To be sure, she couldn’t recall when she’d seen any male so darkly attractive. Not during her season, anyway, and certainly not back home in Hertfordshire, where she lived surrounded by her strapping older brothers, all of them golden-locked and ice-gray-eyed like her formidable father.

Papa was presently in the country with Kate’s mother, Margaret, at Worth House, the family seat in Hertfordshire. Kate had spent many happy Christmases there as a child. As a young lady of twenty, it had finally become her home. All of their homes. On Great-Grandfather’s death last spring, Papa had lost his courtesy title. No longer Viscount St. Clare, he was now the Earl of Allendale.

Kate’s elder brother James had taken on the title of St. Clare. He would remain so until Papa died.

An unfathomable occurrence!

Kate didn’t like to think of it. They were a close-knit family, albeit a slightly ramshackle one as far as society was concerned. Rumors still managed to cling from the past. Whispers that Papa was illegitimate and that the title he’d inherited wasn’t truly his but instead belonged to some odious distant cousin.

It was why Kate was in London alone instead of in company with her parents. Mama had thought it preferable for Aunt Jane, Viscountess Mattingly—Mama’s oldest friend⁠—to bring Kate out. And Aunt Jane had done so, to miserable effect. Five months later, the season at an end, Kate was still unmarried.

Still ungovernable.

She tied the gentleman’s handkerchief tighter around her throbbing finger. Her mouth settled into a pensive frown.

She was too willful, that was the problem. And no gentleman wanted to shackle himself to a difficult wife, no matter how beautiful she might be. A man wanted a wife who was demure and biddable. A wife willing to dim her intellect and ability so that he could shine the brighter.

Kate would die, rather.

And anyway, what kind of man was intimidated by a woman merely because she could rival him in thought and deed? None worth having. Not as far as she was concerned.

“How can you call him handsome when he was so unforgivably unpleasant?” Christine wondered. “Rude, officious, and really quite—”

“Handsome,” Kate said again. “Why haven’t we seen him before?”

“Because he’s no gentleman, clearly,” Christine replied.

“Rubbish. He was well-spoken. And did you see how he carried himself?”

Christine shook her skirts. “I’m sorry, no.” She resumed walking down Bond Street. “I was rather distracted by his hydrophobic dog biting your hand.”

Kate kept pace with her friend. “It wasn’t his dog.”

“He claimed it was,” Christine said.

“He was lying.”

“I don’t know why he would. If the dog didn’t belong to him, what business had he in defending it? Or in taking it away from here?”

Kate gathered her skirts in her hands as she sidestepped a puddle. “He was rescuing it, of course.”