To Pleasure a Lady

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I vow the new earl will drive me to distraction, thinking to marry us off like so much breeding stock.

– Letter from Miss Arabella Loring to Fanny Irwin

London, May 1817

Matrimony. The very word was menacing. Yet the new Earl of Danvers could ignore the topic no longer, much to his regret.

“A pity the late earl already met his end,” Lord Danvers professed, punctuating his declaration with the slash of a steel rapier. “Otherwise I would have his heart on a spit for the trick he served me, leaving me to play procurer for three wards I never wanted.”

His complaint, voiced amid the sounds of swordplay, was met with both sympathetic laughter and skepticism from his friends.

“Procurer, Marcus? Isn’t that something of an exaggeration?”

“It perfectly describes my responsibility.”

“Matchmaker is a more tasteful characterization.”

Matchmaker. What a lowering thought.

Marcus Pierce, formerly addressed as Baron Pierce and now the eighth Lord Danvers, winced with reluctant humor. Although he normally relished a challenge, he would gladly have forgone being saddled with three penniless beauties-and worse, the burden of finding them respectable husbands.

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