This was not how Gareth planned to spend his day—rescuing a damsel in obvious distress. And not just any damsel, but the daughter of his brother's—he winced again—betrothed.

He dashed up the front steps of the townhouse and didn't even bother with the knocker. He threw the door open and bounded into the drawing room, where Miss Benedict thrashed in Kingsley's embrace.

"Unhand her at once!" Gareth roared, hoping that would be sufficient and he wouldn't have to cosh Kingsley over the head with the nearest candlestick. The new earl was known to be a puling scapegrace, and sure enough, he promptly released Miss Benedict. He stared at Gareth with the fearful eyes of a lad who feared a caning from the schoolmaster, or even the prospect of having his allowance cut off.

Gareth might have laughed at that if not for Miss Benedict, who backed into the farthest corner, rubbing her arms as if to scrub off any remnants of Kingsley's unwanted touch.

"Get out," Gareth said to Kingsley.

"You're not the Earl of Tyndall. He's in Brighton. And you're most certainly not the butler or one of Lady Milner's footmen," Kingsley retorted.

"Nor am I the Regent. And I'm not Wellington. Nor am I—"

"I know who you are. You were at my ancestral pile the day my father and brother both died." Along with Lady Ruth Hale, but under the current circumstances, Gareth saw no need to remind this pup of that particular detail. "I was here first."

"That matters not, if she doesn't want your attentions." Gareth glanced over Kingsley's shoulder to Miss Benedict, who shook her head violently as she continued to rub her arms. "And it looks very much to me as if she doesn't."

"Then if you're here to pay your addresses, there's something you should know about Miss Eveline Benedict. She's been to Madame Delphine's. That makes her a soiled dove!"

Gareth might have laughed out loud at that, too, again if not for Miss Benedict, who gasped and crumpled to the floor. Despite their very brief acquaintance, she didn't strike him as the fainting type. The fact that she was, apparently, disappointed him for some reason.

He was about to step toward her when to his relief, she slowly and dazedly rose to her feet.

Kingsley raved on, "You were there, too, that night. 'Twas the same night as Lady Whitbourne's masquerade ball."

Gareth clenched his fists, fighting for control. "So I was. Then I should know as well as anyone else there—certainly better than you, who must have been foxed—that Miss Benedict was never there. Now get out and never importune her again."

"I was not importuning her. I was only trying to persuade her to marry me."

"Despite your outrageous accusations against her? Do you wish to restore her honor, or are you only pitching the gammon to frighten off other, would-be suitors?"

Kingsley only smirked. He staggered to the doorway, giving Gareth a wide berth. "Very well, Miss Benedict. I concede my offer was quite sudden. I will give you time to think about it. Please keep my gift, as a sign of my honorable intentions."

Gareth suppressed a snort as Kingsley saw himself out.

His jaw taut, he turned to a pallid Miss Benedict, who appeared to be staring into space with wide brown eyes, her mouth gaping, and her hands pressed to either side of her head as if to keep her wits in place. She was clearly shocked not only by Lord Kingsley's actions, but his slanderous words about her character and behavior.

"Are you all right, Miss Benedict? Silly question. Clearly you're not." He glanced around for the bell pull. "I shall summon—"

"No. No! Don't!" she rasped. "I'll be fine. At least I hope so. Just give me a few moments." She gulped down huge breaths, visibly quaking from head to toe. Gareth almost expected her teeth to chatter. "I thought I was going to faint—but I've never fainted before. I just—oh, what must you think of me?"

That was an interesting question. "I think you must be very brave to have withstood such an assault on your character. I feel I should apologize for his behavior, but he should have apologized. I should have demanded he apologize. Then again, if he were any sort of gentleman with any modicum of honor, he would have apologized of his own volition. No, if he possessed even a scintilla of honor, he never would have said what he said in the first place." Why was Gareth suddenly babbling like a fool?

She sank into a chair near the fireplace, curling her trembling hands over the intricately carved ends of the chair arms as if to steady herself, and maybe subdue her tremors of shock. She had yet to glance his way, as if she couldn't bear to look at him now—as if she were mortified, or worse, ashamed.

