Chapter 1
Newland House, Kensington
If the bride was drunk—which she wasn’t—it was on account of celebrating.
In a very little while, Lady Olympia Hightower was going to make all of her family’s dreams come true. And hers, too, most
of them.
She would become the Duchess of Ashmont.
Teetering on the brink of six and twenty, she ought to thank her lucky stars she’d won the heart . . . admiration . . . something . . .
. . . of one of England’s three most notorious libertines, a trio of dukes known as Their Dis-Graces.
She narrowed her eyes at the looking glass.
Behind gold-rimmed spectacles, eyes of a can’t-make-up-their-mind grey-blue-green took a moment to focus on the grandeur that
was her. She. Whatever.
Elaborate side curls of a commonplace brown framed her heart-shaped face. An intricate arrangement of plaits, topped by a
great blossom of pleated lace adorned with orange blossoms, crowned her head. A blond lace veil cascaded over her bare shoulders,
down over the full, lace-covered sleeves and on past her waist.
She looked down at herself.
Four knots marched down to the V of the waistline. Below that swelled full skirts of brocaded silk.
She wondered what Papa might have bought with what he’d paid for this creation. Though nobody had mentioned her the precise
amount, she reckoned it would have purchased Clarence, her youngest brother, a year or more at Eton. A cornetcy for Andrew
wasn’t out of the question. Apart from his heir—Stephen, Lord Ludford—the Earl of Gonerby had five boys to support—a subject
to which he’d given no thought whatsoever. His mind, unlike his daughter’s, was not practical.
Thus her present predicament. Which wasn’t a predicament at all. So everybody said. There was nothing predicamental about
being a duchess.
In any event, practicality had nothing to do with this bridal extravaganza. The money must be thrown away on a single dress
because, according to Aunt Lavinia, it was an investment in the future.
A duchess-to-be couldn’t wear any old thing to her wedding. The bridal ensemble had to be expensive and fashionable, though
not flamboyantly so, because a duchess-to-be ought to look expensively fashionable, though not flamboyantly so.
After the wedding was another matter entirely. A duchess could pour the entire contents of her jewel boxes over herself and never be overdressed.
With a few adjustments, a different arrangement on her head, and more diamonds or pearls or both, Olympia would wear the dress
to the next Drawing Room, when her mother or perhaps Aunt Lavinia, the Marchioness of Newland, would present the new Duchess
of Ashmont to the Queen.
That wasn’t all that would happen after the wedding.
The bride picked up the cup of brandy-laced tea Lady Newland had brought to steady prenuptial nerves. The cup was empty.
“Do not even think of bolting,” her aunt had said when she delivered the doctored tea.
Certainly not. Far too late for that, even if Olympia had been the sort of girl who backed down or ran away from anything,
let alone the chance of a lifetime. She had six brothers. Being the second eldest child counted for nothing with boys. It
was dominate or be dominated.
Some said she was rather too dominating, for a girl. But that wouldn’t matter when she became a duchess.
She bent and retrieved from under the dressing table the flask of brandy she’d stolen from Stephen. She unstopped it, brought
it to her mouth, and tipped in what she gauged as a thimbleful. She stopped it again, set it on the dressing table, and told
herself she would be good.
Even if one could afford to have second thoughts, which she couldn’t, it was far too late to have them.
Humiliate the bridegroom, who’d done nothing—to Olympia, in any event—to deserve it? Disgrace her family? Face utter ruin?
On account of what? The sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, which surely was nothing more than bridal nerves.
Only a lunatic would run away from becoming the bride of one of the handsomest, richest, most powerful men, she told herself.
That was to say, Ashmont could be powerful, if he’d bother, but he . . .
She lost her train of thought because somebody tapped at the door.
“Please,” she said. “I’m praying.”
She’d insisted on time alone. She needed to collect herself and prepare for this immense change in her life, she’d told her
mother and aunt. They’d looked at each other, then left. Soon thereafter, Aunt Lavinia had returned with the doctored tea.
“Ten minutes, dear,” came her mother’s voice from the corridor.
Ten minutes already?
Olympia unstopped the flask again and took another sip.
Nearly six and twenty, she reminded herself. She’d never get an offer like this one, ever again. It was a miracle she’d got
this one. And she’d known what she was doing when she said yes.
True, Lucius Wilmot Beckingham, the sixth Duke of Ashmont, was a bit of an ass, and so immature he made nine-year-old Clarence
look like King Solomon. And yes, it went without saying that His Grace would be unfaithful.
