No Man's Mistress by Mary Balogh

should go to bed before she returned from her dinner party, Ferdinand thought. He had no particular wish to encounter her again tonight—or ever again, if it came to that. But dash it all, it was not even midnight. He looked about him at the tastefully furnished library, with its cozy sitting area about the fireplace, its elegant desk, and its small but superior collection of books, which he had noticed were not even dusty. Did that mean she was a reader? He did not want to know. But he liked the library. He could feel right at home here.
    Once she was gone.
    He had not wanted to play for the wretched property in the first place, Ferdinand recalled, replacing the book on the shelf when it became obvious that his mind was too distracted to allow him to read tonight. He had never been much interested in card playing. He preferred physical sport. He liked the sort of extravagant dares with which the betting books at the various gentlemen's clubsalways abounded—particularly the ones that involved him in the performance of some dangerous or daring physical feat.
    He had played that night at Brookes's up to the limit he always privately allowed himself, and then he had risen to leave. There was a party he had half promised to look in on. But Leavering, who had accompanied him to the club, was just then being called away by the news that his wife was in childbed and likely to deliver at any moment, and Bamber, loud and obnoxious in his cups—as he invariably was, damn him—was accusing the prospective papa of making a lame excuse to leave with his winnings before he, the drunken earl, had had a chance to win them back. His luck was changing, he had declared. He could feel it in his bones.
    Ferdinand had caught his friend by the arm just when the scene was threatening to turn ugly and was beginning to attract attention. He had offered to take Leavering's place and had tossed five hundred pounds onto the table.
    A few minutes later he had been exclaiming in protest over the signed voucher Bamber had cast onto the table in place of money. It had represented the promise of property that no one in the card room had ever heard of—it was certainly not Bamber's principal seat or any of his better known secondary properties. Somewhere called Pinewood Manor in Somersetshire. Somewhere probably nowhere near as valuable as the five hundred pounds Ferdinand had thrown in, one of the players had warned.
    Ferdinand would not have played any man for his home—no true gentleman would. But Pinewood was apparently some subsidiary, inferior property. And so he had played—and won. And discovered the next day fromboth Bamber's solicitor and Tresham's that Pinewood really did exist and really was his. When in a pang of conscience, despite everything, he had called on Bamber the day after that to offer the return of the property in exchange for some monetary settlement of the gaming debt, the earl, nursing a colossal hangover from some orgy the previous night, had announced that talking made his head feel as if it were about to explode. Dudley would doubtless humor him by going away. And he was certainly welcome to Pinewood, which Bamber was unlikely to miss, having never set eyes on the place or seen a penny in rents to his knowledge.
    And so Ferdinand had set out with a clear conscience to discover and inspect his new property. He had never owned, or expected to own, any land. He was the son of a duke, it was true, and enormously wealthy, to boot—his father had left him a generous portion, and both his mother and her sister had left him their not-insignificant fortunes on their deaths. But he was a younger son. Tresham had inherited Acton Park and all the other estates with the ducal titles.
    Drat!
Ferdinand thought suddenly, lifting his head and listening. The knocker had rattled against the front door and it was being opened. There was the sound of voices in the hall. More than one. More than two. Either all the servants had come upstairs to