A Secret Love by Stephanie Laurens Page A

Alathea smiled at Mary and Alice. “Come, girls. Let’s stroll about the Inn.”
    Evening came, and with it a strange restlessness.
    Gabriel prowled the parlor of his house in Brook Street. He’d dined and was dressed to go out, to grace the ballroom of whichever tonnish hostess he chose to favor with his presence. There were four invitations from which to choose; none, however, enticed.
    He wondered where the countess would spend her evening. He wondered where Alathea would spend hers.
    The door opened; he paused in his pacing. His gentleman’s gentleman, Chance, pale hair gleaming, immaculately turned out in regulation black, entered with the replenished brandy decanter and fresh glasses on a tray.
    â€œPour me one, will you?” Gabriel swung away as Chance, short and slight, headed for the sideboard. He felt peculiarly distracted; he hoped a stiff brandy would clear his mind.
    He’d left Lincoln’s Inn buoyed by his small success, focused on the countess and the sensual game unfolding between them. Then he’d met Alathea. Ten minutes in her company had left him feeling like the earth had shifted beneath his feet.
    She’d been part of his life for as long as he could remember; never before had she shut him out of her thoughts. Never before had she been anything but utterly free with her opinions, even when he’d wished otherwise. When they’d met in January, she’d been her usual open, sharp-tongued self. This afternoon, she’d shut him out, kept him at a distance.
    Something had changed. He couldn’t believe his comments had made her defensive; it had to be something else. Had something happened to her that he hadn’t heard about?
    The prospect unsettled him. He wanted to focus on the countess, but his thoughts kept drifting to Alathea.
    Reaching the room’s end, he swung around—and nearly mowed Chance down.
    Chance staggered back—Gabriel caught his arm, simultaneously rescuing the brimming tumbler from the wildly tipping salver.
    â€œHoo!” Chance waved the salver before his unprepossessing visage. “That was a close one.”
    Gabriel caught his eye, paused, then said, “That will be all.”
    â€œAye, aye, sir!” With cheery insouciance, Chance headed for the door.
    Gabriel sighed. “Not ‘Aye, aye’—a simple ‘Yes, sir’ will do.”
    â€œOh.” Chance paused at the door. “Right-oh, then. ‘Yes-sir,’ it is!”
    He opened the door, and saw Lucifer about to enter—Chance stepped back, bowing and waving. “Come you right in, sir. I was just a-leaving.”
    â€œThank you, Chance.” Grinning, Lucifer strolled in. With unimpaired serenity, Chance bounced out—then remembered and returned to shut the door.
    Closing his eyes, Gabriel took a large swallow of brandy.
    Lucifer chuckled. “I told you it wouldn’t simply be a matter of a suit of clothes.”
    â€œI don’t care.” Opening his eyes, Gabriel regarded the exceedingly large quantity of brandy in the tumbler, then sighed, turned, and sank into a well-stuffed armchair to one side of the hearth. “He’ll become something employable if it kills him.”
    â€œJudging by his progress to date, it might kill you first.”
    â€œQuite possibly.” Gabriel took another fortifying swallow. “I’ll risk it.”
    Standing before the mantelpiece checking his own stack of invitations, Lucifer shot him a look. “I thought you were going to say you’d ‘chance’ it.”
    â€œThat would be redundant—I am ‘chancing’ it. Precisely why I named him that.”
    Chance was not Chance’s real name—no one, including Chance, knew what that was. As for his age, they’d settled on twenty-five. Chance was a product of the London slums; his elevation to the house in Brook Street had come about through his own merit. Caught up in the stews