But he was only asking her to accompany him on a walk in the gardens. They would be unchaperoned, since Lady Clarice never rose before noon. “We shall stay well within view of the house,” he assured her.

Tess didn’t bother telling him that she and her sisters had spent their childhood walking about the estate just as they pleased; their governess (when they had one) could hardly chaperone four girls at once.

“I’d be pleased to,” she said, realizing a second too late that her tone was lacking in a certain enthusiasm.

“Unless you would rather stay inside the house. Rafe won’t rise for hours: he generally nurses his head in the mornings.” The earl had witch black eyes.

“Why do you call him Rafe?” Tess asked. “I was under the impression that English gentlemen never used Christian names in reference to each other.”

“Rafe won’t countenance being known as Holbrook,” Mayne replied. “He has only been the duke for five years, since his elder brother died.”

“Oh,” Tess said, seeing immediately. “It’s as if he had to step into his brother’s name as well as his title.”

Mayne nodded, but just as Tess began thinking that perhaps he wasn’t as brittle and fashionable as she would have guessed from his manners, he bent his head to her hand and kissed it again. The repetitive hand-kissing was giving her quite a sympathy with Josie’s churlish refusal to be kissed the previous afternoon. Thank goodness she hadn’t been working with the horses for a good year or so; at least her hand was sufficiently white and soft to warrant so many intimate touches.

Sure enough, when he raised his head, the trace of sympathy she’d seen in his eyes when they were talking of the duke had vanished. Instead, he looked at her as if she were an exquisite cravat that he had quite decided to purchase. He must have been looking for a wife before they even arrived at the house, given his precipitous decision to court her. Could one imagine that the arrival of four marriageable misses had driven him to distraction, and he simply chose the eldest, without pausing to ascertain her suitability?

“I find it is dangerous to spend time in your company, Miss Essex,” he said.

“No doubt that is a disagreeable sensation,” Tess told him.

He looked faintly surprised, but regrouped. “Not at all,” he assured her. “One feels, always, a kind of exquisite twinge in the presence of a woman of your beauty.”

“A twinge?” Tess asked, raising an eyebrow. Really, he made her sound like a case of jaundice.

The earl seemed to have realized that the conversation had gone astray. He pressed her hand and raised it to his lips again. “True beauty always brings a bit of sadness to the heart. One feels the same looking at the great marbles of Greece and paintings by the Italian masters.”

“I haven’t had the pleasure.” Tess withdrew her hand. She was wishing rather desperately for the solitude of her own chamber. “I do believe that I have a touch of a headache,” she said, standing up. “I must postpone our walk, my lord.”

Again, he surprised her. There was a flash of amusement in his eyes. He might be a rake, but at least he had a sense of humor.

“May I bow, if I don’t kiss your hand in farewell?” he asked, and that was definitely laughter in his eyes. “I can certainly sympathize, Miss Essex. We English are outrageously overformal.”

Apparently, he saw her as some sort of untutored country miss, shaken by kisses to her hand and likely to be thrown into a positive twitter by an elegant bow.

He bowed. She watched. Then she let a deliberate sardonic edge creep into her voice. “How kind of you,” she said. “I learned so much from this brief encounter. I can only retreat to my room and study how to raise myself to the level of such elegant discourse.”

Truly, she didn’t even care if he was left with his jaw hanging. He was too beautiful for his own good. Probably he was used to women throwing themselves at his head, the way Annabel had done the previous night.

Well, perhaps he would be put off by her gaucheness and shift his attentions to Annabel. She turned and walked out.

Left to his own devices, Garret Langham, Earl of Mayne, collapsed back into his seat and stared at the coddled eggs Brinkley had placed on his plate. Miss Essex didn’t like him much. She was remarkably beautiful, with deep chestnut hair and lips of deep rose that looked as if they were curved to smile, even when they compressed with a faint disapproval.

The lady wasn’t pleased with his particular brand of civility. Not that he could blame her. Ten years of making himself beloved by every eligible young matron in London—and the only qualification for eligibility was a husband who looked able to hold his firearm at thirty paces—had polished his phrases to a high gleam. He was tired of them himself.For a moment he wondered whether such flummery simply didn’t work with unpolished girls from the Scottish countryside. But no. He had seduced matrons far younger than Miss Teresa Essex. Though not—he admitted rather reluctantly—more beautiful.

Unbidden, the picture of an overly slender blond countess, her head a sleek cap of wispy locks, clothed in fabric so light that it floated around her body came to his head. He narrowed his eyes and clenched his jaw. Countess Godwin had no interest in his company. He had made a fool of himself over her. Enough.

He wrenched his thoughts back to his future wife. He had to marry. His sister told him that daily. He was all of thirty-six and in need of an heir. It all just seemed so…final. So tediously final. Yet Miss Essex was lovely. She was intelligent too, intelligent enough to be unimpressed by his practiced compliments.

If their union was unlikely to be passionate, well, she came along with a horse named Something Wanton, a horse who had come close to winning the Ascot just the year before. At least he was assured of a passionate attachment to that horse.

Who could want anything more?

Chapter 10

Afternoon

“A modiste will arrive just after nuncheon tomorrow,” Rafe said to Tess, catching her on her way up the stairs.

“Oh, you needn’t,” she said, feeling a tinge of embarrassment. Of course he must have taken one look at their wretched wardrobes and realized they were in desperate straits.“Nonsense.” He looked up at her with a grin that made him look suddenly much younger. “You’re my new sister, remember? I can’t have my new sister dressed in bombazine. I can’t stand the stuff. It reminds me of the cook we had when I was growing up: a fearsome lady likely to employ her ladle on a young lad’s head.”

“Ouch,” Tess said. She agreed about the bombazine, but it was humiliating to be penniless.

“And you’re past the first three months of mourning,” the duke continued. “You needn’t wear unrelieved black. On quite another subject, Lady Clarice has inquired whether you and your sisters wish to join her in an excursion to the Roman ruins at Silchester tomorrow morning. Miss Pythian-Adams will join us here until we find another chaperone. So if you wish to investigate the ruins, this would be an excellent opportunity.”

The very idea of Lord Maitland’s cultured fiancée was disheartening, but Tess knew that Imogen would insist on attendance in the off-chance that Draven Maitland would accompany the party. “That would be very kind of Lady Clarice,” she said, with just the tiniest wrinkle of her nose.