As if she feared Gareth believed Kingsley's accusations.

In which case, she couldn't possibly know about her mother's past as a courtesan, making her all the more innocent. Perhaps Kingsley assumed that because of her mother's scandalous reputation, Miss Benedict was little more than a lightskirt, easy prey for a fortune-hunting cur like him.

"Are you truly all right, Miss Benedict? Are you certain you wouldn't like me to ring for someone?" As it was, Gareth was mystified as to why all the commotion hadn't drawn the attention of anyone else in the house. Had Kingsley found Miss Benedict all alone? If Gareth hadn't followed him here...or glimpsed Miss Benedict in the window, looking for all the world like that damsel in distress trapped in a tower...

"I told you, I'll be fine. Now that the worst is over, I—I wonder why you're still here?"

"I'm not about to leave you when you're so understandably distraught. Even if you say you're fine, and you don't want me to summon anyone."

"That's very kind of you," she murmured, still not looking at him.

"It's only basic human decency. A good thing I happened along when I did."

She kept her head down. "How did you just happen along here at precisely the right moment, my lord? Not that I'm complaining."

Gareth couldn't very well explain to her that he'd been tasked by his superior at the War Office with calling on Kingsley today to question him about a classified document thought to be in his possession, a list of subagents that included not only their code names, but their real names. It was entirely possible Kingsley wasn't even aware of it. But Lady Ruth Hale, who'd been shot and killed by his father at Kingsley's ancestral pile last month, was thought to have been carrying the document in question. A search of her effects had yielded nothing, so she may have passed it on to someone else.

Even though the war with France was over, there remained plenty of wrong hands for that list to fall into. Gareth's superior opined that Lady Ruth may have given it to someone else for safekeeping—possibly Kingsley's late older brother, who'd been one of her lovers. Gareth had only one job—to seek out Kingsley and appeal to his sense of patriotism.

Instead he'd antagonized him and threatened to call him out for forcing his unwanted attentions on Miss Benedict—only to find out in the process that he'd also been at Madame Delphine's that night, an infamous hotbed for traitors and double-agents.

It was another reason he balked at having Lady Milner for a sister-in-law. What if she'd been involved in some of the more havey-cavey activities there?

Yet Gareth had only ever seen her there once—and even then, she'd been masked.

Either way, he couldn't tell her daughter the real reason he'd been trailing Kingsley.

"I found out he was going to propose to you—or at least compromise you into a situation that would've required you to marry him—and I followed him here in hopes of intercepting him because he's nothing but a fortune hunter."

She finally raised her head to regard him with obvious skepticism. "That's why you followed him here?"

He should have known she'd never believe something so absurd.

He also should have realized that she'd interpret his actions as an attempt to claim her hand for himself.

Not after what he'd—here he abruptly cleared his throat—seen of her mother.

Gareth could not possibly spend the rest of his life married to Miss Benedict, attending family weddings, christenings, Yuletides, and God forbid, the occasional funeral—facing a mother-in-law with whom he'd almost—"Yes, that's why I followed him here. You heard what he said—I've been to his ancestral pile. And that's not just a figure of speech, Miss Benedict. That place is nothing but rubble. He's also a gambler. No woman deserves to be married to someone like that."

"What must you think of me now?" She lowered her gaze again, settling it on a very nicely bound book sitting on the piecrust table next to her chair.

Gareth folded his hands behind his back. "What do you mean? What do you fear I must think of you now? Are you worried that because I saw you trapped in his unwanted embrace, that I must think you're some sort of—well, that maybe you encouraged him? That I consider you at fault? The moment I saw you in the window, I knew you were in trouble. Indeed, you looked as if you were hoping to see someone who might come to your rescue. So I did. Why do you look at me as if that's not the case?"

For while he was asking all those questions, she slowly lifted her gaze to him again. Her eyes were no longer saucer-like, but now she had a vertical crease between her dark brows.

