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Love is miraculous.

If she were a vicar’s wife, she’d have no need of ballrooms, although at the moment she felt brave enough to dance a minuet. In fact, if she married Mr. Marlowe she might never have to enter a ballroom again.

Gladness flooded her body, and she barely stopped herself from gazing at the vicar again, her heart in her eyes.

Perhaps he would never be hers—although some steely part of her was determined he would be hers—but even if not . . .

She could still save him from this dreadful marriage.

He was like her beloved Cleo and Daisy. Like Barty, whom she rescued after he fell from the nest. Mr. Marlowe needed to be saved from the domineering Miss Pettigrew.

She had a mission.

And she was in love.

Chapter Three

The Duke of Wynter’s townhouse

Mayfair

Devin Lucas Augustus Elstan, Duke of Wynter, was not the sort of man who wasted time. Or, rather, as he would have phrased it: not the sort of duke. He had grown up knowing that a duke (or future duke) was as different from the average man as a lion from a tabby cat.

He wasn’t akin to the other lions either. He watched with bemusement as his peers gathered to circle a crowded dance floor, or met at the racetrack for the sole purpose—or so it seemed—of losing money in questionable bets. Being a mathematician, he had walked into a gambling house as a young man, spent precisely one hour there, and walked out considerably richer.

But also bored.

He had been educated in isolation by a series of tutors as befitted the future Duke of Wynter and an only child. Normally, a duke’s son would have met other children at house parties, but due to his father’s reckless propensity for dueling, such invitations had stopped by the time he reached the age of four.

His only acquaintances had been his cousins, especially the two closest to his age, Otis and Hazel. Even so, he saw them rarely, as his father didn’t care to remain in the same house longer than a month or two.

Like Queen Elizabeth in the 1600s, the ducal establishment had moved from estate to estate as the duke’s fancy struck him. While the duchess was alive—she had died when Devin was fourteen—she either engaged in pitched battles with her husband or disappeared for months, choosing to live in more congenial environs.

“The one thing you can say about marriage,” she was fond of saying, “is that not even an idiot is allowed to challenge his wife to a duel.”

Or, Devin might have added, challenge his son.

By the age of ten, Devin had realized that his father’s adherence to that particular tenet of civilization was all that stood between him and a gravestone.

When he inherited the dukedom at age sixteen, it was too late to bother with Eton or Harrow, and he had no time to spare for Oxford. It was too late for friends.

People found him to be cold, arrogant, and uncaring.

He accepted that judgment with disinterest.

To go back to the image of the lions and tabbies, as Devin saw it, strange cats slept by each other in the sun, whereas a lion was only comfortable in the company of his blood relatives.

His pride.

Even the most frustrating ones, which in this case included his cousin Otis.

“Do you really mean to tell me that you’re giving up your living, Otis? St. Wilfrid’s, which I held open for you for the last two years until you finally graduated from Cambridge?”

Otis lounged opposite, looking entirely unrepentant. “It’s easy for you to be so patronizing. As a second son, I’m supposed to find a genteel profession. The law is far too abstruse, and the military dismayingly violent. That left the church. I kept to the scheme as long as I could. My new plan is to move to the continent and woo an heiress.”

“You’ve only been in the vicarage for two weeks. Why are you turning down St. Wilfrid’s?”

“Not just Wilfrid’s,” Otis said. “I’m done with the clerical life, cuz.”