But he was miserable. He was going to the dogs and he knew it. Then, just as he was on the verge of joining the Third Dragoon Guards, the papers signed and the only task remaining to inform his wife, Maria came to him and begged him to release her from the marriage. Release her! He would have done anything to wipe out their wedding. Oddly enough, they made love that night for the first time in months, rather tenderly, as he remembered. Unfortunately, it was also the night that Pippa was conceived.

Within a month her powerful family had arranged everything. Alex had one sticky and uncomfortable interview with three black-gowned bishops who asked him politely: “Lei avrebbe per caso un problema?’

“Sì, sì,” he responded earnestly. He may not have had the problem they thought he had, but he had no trouble labeling Maria a problem. And he was free. Maria set off with her priest, now ex-priest he supposed, carrying with her all the household silver, jewelry, and every piece of furniture she could put her hands on. She even took a miniature of his mother, presumably to sell it since she could have no attachment to the picture.

In the first joyful breath of liberty he didn’t care, thinking that the marriage was over and he would never again have to wake up to Maria Colonna in his bedchamber. But in fact he was still not entirely free. The debris from that dreadful marriage kept washing up on the shores of his life. The miniature of his mother showed up in a secondhand store in Naples. At one point Maria’s feckless brother tried to blackmail him. And now ribald verses. Personally, he didn’t give a hang what the papers printed about him. But Charlotte’s father, the Duke of Calverstill—that would be another story. To tell the truth, he himself would never allow Pippa to marry a man with a reputation like his own.

His thoughts were broken by the sound he was unconsciously waiting for. Little footsteps padded down the stairs, stumbling slightly but recovering, he knew, because Keating tightly held Pippa’s hand.

“Papa!” her little voice shouted a greeting as Keating pushed open the heavy double doors to the library. “Papa!”