The Charmer by Madeline Hunter

me.”
    “Liar. It is all yours, despite your willfulness and disobedience. It sickened him to know that it would all go to you, after everything you had done.”
    “I do not know why you speak as though I am to blame. You were the one who was supposed to guarantee that this day never came to pass.”
    Celine flushed. “The least you can do is finally respect his wishes.”
    “I was counting on your solving the problem for us all by providing him with another son to replace my brother Brandon. Now the only wishes that I intend to respect are my own.”
    The footman had reached their level. Sophia listened to the formal request for her presence by King William. She stared Celine down until the dowager duchess retreated. Then she stepped closer to the footman and gave him new instructions.
             
    Adrian strolled through the copse of trees bordering the water garden, wondering how the duchess was managing. Their delayed arrival meant she had not had much time to rest before this ordeal. The ride from Portsmouth had been slow and tiring, with him sitting with pistols at the ready atop the carriage. The extreme tension in England rarely exploded into deadly violence, but it only took one radical or one displaced farmer to hurt a woman.
    She had grown quiet upon their landing. Her withdrawal had troubled him. She did not castigate or accuse, she barely seemed to notice him at all, but by the time he had deposited her here at Marleigh last night, he had begun to feel guilty for crimes unnamed.
    A crunch on the path behind him broke through his thoughts. A delicate cough demanded his attention. He pretended he had not heard either announcement. The Dowager Duchess of Everdon had been stalking him all day. In a manner of speaking, she had been stalking him for years.
    As an unmarried ingenue named Miss Celine Lacey, the duchess had not given serious consideration to the Earl of Dincaster's third son. The vain mind inside her pretty head did not seem to grasp that she had insulted him later by offering her favors in adultery. Nor had it ever concerned her that he was beholden to her husband in ways that would make an affair especially dishonorable.
    Still, some men might have ruthlessly accepted the opportunity. He had strongly suspected, however, that no matter what his motivations in bedding the willing Celine, he would have ended up feeling like an exotic animal permitted into the lady's boudoir, to be petted and admired as a trophy.
    A bit like the animals in Sophia Raughley's menagerie, come to think of it.
    Speaking of Sophia Raughley . . . He glanced through the trees to the terraces rising up against the beautiful classical palace. Things must be underway now.
    The crunches sounded closer and faster. Adrian quickened his pace and cut toward the garden. His brother Colin and his Aunt Dorothy rounded the pond and hailed him just as he exited the copse.
    “There you are. Everyone is singing your praises in getting the duchess back so quickly,” Colin said.
    Adrian greeted his brother and kissed Dorothy Burchard, the earl's maiden sister. With his mother dead, she and Colin were the only two people whom he really considered family. “Good to see you, Dot. It has been some weeks.”
    Colin glanced slyly to his left, where Celine had retreated to study some new buds on a bush. “Thought you looked on the run and could use a rescue, although why you would ignore her I'll never know. The duke won't mind now.”
    Dorothy swatted Colin with her fan. “Disgraceful, that's what it is. The man is barely cold and she is casting enough lines to empty the Thames of fish.”
    “Dowager duchesses are not for me, Colin, any more than the Celine Laceys were,” Adrian said.
    “This dowager does not want to marry you, Adrian,” Colin said, only to get swatted by Dorothy's fan again.
    Precisely.
    Colin kicked up gravel with his casual gait. “Is Gavin in with Father?”
    “Yes, Gavin is with the earl and the King. So is