Richard clucked impatiently and turned around to make his way across the room. With his pants around his ankles it wasn’t a fast maneuver and watching him duck march around the bed toward the window with his family jewels hanging out and swinging to and fro under his frock coat was really quite the most ridiculous thing she thought she’d ever seen.

“There. Is this better?” he asked, pausing beside the window and turning so that he was sideways to it.

Christiana cleared her throat to remove the laughter lodged there and made herself follow him across the room. She then bent and peered at his behind.

“Oh! There it is,” she said, reaching out to brush a finger over the mark. It was a pale red or dark pink-colored splotch on his left butt cheek as Langley had said. “It’s not really a strawberry though, is it? It’s more the shape of a rosebud. Langley said it was—”

“My lady? Your sisters are— Oh, dear Lord.”

Christiana straightened abruptly and turned toward the connecting door that she’d left open and Daniel hadn’t closed. Grace now stood in the entrance, eyes wide as she took in the portrait of the two of them by the window. A moment of silence passed as Christiana tried to think of something to say and then the maid started to withdraw, mumbling an apology that died abruptly as she spotted the body on the bed. Her gaze slid from the body in the bed to the man behind Christiana and back and she breathed, “Oh, dear Lord,” again.

“I can explain everything,” Christiana said at once, and hurried toward the woman. Hearing a resigned sigh and the rustle of clothing behind her, she glanced over her shoulder to see Richard looking exasperated as he pulled up his pants and did them up. She supposed between her discovering the body, her demand to see his bottom and Grace’s discovering the body, the man was having something of a difficult morning. Christiana could sympathize, she’d been having a difficult year and it didn’t look as if things were going to get any easier in the near future.

Chapter Eleven

So,” Grace said the moment Christiana finished her explanations and fell silent. “Your marriage to Dicky-George wasn’t legal, because it was Richard Fairgrave, Earl of Radnor on the marital contract and George was just impersonating Richard when he signed the papers?”

“I think that’s probably true,” Christiana admitted.

“But you’ve now consummated that illegal marriage to Dicky-George with Dicky-Richard . . . Does that make the marriage to Dicky-Richard legal now?

Or . . .” Grace let the words trail off, but then she didn’t have to say it, Christiana knew what she was asking. Was she now legal y married to Richard or was she a fall en woman in a sham of a marriage with a dead man who hadn’t been who he claimed to be?

Really, Christiana thought, she’d believed she had problems when Richard had come walking into the ball and she’d thought Dicky resurrected, but it just kept getting more and more complicated, the problems mounting up one atop the other. Clearing her throat, she said, “I do not think so, though Richard may let it stand. He wishes to see how well we deal together before he decides.”