Alex stood up and walked around from the back of the armchair, crouching down on his heels and opening his arms for a huge hug. Pippa toddled as fast as she could toward him, leaving Keating standing at the library door. As Alex scooped her little body into his arms, his heart melted. So what if he couldn’t have Charlotte? He had Pippa. He’d try harder to find a proper nanny. Miss Virginia had left after three days. She was the first nanny who hadn’t quit; Alex’s housekeeper had fired her. Apparently she became very close to two of the footmen in the week she spent in Sheffield House, and that intimacy resulted, naturally enough, in a whole brace of footmen sporting black eyes.

“Papa, fwore,” Pippa shouted. Shouting seemed to be Pippa’s normal mode of speech. Fwore mean fuori: outside, Alex translated. Pippa had only ten words that he had been able to decipher, and he couldn’t afford to ignore the ones she spoke in Italian. But she was adding them every day. Yesterday she said kiss very clearly, and this morning (before breakfast), cake.

“All right, pumpkin,” Alex said, the corners of his mouth curling upward. “Let’s go to the park.” He banished the fleeting image of Charlotte’s tight riding costume from his mind—but he did scoop up Pippa and stride quickly toward the hallway, shouting to Keating to have Bucephalus, his horse, readied once again. Keating handed Pippa up to him once he was seated on the massive stallion. Mrs. Turnpike, his housekeeper, emerged from the house looking anxious. She hated these excursions to the park with Pippa balanced on a great prancing horse. She wrung her hands in her apron, but stopped herself from saying anything. There was no telling with the earl. One day he was right as sunshine, and the next he would snap your head off.

Alex and Pippa paced gravely up and down the aisles of Hyde Park. Now that he had read the scandal sheet, he was able to see a clear influence in people’s demeanor. No one would ever snub him; he was an earl, after all. But older women bowed more stiffly than they were wont to, and men bent a sympathetic eye on him. The sapskulls! Alex’s chiseled face became even more forbidding. To tell the truth, some of his acquaintances avoided him, not due to the scandal, but from pure fear.