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conscience readily supplied. He ignored it, his lips twisting in broody self-annoyance while Ben counted out the messenger’s charge.
    Dev opened the neatly folded letter and read. As his gaze skimmed the page, the blood promptly drained from his face:

    Express
9 February 1817

Bath

    Dear Lord Strathmore,
    Though we have never met, I trust you will forgive my presumption in writing to you on a matter of greatest urgency. Necessity compels me to set propriety aside to convey to you a most alarming intelligence.
    My name is Miss Elizabeth Carlisle, and since August, I have been serving in the capacity of lady’s companion to your esteemed Aunt. It is my sorrowful duty to advise you of a change in the excellent health Her Ladyship has always heretofore enjoyed, and to implore you, if you love her, to come with all due haste…before it is too late.
    Godspeed,
E. Carlisle

    For a moment, Dev could only stand there, his face draining of color.
    No.
Not yet.
She’s all I have left.
    â€œMy lord?” Charles ventured in a worried tone. “Is aught amiss?”
    Without a word, Dev strode over, reached up, pulled the messenger down bodily from his horse, and swung up into the still-warm saddle.
    â€œWhat the devil—!”
    â€œPay him, Charles. I’ll leave this brute in the stable at home. I must to Bath.” His voice sounded odd and tight in his ears. “I’ll take the curricle—it’s fastest.” He gathered the reins and wheeled the roan around, glancing over his shoulder. “Ben, follow with my things.”
    â€œBut, Devlin!” the blonde protested, poking her head out the carriage window in that ridiculous feathered hat.
    He rolled his eyes, losing patience. “Would someone
please
take that woman home or wherever it is that she goes?”
    She let out an angry gasp, but he was already gone, galloping off, hell-for-leather, down the drive, his stomach knotted with panicked dread and guilt for neglecting his only living kin. The despairing knowledge spiraled through his mind that when Aunt Augusta finally left him—never mind his vast inheritance—he would be left completely and unutterably alone.

C HAPTER
T WO
Bath, the next day
    Translucent in the light, the delicate porcelain shard was as thin and fragile as a bit of some exotic eggshell as she held it up between her fingers, studying its shape. She tested it here and there on the half-mended vase until she found the spot where the little piece fit; dabbing the jagged edges with a few droplets from her tiny glue brush, she gently pressed the broken fragment back into place. Lizzie Carlisle sat very still, careful not to let her hand waver lest the piece set crookedly.
    White winter sunshine streamed through the lace curtains, but the parlor smelled of springtime, of beeswax and lemons, with a graceful hint of lavender from the dried bouquet on the round worktable where she sat. The restful silence of her employer’s elegant country villa was broken only by the muffled voices from the next room, where Dr. Bell was quizzing the dowager on her latest symptoms.
    Cautiously releasing her hold on the shattered vase, Lizzie glued another piece back into place and cast a skeptical glance upward at the culprit. Pasha, Lady Strathmore’s haughty Persian cat, lay luxuriously sprawled atop the Chippendale highboy, his fluffy tail swinging idly over the edge, his gold eyes gleaming with a distinct look of feline amusement at the hapless human whose job it was to smooth out all of life’s little disasters. If one of the maids had broken the small, elegant Wedgwood vase—a gift from Her Ladyship’s rakehell nephew—the servant would have been summarily sacked, but the dowager’s spoiled darling appeared not a whit repentant.
    â€œYou, sir, are a menace to society,” she told the cat with a pointed glance.
    Pasha’s sable-tipped ears merely twitched with a knowing air.
    Just