Free Never Lie to a Lady by Liz Carlyle Page A

Working London had long since gone home to dinner, and traffic up and down the hill had waned to little more than the occasional brisk rattle of a fine carriage passing by. Agnes, the first-floor parlor maid, was working her way through the house, methodically sweeping the hearths and drawing the draperies as she went.
    In Lord Nash’s vast library, she hesitated. Coals yet glowed in the grate, casting an eerie red light along the mantelpiece. She began instead with the floor-to-ceiling curtains, drawing snug the weighty velvet panels using a long brass rod. When the last was drawn against the evening’s chill, she put down the rod and turned to the hearth.
    “Thank you, Agnes,” said a deep voice in the shadows.
    Agnes shrieked, nearly leaping from her skin.
    “Thank you, Agnes,” Lord Nash repeated. “You may go now.”
    Agnes bobbed unsteadily. “Beg pardon, m’lord,” she squeaked. “I d-did not see you. D-Do you not wish a lamp lit?”
    “Thank you, no.” There was the sharp chink of a vodka decanter as he refilled his glass. “The dark can cover a multitude of sins, can it not?”
    Agnes bobbed again, as if for good measure. “I—I daresay, sir,” she whispered. “Am I to do the hearth now?”
    “See to it tomorrow.” The marquess’s voice rumbled in the gloom. “You are excused. No—wait.”
    “Yes, m’lord?”
    “Is Mr. Swann still in, by chance?”
    “I—I don’t know, sir,” admitted the parlor maid. “Shall I send a footman to fetch him, sir?”
    “Please do.”
    The girl darted out, leaving Nash alone again with his thoughts. He slid deeper into his armchair, cradling his snifter of okhotnichya against his shirtfront. He had been sitting thus more or less since his return from Rothewell’s mansion in Berkeley Square, his solitude broken only by dinner. Perhaps he would not have thought to eat at all, but Tony had come to dine, blowing in and out like an August thunderstorm.
    Nash wished he had not invited him. Not tonight.
    Though they had always been close, they were like chalk and cheese, he and his stepbrother. Tony lived in the present, Nash in the past—or somewhere in between. They shared little by way of personality, and nothing at all in appearance. Tony was fair and handsome to Nash’s dark glower. Tony was slender, elegant, blue-eyed, and Oxford-educated. Yes, Tony was the one thing Savile Row’s finest tailoring would never make Nash—the perfect English gentleman. But like most of them, Tony held a provincial view of the world, and England’s place within it. To him, there was nothing which mattered beyond Albion’s white shores.
    So whilst Tony was left to fight and finesse and scrap his way up the government ladder, here was Nash, being…well, Nash —a title almost as old and as grand as fair Albion herself. It seemed contrary to the laws of nature. It seemed…a little unjust, really. Tony was the grandson of a duke—which in England counted for quite a lot, even if two dozen cousins would have to perish to put him within sniffing distance of the title.
    It was a pity, Nash often thought, that Tony could not simply have had the marquessate—and he could not escape the feeling that Nash’s late father had probably thought so, too. The perfect English gentleman for the perfect English title. And by now, left to his own devices, Nash might have been a major in the czar’s Imperial Guard. Or left in peace to stroll the hills of home with his favorite wolfhound.
    Ah, but his life was in England now. Nash had been fourteen when his father had married Edwina, his very distant, very English cousin in a match arranged within the family. It was a far cry from his first marriage, for Edwina was a pale, pretty girl, newly widowed by a blue-blooded, black sheep of a husband. She had a small child in tow and scarcely two shillings to rub together.
    Nash’s mother had descended from the noble houses of Russia and Eastern Europe. The blood of czars, vladikas , and the