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the ebony panther clock on the drawing room mantelpiece had just begun chiming eleven as Hawke finally appeared to take his breakfast.
    Granted, he was only slightly more awake than asleep. His eyes were still heavy-lidded and his jaw unshaven, and despite the pleas for ducal propriety from his manservant, Giacomo, his feet were bare and he wore only his silk banyan wrapped loosely over his nakedness. Yawning, he dropped into a leather-covered armchair near the fire and watched Giacomo pour his coffee:very black, very thick, very potent, the way the Turks drank it.
    “Excellent, Giacomo,” he murmured, sipping the coffee. He spoke Italian with Giacomo, with the southern lilt he’d acquired over the years. “You earned your passage for your coffee alone.”
    “You are kindness itself, sir.” Giacomo touched his forehead and bowed so low that his waist-length pigtail with the red ribbon bow flipped forward over his head. Before he’d come into Hawke’s service, he had apprenticed as a barber, and he was terribly vain about his own appearance, a true macaroni. But Hawke considered Giacomo’s endless primping a fair trade for his skill with a razor and his gift for making Hawke eminently presentable in the shortest of time.
    That, and the coffee. He closed his eyes, savoring the heady fragrance. He needed this even more than usual this morning. It wasn’t that he was suffering from the aftereffects of a raucous night. Far from it. He’d spent the last two nights and the day in between making his way through every fashionable resort he could imagine—clubs, dining houses, playhouses, gaming dens, pleasure gardens, even the better class of bagnio and brothel—trying to find his fairy queen again. Surely a beauty who had appeared alone at an opera and at Ranelagh had to have a name, and a reputation to go with it. Yet every time he’d described her, he’d met with only blank faces and shrugs, coupled with the occasional pitying shake of the head. He’d begun to feel like one of Fielding’s Bow Street runners, except that they were successful and he was not. She’d said her affections were taken, and clearly that lucky gentleman, whoever he was, had her securely squirreled away in keeping in a private house.
    He could see her in his thoughts as clearly as if she stood before him still, and the memory of her kiss was just as vivid. She had beguiled him thoroughly, fascinatedhim as if she’d cast a true fairy spell over him, and then vanished completely into the night.
    “The curtains, sir?” Giacomo asked, already poised to pull them open. It was another of the servant’s admirable qualities that he never let the morning light intrude unbidden, and with a sigh Hawke nodded and opened his eyes to the scene from his drawing room window.
    He was still half surprised to see the regimented English garden of his family’s London house instead of the familiar Bay of Naples with Vesuvius wrapped in a haze in the distance. Hawkesworth Chase stood on the grounds of an ancient royal hunting park, one of the many rewards given by the old king to the first Duchess of Hawkesworth for generously sharing her favors. Although the deer, the old lodge, and the chase were long gone and the house had been absorbed by the spread of London in the last hundred or so years, the place still retained its original name. Hawke’s father had made some improvements, but it remained a rambling, old-fashioned mansion of brick and stone, with octagonal towers at each corner and a hawk with spread wings carved over the door.
    But what made Hawke most uncomfortable about the place wasn’t the unstylishness of the façade or the small-paned windows. It was the overwhelming sense that this was still his father’s house, not his. His mother had moved to the dowager’s house soon after his father’s death, and Hawke himself had left for Italy. Almost nothing had changed since he was a boy, with every chair and painting in exactly the spot that his