"Because that isn't the case. Instead, I thought that you—that is—then you don't believe what he said about me? He said he would tell everyone if I don't marry him."

"Of course I don't believe him, and I doubt anyone else will, either. He's a fool, and he's usually foxed." He quickly decided to steer her away from any discussion of Madame Delphine's place of business. "But since I'm here, I wonder if you've given any thought as to how you might persuade Lady Milner to cry off."

"As far as I'm concerned, she needn't cry off as long as I marry before she does. To that end, over breakfast this morning she gave me a list of prospects. It should still be on the dining room table. Do pardon me while I fetch it." She sprang to her feet and swept past him, leaving a barely discernible cloud of violets in her wake. Gareth breathed deeply to catch it, glad she'd recovered so swiftly from her encounter with Kingsley.

He paced around the drawing room in a small circle, pausing at the piecrust table to pick up the book, a brand new copy of Pride and Prejudice. He turned the pages to the first chapter and after reading the first paragraph, decided it was just as much a truth universally acknowledged that a spinster in possession of a large dowry must be in want of a husband. Ergo, Lord Kingsley's visit. He flipped through the pages to the bookmark, which appeared to be more of a letter. Gareth caught only the first letter of Miss Benedict's first name, which he recalled was not Eveline but Evangeline, or Evie for short, when he heard Miss Benedict's quick, light footsteps approaching, whereupon he snapped the book shut and set it back on the table

She entered with a sheet of vellum, pinching the edge with thumb and forefinger and holding it at arm's length, as if it were a dead rodent she had by the tail. Gareth didn't even bother to take the list as he studied the names.

He did not see his own name anywhere, which he found strangely irritating...and alarming.

It irritated him that none of the men on the list were second sons like himself. Lady Milner meant to get a title for her daughter, even if it wasn't as lofty as the one she sought for herself. He supposed that was only natural, but still—it irritated him.

What alarmed him, however, was the fact that he didn't make the cut, obviously because Lady Milner didn't want her daughter marrying a man that she herself had—

"Do you approve of any of these gentlemen, my lord? I mean, besides Lord Kingsley? Had I a pen handy, I might have already crossed him off the list."

He finally took the list into his hand. He didn't see his cousin Ned, heir to the Marquess of Frampton, listed here, either. The current marquess was, in fact, Gareth's uncle, a widower who'd never remarried after the death of his marchioness, the sister of Gareth's father, in childbed almost thirty years ago.

"My mother gave me that list this morning," said Miss Benedict. "We discussed this name and that name, and would you believe that just as we were discussing Kingsley, the butler announced he was here?"

Gareth returned the list to her with a wry smile. "Do you consider that a sign?"

She crumpled the list and tossed it into the fireplace. "I consider the meeting itself to be a sign that he is definitely not the one for me. Did you see any better prospects on that list? You must be acquainted with some of them."

"I'm acquainted with all of them, and with the exception of Lord Whitbourne, they are all rogues, drunks, gamblers, and fortune hunters," he said flatly. "I can scarcely believe your own mother would wish for you to marry any of them."

"Maybe she thinks I can't do any better. You know, because of her own reputation. She's even admitted that her many marriages have quite possibly ruined my own prospects. That's why she wanted my brother to marry someone like Princess Antonia—in hopes of improving my prospects. Instead he married Princess Antonia's half-sister Tabitha, who isn't a princess at all, but what they—not I, mind you, but they—the same ones, besides me, who disapprove of my mother's many marriages—refer to as a poor relation."

"But if your mother were to marry a duke, would that not also help those same prospects?"

"No, because in a normal world, the duke should marry me instead!" Miss Benedict exclaimed, brown eyes flashing. "And my mother should remain a widow."

Gareth studied her, pondering her words, wondering if she truly wished to marry his brother. "It's almost as if your mother doesn't want you to marry at all."

"That's what I'm beginning to think, if not for this list."

"Evie! What was all that commotion?" came a woman's voice from the front hall.

Speak of the devil, or rather the woman whose veryexistence continued to bedevil Gareth.