How to Master Your Marquis Read Free

Dingleby . . .”
    “. . . and what’s more,” Miss Dingleby said, standing back to admire her handiwork, “we shall all be a great deal reassured by the knowledge that you’re lodged with the most reputable, learned, formidable, and upstanding member of the entire English bar.”
    Stefanie allowed herself to be taken by the hand and led out the door to the great and rather architecturally suspect staircase that swept its crumbling way to the hall below. “That,” she said mournfully, “is exactly what I’m afraid of.”
    Olympia and his guest were waiting in the formal drawing room, which had once been the scene of a dramatic capture and beheading of a Royalist younger son during the Civil War (Stefanie had verified this legend herself with a midnight peek under the threadbare rugs, and though the light was dim, she was quite sure she could make out an admirably large stain on the floorboards, not five feet away from the fireplace), but which now contained only the pedestrian English ritual of a duke taking an indulgent late-morning glass of sherry with a knight.
    Or so Stefanie had supposed, but when she marched past the footman (a princess always greeted potential adversaries with aplomb, after all) and into the ancient room, she found herself gazing instead at the most beautiful man in the world.
    Stefanie staggered to a halt.
    He stood with his sherry glass in one hand, and the other perched atop the giant lion-footed armchair that had been specially made a century ago for the sixth duke, who had grown corpulent with age. Without being extraordinarily tall, nor extraordinarily broad framed, the man seemed to dwarf this substantial piece of historic furniture, to cast it in his shadow. His radiant shadow, for he had the face of Gabriel: divinely formed, cheekbones presiding over a neat square jaw, blue eyes crinkled in friendly welcome beneath a high and guiltless forehead. He was wearing a dark suit of some kind, plain and unadorned, and the single narrow shaft of November sunshine from her uncle’s windows had naturally found him, as light clings to day, bathing his bare golden curls like a nimbus.
    Stefanie squeaked, “Sir John?”
    The room exploded with laughter.
    “Ha-ha, my lad. How you joke.” The Duke of Olympia stepped forward from the roaring fire, wiping his eyes. “In fact, your new employer has the good fortune of traveling with company today. Allow me to present to you the real and genuine Sir John Worthington, Q.C., who has so kindly offered to take you into his chambers.”
    A white-haired figure emerged dimly from the sofa next to the fire and spoke with the booming authority of a Roman senator. “Not nearly so handsome a figure as my friend, of course, but it saves trouble with the ladies.”
    With supreme effort, Stefanie detached her attention from the golden apparition before her and fixed it upon the source of that senatorial voice.
    Her heart, which had been soaring dizzily about the thick oaken beams holding up the ducal ceiling, sank slowly back to her chest, fluttered, and expired.
    If Stefanie had been a painter of renown, and commissioned to construct an allegorical mural of British law, with a judge occupying the ultimate position in a decorous white wig and black silk robes, bearing the scales of justice in one hand and a carved wooden gavel in the other, she would have chosen exactly this man to model for her and instructed him to wear exactly that expression that greeted her now.
    His eyes were small and dark and permanently narrowed, like a pair of suspicious currants. His forehead was broad and steep above a hedgerow brow. His pitted skin spoke of the slings and arrows of a life spent braced between the dregs of humanity and the righteous British public, and his mouth, even when proffering an introductory smile, turned downward at the ends toward some magnetic core of dole within him. Atop his wiry frame was arranged a stiff gray tweed jacket and matching plus fours,