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business end of my…”
    Sebastian chuckled and wriggled his eyebrows suggestively.
“I just love it when you flirt, Your Grace.”
    “I should burn down the brewery for that comment alone.” He
strode towards the door.
    “Where’re you going?” Marlowe cried, sitting up.
    To bash my head in .
“To bed.”
    “You are such a bloody stuffed shirt, Monty,” Marlowe
replied laconically.
    “I’ve told you, don’t call me that.”
    “Or what? You’ll break my nose again?”
    “Don’t tempt me.”
    “Pleasant dreams,” Sebastian called, long after Montford
slammed the door behind him.
    Their conversations often ended up this way. And he knew
when he came down in the morning, he’d find his sideboard emptied of its stock,
evidence of the fun his friends had had in his absence and at his expense.
    Usually, Montford never begrudged his friends their fun. He
knew for a fact that both of them were perpetually skirting dun territory and
bumbled their way through life dining at their friends’ tables and drinking
their liquor. He didn’t mind it when they took advantage of his largesse, for
they never asked for loans or importuned him in any other way … well, besides
wheedling sandwiches from his cook and drinking his port. But tonight he was
seriously considering taking them by their collars and kicking them to the
curb.
    Which was insane. They were his best friends, after all.
His only friends, now that he thought
about it.
    And this realization made him feel even worse. His only
friends in the world were a pair of leeches who used him for his sandwiches and
sideboard, and who would not even do that should he deprive them of their
goddamned ale.
    His life, he thought bleakly as he trudged up the grand
marble staircase in the cavernous gilded foyer, was as empty as this house.
    Maybe he did need
a holiday.

 
Chapter
Three

 
    IN WHICH
THE DUKE VENTURES FORTH INTO THE WILD
    BESIDES
HIS sundry well-documented compulsive behaviors, Montford’s inner demons
manifested themselves in two distinct aversions: riding in carriages and the
sight of blood. He couldn’t explain these phobias any more than he could
explain why he hated to let different foods touch each other on his dinner
plate. But he had become an expert at disguising his fears, for it would never
do to let people discover that the Duke of Montford tended to vomit in coaches
and faint when he got scratched.
    He avoided extended journeys that would require a carriage
and rode his mount when at all possible. When he was fencing, a sport at which
he excelled, he made sure his foil never came loose, thus avoiding nicking his
opponent. And if he was nicked, which
was not often, and usually only at Sebastian’s expert hand, he never looked
down at the wound. Fortunately, only one of the duels in which he had stood
second for Marlowe had ended in bloodshed, when his friend had taken a ball to
his shoulder. No one noticed his light-headedness, however, in the drama that
had followed.
    Nonetheless, three days after speaking to his friends,
Montford arrived at Rylestone Hall after an excruciatingly long and messy
journey northward. His agitation over the situation had at last overcome his
aversion to travel, and he decided to put up with a miserable few days
traveling rather than let this Honeywell business go unresolved.
    As he couldn’t abide putting up at a vermin-infested
roadside inn, and as he owned no other residences between London and Rylestone,
he had made his driver stop only long enough for him to vomit, for Coombes to
retie his cravat, or for the horses to be changed out. The journey, even at
such a rate, should have only lasted two days, but the second day, one of the
horses went lame, and it had taken the entire afternoon for a replacement to be
located.
    On the third day, by his calculations, which were always
precise, he should have been on the estate by midmorning. But Rylestone proved
as elusive as an oasis in the desert. The Yorkshire dales