerous whores.
    Two years ago, gravely ill and dying, he had sent for Justin and offered him the single thing the earl could give him that he could not refuse.
    The legitimacy of his name.
    Even the lure of the Greville fortune and the power and prestige of an earldom would not have been enough to entice him. It was the name that he had wanted, the name he had yearned for since he was a boy. Justin had accepted his father’s offer of adoption, becoming Justin Bedford Ross, because he would no longer be the bastard son who had been laughed at and scorned for as long as he could remember.
    He leafed through the stack of letters, drew out another, and scanned the page:
    My studies continue. By necessity, before I left my home in Ewhurst, I had learned to work a bit with numbers, enough to help my father sell his crops and livestock at market. Here I have studied at length the Young Ladies New Guide to Arithmetic and have become quite accomplished at mathematics. History is another subject I enjoy, especially learning about the ancient Egyptians, Romans, and Greeks. I can’t believe the women actually went about half-naked!
    His mouth edged up. Justin folded and replaced the letter in its proper order in the stack. As he had promised, he had kept his father’s bargain, struck with Ariel Summers more than four years ago. The girl was now beyond eighteen and ready to leave Mrs. Penworthy’s School of Feminine Deportment, the expensive finishing school he had arranged for her to attend.
    A thousand times since he’d become earl, he had tried to imagine what she looked like. Beautiful, he was sure. His father had always had exquisite taste in women. He wondered if she was dark