“Well, I’m not going to,” Hislop said indignantly. “You promised to take me. And you’ve gone and stolen my ladybird from me, without so much as a by-your-leave, and with a good deal of unnecessary personal violence. The least you can do is keep your promise.”

To his own surprise, Lucien heard himself break into a snort of laughter.

Hislop stared at him.

“You’d better straighten your neckcloth,” Lucien said.

PERHAPS AN HOUR LATER, Patrick Foakes, the Duke of Gisle, poked his friend in the ribs. “Who’s that little mushroom you brought to our breakfast?” he said, nodding toward Hislop, who was happily chatting with the duchess.

“Bartholomew Hislop,” Lucien said lazily. “Lovely, isn’t he? He’s been trying to turn my future wife into his chérie amie”

“What!”

Lucien hadn’t known until the sentence left his lips. But he liked the sound of it. “I’m planning to marry Mrs. Emily Ewing,” he explained. “But I had to slay her dragon first.”

Patrick blinked, looking at Hislop and his crumpled neckcloth. “That’s a dragon?”

Lucien grinned. “We dragon slayers have to take our work as it comes.”

Patrick rolled his eyes. “Why did you bring him here? Hoping that my cook will poison his meal? He looks perfectly healthy to me.”

“Hislop and I came to terms about Mrs. Ewing,” Lucien remarked. “But I had promised to bring him to your breakfast and he felt that, as a gentleman, I should keep my promise.”

Patrick snorted. “Sounds more like a mouse than a dragon.” But at that moment, Sophie sent him an unmistakable look of appeal over Hislop’s head.

“I’ll have his gizzard,” the duke said between clenched teeth as he lunged across the room.

SADLY ENOUGH, Bartholomew Hislop’s unexpected invitation to the Duke of Gisle’s breakfast did not go as smoothly as he could have hoped. For, as he told his close friends the following evening, he did nothing more than accidentally drop an apricot tart near the duchess. “Not on her bodice,” he painstakingly explained. “Near it.” And when he bent over to make absolutely certain that her gown was not stained, why, the duke went into a frenzy.

His friends’ eyes widened and they leaned closer.

“Naturally,” Bartholomew reported, “this small contretemps will not affect our friendship, and I have no doubt but that I shall be invited to many future events at the Gisle house. But I must warn you all to avoid the duchess. Frankly, Gisle is just a trifle bourgeois with regard to his wife. After all, Her Grace displayed her bosom to the whole of the Fester ballroom, didn’t she? So why would he mind if I happened to catch a glimpse?”

His friends entirely agreed with him, which mitigated the pain of a darkish purple bruise that had unaccountably appeared under his right eye.

Chapter 18