with whom will you speak of them? Your father is no longer here. You must marry, and I’d far rather embarrass you than have you make a muddle of things right from the start. Being coy about the facts won’t help.” She reached out her slippered foot and jostled his knee, making him open his eyes, though he didn’t lift his head. “Too many marriages fail because neither the bride nor the groom understands what goes where, you know.”
“Mother,” James moaned.
“Son,” she said. “Let us speak plainly. You have no male relative to advise you, so it falls to me. Not to speak ill of the queen, but her obsession with modesty is ruining the upper class of this country. I suppose I can’t blame you, since all our set seem to think the same way, but I swear—the aristocracy will die out if we don’t encourage more frankness.”
“Well,” James said sourly, “when it comes to Miss Allington, you won’t have to worry about that. I suspect she knows more about what goes where than I do.”
Lady Eleanor surprised him with an indelicate guffaw. “Does she, indeed! I do like that girl.”
“She likes horses better than people, I’m fairly certain.”
“So do you!”
He scowled at her. “I didn’t like her in the first place, Mother. I like her less now.”
“What first place?”
“She’s the one I met in Regent’s Park.”
“What? She was?”
“Yes, and she had no manners at all.”
“Manners can be learned. You and she share an interest in horses, which is no small thing.” His mother’s smile vanished, and she fixed him with a hard stare. “We need her, you know. Our situation is serious.”
“I know that better than anyone, Mother. Just the same, I—”
Lady Eleanor raised a hand to stop his thought. “You’ll have to give her a chance, Rosefield. Look at her again, without all your missish sensitivities. The girl may not be a beauty, but she has lovely skin, wonderful hair, brilliant eyes. She also has the body type that will never run to fat.” She patted her own soft midriff. “Lucky.”
She stood up and started for the door. “Give her a tour of the stables. If she wants to ride, indulge her. Remember what’s at stake here.”
She was gone before James could think of an effective protest. He sighed and rang for Perry. He would breakfast in his room so he didn’t have to face the guests. He would dress for riding and have Perry take a message to Miss Allington.
It was not at all the way he wanted to spend his day. Irritably he kicked off his slippers, first the left, then the right. They both flew across the floor and slid under his bed, disappearing into the darkness.
Cursing, but not wanting Perry to have to hunt for them, the Marquess of Rosefield got down on his knees and scrabbled under the bed until he found the slippers. He set them side by side in front of the wardrobe.
When he straightened, he caught sight of himself in the mirrored door. “Damn,” he said, shaking his head. Stubble covered his chin, and his hair stood out every which way, as if he had slept standing on his head. His neck, poking out of the wide collar of his dressing gown, looked as scrawny as that of a farmer’s nag.
“Hardly an appealing figure,” he muttered. “Chances are the dratted girl wouldn’t have me anyway.”
Two hours later a reluctant James walked down the main staircase, intending to await Miss Allington in the library as his note had promised. Instead he found her waiting in the foyer, pacing back and forth on the parquet floor. She caught sight of him and went to the foot of the stairs, gazing upward.
As he looked down on her, a strange thing happened. He had thought of her, at dinner the night before, and certainly in Regent’s Park, as unremarkable in her appearance. She had struck him as boyish-looking, with her modest bosom and those narrow hips no bustle could disguise. Her eyes were good, the cool blue of the forget-me-nots that grew in the meadows of Seabeck, and her hair was dark and thick, but her nose was a bit long, and her chin too strong, almost masculine.
That had been his impression, but this morning—oh, this was indeed odd. He experienced a jolt of disorientation, as if he had opened the wrong door and gone into a room he didn’t recognize.
Miss Allington stood in a shaft of sunlight falling through the leaded glass