What Price Love? Read Free

she faced Eugenia and Adelaide. “I’ll have to go to Newmarket.”
    Adelaide’s chin firmed. “ We’ll go to Newmarket—you can’t go alone.”
    Pris sent her a fleeting smile, then looked at Eugenia.
    Her aunt studied her, then nodded, and calmly folded her tatting. “Indeed, dear. I see no alternative. Much as I love Rus, we cannot leave him to deal with what ever this is alone, and if there is some illicit scheme being hatched, you cannot, to my mind, risk even a letter to warn him, in case it falls into the wrong hands. You will need to speak with him. So!”
    Folding her hands on the pile of tatting in her lap,
Eugenia looked inquiringly at Pris. “What tale are we going to
tell your father to explain our sudden need for a sojourn in
England?”

1
    September 1831
Newmarket, Suffolk
    I had hoped we’d have longer in reasonable privacy.” Letting the door of the Twig & Bough coffee shop on Newmarket High Street swing shut behind him, Dillon Caxton stepped down to the pavement beside Barnaby Adair. “Unfortunately, the sunshine has brought the ladies and their daughters out in force.”
    Scanning the conveyances thronging the High Street, Dillon was forced to smile and acknowledge two matrons, each with beaming daughters. Tapping Barnaby’s arm, he started strolling. “If we stand still, we’ll invite attack.”
    Chuckling, Barnaby fell in beside him. “You sound even more disenchanted with the sweet young things than Gerrard was.”
    â€œLiving in London, you’re doubtless accustomed to far worse, but spare a thought for us who value our bucolic existence. To us, even the Little Season is an unwanted reminder of that which we fervently wish to avoid.”
    â€œAt least with this latest mystery you have something to distract you. An excellent excuse to be elsewhere, doing other things.”
    Seeing a matron instructing her coachman to draw her landau to the curb ten paces farther on, Dillon swore beneath his breath. “Unfortunately, as our mystery must remain a strict secret, I fear Lady Kershaw is going to draw first blood.”
    Her ladyship, a local high stickler, beckoned imperiously. There was no help for it; Dillon strolled on to her now-stationary carriage. He exchanged greetings with her ladyship and her daughter, Margot, then introduced Barnaby. They stood chatting for five minutes. From the corner of his eye, Dillon noted how many arrested glances they drew, how many other matrons were now jockeying for position farther along the curb.
    Glancing at Barnaby, doing his best to live up to Miss Kershaw’s expectations, Dillon inwardly grimaced. He could imagine the picture they made, he with his dark, dramatic looks most commonly described as Byronic, with Barnaby, a golden Adonis with curly hair and bright blue eyes, by his side, the perfect foil. They were both tall, well set up, and elegantly and fashionably turned out. In the restricted society of Newmarket, it was no wonder the ladies were lining up to accost them. Unfortunately, their destination—the Jockey Club—lay some hundred yards distant; they had to run the gauntlet.
    They proceeded to do so with the glib assurance that came from untold hours spent in ton ballrooms. Despite his preference for the bucolic, courtesy of his cousin Flick—Felicity Cynster—over the last decade Dillon had spent his fair share of time in the whirl of the ton, in London and elsewhere, as Flick put it, keeping in practice.
    In practice for what was a question to which he was no longer sure he knew the answer. Before his fall from grace and the scandal that had shaken his life, he’d always assumed he would marry, have a family, and all the rest. Yet while spending the last decade putting his life to rights, repaying his debts of social and moral obligation, and reestablishing himself, his honor, in the eyes of all those who mattered to him, he’d