Excerpt

My darling son, my hands are shaking as I pen this letter....

The devil had come to Devonbrooke Hall.

He hadn’t come drawn by four white horses or in a blast of brimstone but in the honey gold hair and angelic countenance of Sterling Harlow, the seventh duke of Devonbrooke. He strode through the marble corridors of the palatial mansion he had called home for the past twenty-one years, two brindle mastiffs padding at his heels with a leonine grace that matched his own.

He stayed the dogs with a negligent flick of one hand, then pushed open the study door and leaned against the frame, wondering just how long his cousin would pretend not to notice that he was there.

Her pen continued to scratch its way across the ledger for several minutes until a particularly violent t-crossing left an ugly splotch of ink on the page. Sighing with defeat, she glared at him over the top of her wire-rimmed spectacles. “I can see that Napoleon failed to teach you any manners at all.”

“On the contrary,” Sterling replied with a lazy smile. “I taught him a thing or two. They’re saying that he abdicated after Waterloo just to get away from me.”

“Now that you’re back in London, I might consider joining him in exile.”

As Sterling crossed the room, his cousin held herself as rigid as a dressmaker’s dummy. Oddly enough, Diana was probably the only woman in London who did not seem out of place behind the leather-and-mahogany-appointed splendor of the desk. As always, she eschewed the pale pastels and virginal whites favored by the current crop of belles for the stately hues of for