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looked it over, silently mouthing the words. “Cap’n
Am
-Erst, eh?”
    “Yes, and I believe I am expected,” said Cole, striving to keep a straight face. “You might just drop that card onto a little tray, take it up to her ladyship, and put an end to your troubles.”
    “Oh, our
troubles
, is it?” The footman with the card flicked a rather suspicious look up at Cole. “An’ just wot would yer be knowin’ about ’em, sir?”
    Cole glanced back and forth between them, more than a little confused. The second pugilist seized upon his hesitation. “No soldiers s’pected,” he announced, moving as if to shut the door in Cole’s face. “An’ the ’ouse is still in mourning.”
    Cole should have been relieved by their refusal to admit him. In fact, at that very moment, had he possessed one grain of sense, he would have accounted himself the most fortunate of men, turned on his heel, walked right back down to Pall Mall, and gotten himself cheerfully drunk. Unfortunately, there was just enough muscular Christianity left in him to resent the affront to his dignity.
    “I am expected,” he insisted, in the tone of a man who was accustomed to seeing soldiers snap to his command. “I come at the behest of Lord James Rowland to wait upon Lady Mercer. Now if you would be so good as to take my card and go up those stairs with it, I am sure all will be revealed to you!”
    Invoking James’s name was a dreadful error. Eyes bulging, both men shifted their weight forward onto the balls of their feet, but Cole was saved from an almost certain death—or at least severe dental damage—by the sudden appearance of a tall young man in butler’s garb.
    “Why, here now!” he said in a light brogue. “What’s all this trooble?”
    “Gent ’ere says he’s to see ’er lay’ship, Donaldson,” answered the first footman a bit defensively. “I tole him she weren’t receivin’ but I reckon ’e finks ’e can stroll on in.”
    “Right,” the second footman chimed in. “Claims ter be another o’ that Lord James’s chaps wot keeps coming ’round ter bother ’er la’yship.”
    Donaldson’s eyes skimmed down Cole’s length, mild surprise lighting his expressive blue eyes. “Gads!” he said softly. “Are
you
Amherst?”
     
    Despite the fact that for the first eighteen years of her life Lady Mercer had been an innocent, provincial miss, she realized that she had become—out of necessity—a woman who was rather indurate and cold. At times, her very heart felt like a chunk of winter’s ice that had been hacked from a frozen pond, packed in sawdust, then dropped into a deep, dark pit for storage. After a decade of such an existence, she was now rarely caught unprepared by anyone or anything, and certainly not by the vagaries of fate.
    Nothing, however, could have prepared Jonet for the man who came striding down the hall toward her drawing room at five minutes past three on that fateful afternoon. She had expected a man to arrive, certainly. Someone who would look at least marginally like a tutor of young men, she had assumed. But from the very first, she had doubted that Lord James’s lackey would be the usual impoverished Milquetoast of a fellow in a rumpled frock coat and a scraggly haircut.
    Well—at least she had gotten that much right, Jonet weakly decided, watching her caller walk inexorably nearer. With a gait that was long and lean-hipped, Cole Amherst moved with his shoulders set rigidly back, his heavy boots echoing through the corridor. He wore the fine red coat of a Dragoon’s officer, turned back into facings of midnight blue, and covered in a shade of gold which perfectly matched his hair.
    As he paused formally at attention in the frame of her doorway, the army captain looked more like a work of portraiture than a man of flesh and blood. As if the painter, in the way of some so-called artists, had looked at a normal man, then imbued him with all the artistic license reality might allow.