But he was handsome and could be charming when he chose and he liked her and she’d known him for years. She doubted any great
shocks were in store for her.
Most important, he’d asked.
It was the last thing she or anybody else could have expected.
Of all the girls he could have chosen, why the Most Boring Girl of the Season—the title she’d won seven years in a row?
Why look a gift horse in the mouth?
“A duchess,” she told the looking glass. “You can practically change the world, or at least part of it. It’s as close as a
woman can come to being a man, unless she becomes the Queen—and no mere consort either, but Queen in her own right. Even then . . .
oh, never mind. It’s not going to happen to you, my girl.”
Somewhere in Olympia’s head or maybe her heart or her stomach, a snide little voice, exactly like her Cousin Edwina’s, said,
“The Love of a Lifetime is never going to happen to you, either. No Prince Charming on his white charger will come for you.
Not even a passionate lord. Or a shop clerk, for that matter.”
She suffocated the voice, as she had wished, many times, to suffocate Cousin Edwina.
The Olympia who’d entertained fantasies of princes and passionate gentlemen had been a na?ve creature, head teeming with novel-fed
romantic fantasies as she embarked on her first London Season.
Seven years later, she’d received not a single offer. That was to say, she’d received no offer any young lady in her right
mind, no matter how desperate, would accept or, as had happened in one case, would be allowed to accept.
And so, when Ashmont asked, what could she say?
You could have asked him why. Why me? you could have said.
As though the why mattered. Her choice was Ashmont or a future as an elderly spinster dependent not merely on brothers who couldn’t afford
to keep her, but on the goodwill of their wives as well.
She took another sip of brandy. And another.
There came louder and more impatient tapping at the door.
“I’m going to be good,” she whispered. “I’m going to do the right thing because somebody has to.”
She took another swig.
* * *
“What the devil’s keeping her?” Ashmont said.
The guests whispered busily. At every sound from outside the drawing room, heads had turned to the door through which the
bride was to come.
No bride had made her entrance. It must be half an hour past the appointed time.
Ripley had gone out to enquire of the bride’s mother whether Lady Olympia was ill. Lady Gonerby had looked bewildered and
only shook her head. Her sister Lady Wayland had explained.
“Something to do with the dress,” Ripley said. “The aunt’s gone up with a maid and a sewing case.”
“A sewing case!”
“Something’s come undone, I take it.”
“What the devil do I care?” said Ashmont. “I’m going to undo it later, in any event.”
“You know how women are,” Ripley said.
“It isn’t like Olympia to fuss over trifles.”
“A wedding dress is not a trifle,” Ripley said. “I ought to know. M’sister’s cost more than that filly I had of Pershore.”
Alice had married the Duke of Blackwood, the other of his two closest friends, shortly before Ripley left England.
Alice wasn’t here. According to Blackwood, she’d gone to Camberley Place, one of Ripley’s properties, to look after their
favorite aunt.
“This is boring,” Ashmont said. “I hate these bloody rituals.”
Lord Gonerby left the drawing room. He returned a moment later and said, jovially, “Apologies for the delay. Something to
do with a hem or some such. I’ve sent for champagne. No sense getting thirsty while the sewing needles are at work.”
A moment later the butler entered with a brace of footmen, all bearing trays of glasses.
Ashmont drank one, then another and another, in rapid succession.
Ripley drank, too, but not much. This was partly because he hadn’t yet recovered from last night’s activities. He must be
getting old, because he could have used another hour or more of sleep, after the extended bout of gambling and drinking followed
by a street brawl followed by the too-familiar labor of getting Ashmont out of a melee and home and to bed.
The other reason he abstained was the job he’d undertaken.
Last night, at Crockford’s Ashmont had asked—or insisted, rather—that one of his two friends supervise today’s proceedings.
“One of you has to make sure I get there on time, with the ring,” he’d said. “And the license and such.”
Blackwood had suggested Ashmont toss a coin to decide which of the two friends of his bosom got the job.
When Ripley won the honors, Blackwood had smiled and waved them on their way, suggesting they both go home and get some sleep.
He hadn’t seemed to have any clearer idea of this particular marriage business than Ripley had.
Like everybody else, he’d been knocked on his beam ends when he learned that Ashmont had acquired his betrothed fair and square,
in the usual manner of wooing and asking. In other words, the bride wasn’t pregnant.