The Bolingbroke Chit: A Regency Romance by Lynn Messina

glowing with excitement as he focused his magnifying glass on a spindly brown root. He was an unusually tall gentleman with a graying beard, and after fifty-two years of looking down on his fellow enthusiasts, he had started to consider them beneath his notice. This predilection explained why he failed to see the glassy-eyed boredom in his lone audience member’s gaze. “You see, it’s exactly as I said,” he observed eagerly.
    Like any titled gentleman of impeccable breeding, the viscount did not mind being bored to flinders. Indeed, he considered it one of his chief obligations as a member of the peerage. Dinner hostesses, business associates, simpering misses, ignorant cawkers, swells of the first stare—they all conspired to keep him in a semipermanent state of ennui. Addleson wasn’t an impatient man, merely a quick-thinking one, and few people or things presented sufficient stimulation to maintain his interest. To his late father’s irritation, he had the deplorable ability to immediately identify a problem and present a solution, a skill that assured his estates ran with unprecedented efficiency but left him with few challenges. Vingt-un had been a consuming occupation for a while—before he realized he could keep track of all the cards in play and was no longer surprised by the revelation of a hand.
    As tolerant as he was of boredom, however, Addleson was willing to shoulder only his fair share of it, and the fact that he was Mr. Petrie’s sole victim bothered him hugely. If the lecture had been addressed to the entire room, which was, to be sure, stocked to the ceiling with plant devotees, he would not cavil. But it was directed exclusively at him and there was no good reason why he alone should be singled out for the honor. His interest in flowers extended only to the presenting of them to Incognitas and courtesans and even then he performed such courtesies infrequently. A man of his ilk—cultured and tailored to within an inch of his life—had no business knowing the word cultivar, let alone how to use it correctly in a sentence.
    Indifferent to the viscount’s shame or, perhaps, even oblivious to it, the thoughtless Mr. Petrie had foisted that knowledge on him as he had other information, a development Addleson deeply resented. There were few experiences more unpleasant to an Englishman than to be educated against his will.
    Of course, attending the soiree had been a mistake. A gathering to welcome an unknown naturalist from the wilds of North America was hardly Viscount Addleson’s natural milieu. A gathering to welcome a well-known one was no more his scene, but that at least carried the cachet of meeting a celebrated figure. In this case, however, he had been unable to resist the enthusiasms of his cousin, who had sworn up and down that the evening would be the most thrilling affair of the season. The viscount, being almost thirty years of age and suspicious of all superlatives, doubted very much that the event would rise to the level of entertainment vehemently professed, but his sense of humor was such that it compelled him to witness firsthand exactly how un thrilling it was. For his perversity, he’d earned a private audience with the evening’s guest of honor, whose success among other unknown naturalists from the wilds of North America was mentioned several times by the visitor himself.
    The viscount found it difficult to believe there were any other American naturalists, let alone additional unknown ones, but he held his tongue and waited out his punishment. He knew it was pointless to try to interrupt a man who traveled with his own magnifying glass. Had Petrie produced a monocle or even a loupe like a jeweler, Addleson would not have hesitated to change the subject, for the reticent nature of those devices implied an openness to new ideas. But Petrie’s magnifying glass, with its mother-of-pearl handle that freed its user from all physical constraints, indicated a dominant mind unwilling