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than an infant, but he’s still Lucien’s legitimate heir.”
    “He would be if Lucien left no heir of his own,” the duke pointed out, casually riffling through the pages of the
Gazette.
    “Well, we all know that’s an impossibility,” Quentin declared, stating what he had always believed to be an immutable fact. “And Lucien’s free of your rein now; there’s little you can do to control him.”
    “Aye, and he never ceases to taunt me with it,” Tarquin responded. “But it’ll be a rainy day in hell, my friend, when Lucien Courtney gets the better of me.” He looked up and met his half brother’s gaze.
    Quentin felt a little shiver prickle his spine at this soft-spoken declaration. He knew Tarquin as no one else did. He knew the softer side of an apparently unbending nature;he knew his half brother’s vulnerabilities; he knew that the hard cynicism Tarquin presented to the world was a defense learned in his youth against those who would use the friendship of a future duke for their own ambitions.
    Quentin also knew not to underestimate the Duke of Redmayne’s ruthlessness in getting what he wanted. He asked simply “What are you going to do?”
    Tarquin drained his glass. He smiled, but it was not a humorous smile. “It’s time our little cousin took himself a wife and set up his nursery,” he said. “That should settle the matter of an heir to Edgecombe.”
    Quentin stared at him as if he’d taken leave of his senses. “No one’s going to marry Lucien, even if he was prepared to marry. He’s riddled with the pox, and the only women who figure on his agenda of pleasure are whores from the stews prepared to play the lad.”
    “True. But how long do you think he has to live?” Tarquin inquired almost casually. “You only have to look at him. He’s burned out with debauchery and the clap. I’d give him maybe six months … a year at the outside.”
    Quentin said nothing, but his gaze remained unwaveringly on his brother’s countenance.
    “He knows it, too,” Tarquin continued. “He’s living each day as if it’s his last. He doesn’t give a damn what happens to Edgecombe or the Courtney fortune. Why should he? But I intend to ensure that Edgecombe, at the very least, passes intact into competent hands.”
    Quentin looked horrified. “In the name of pity, Tarquin! You couldn’t condemn a woman to share his bed, even if he’d take her into it. It would be a death sentence.”
    “Listen well, dear brother. It’s perfectly simple.”

Chapter 2

    B y the time the stagecoach lumbered into the yard of the Bell in Wood Street, Cheapside, Juliana had almost forgotten there was a world outside the cramped interior and the company of her six fellow passengers. At five miles an hour, with an enforced stop at sunset because neither coachman nor passengers would travel the highways after dark, it had taken over twenty-four hours to accomplish the seventy miles between Winchester and London. Juliana, like the rest of the passengers, had sat up in the taproom of the coaching inn during the night stop. Despite the discomfort of the hard wooden settles, it was a welcome change from the bone-racking jolting of the iron wheels over the unpaved roads.
    They set off again, just before dawn, and it was soon after seven in the morning when she alighted from the coach for the last time. She stood in the yard of the Bell, arching the small of her back against her hands in an effort to get the cricks out. The York coach had also just arrived and was disgorging its blinking, exhausted passengers. The June air was already warm, heavy with city smells, and she wrinkled her nose at the pervading odor of rotting garbage in the kennels, manure piled in the narrow cobbled lanes.
    “Ye got a box up ’ere, lad?”
    It took Juliana a moment to realize the coachman’s question was addressed to her. She was still huddled in her cloak, her cap pulled down over her ears as it had been throughout the journey. She turned