Allendale scowled but nonetheless lifted the cup and took a sip. After a moment, the redness receded from his face. “I told you when we left Florence that the time had come to do your duty. There’s to be no more mucking about, my boy. You’ll find yourself a wife and get yourself an heir. It’s what you owe to the title. It’s what you owe to me.”

St. Clare didn’t argue. He knew very well the duty he owed to the title. For years, his life had been one long, grueling exercise in preparing for his role as the next Earl of Allendale. Anything his grandfather thought he should learn, he had learned. Any skill that had to be mastered, he had mastered. In time, St. Clare’s own ambitions had receded, dimmed by the constant need to prove himself. To excel at every challenge set before him.

And he had excelled. No study had been too difficult for him. No sport too daring. He’d grown—by his grandfather’s own admission—into a fine figure of a gentleman.

But they weren’t in Florence now, nor in Paris, Cairo, or Bombay. They were in England.

“I’m not insensible of my duty,” St. Clare said. “I’ve done everything you bid me.”

“Not everything,” Allendale snapped.

St. Clare continued unperturbed. “I’ve engaged a new tailor and bootmaker. I’ve set up my stable. I’ve joined the right clubs and attended the right balls and parties. I’ve even been forced to endure the company of those very men who once ostracized my father.”

At that, Allendale frowned deeply. “Jackals, every one of them,” he muttered. “A pack of bloody jackals. They drove him to his death.”

“As I’m well aware.”

St. Clare’s father, the late James Beresford, Viscount St. Clare, had in his youth engaged in countless affairs of honor and had earned for himself a reputation as an excellent shot. But when, as a result of a foolish dispute over a carriage accident, he’d dueled with and killed the youngest son of the Duke of Penworthy, the ton had accused him of taking advantage of a weaker opponent.

The viscount’s honor had been tarnished. His friends, such that they were, had deserted him.

His father had deserted him.

It was a fact that Allendale never mentioned—and one that St. Clare could never forget. The late viscount had needed Allendale’s protection, and Allendale—a man who had valued familial pride over his actual family—had thrown his son to the wolves.

Facing arrest, St. Clare’s father had fled to the continent. It was there he’d lived out the remainder of his short life, dying in his thirty-third year of an insidious wasting disease.

“Your father was a damned sight too trusting. Fell in with the wrong sort of people. But you… You know better. I believe you don’t trust anyone.”