Three-quarters of an hour later, Ramsey ushered a satisfied, if very subdued, Mrs. Lawrence and Sir Montague out of the house, leaving the dowager duchess alone with her two grandsons. The duchess arose slowly, her shoulders stiff as she turned to Jordan. "You cannot seriously mean to go through with this!" she announced.

"I intend to do exactly that."

Her face whitened at his words. "Why?" she demanded. "You can't expect me to believe you feel the slightest desire to marry that provincial little mouse."

"I don't."

"Then why in heaven's name are you going to do it?"

"Pity," he said with brutal frankness. "I pity her. And, like it or not, I'm also responsible for what happens to her. It's as simple as that."

"Then pay her off!"

Leaning back in his chair, Jordan wearily closed his eyes and shoved his hands in the pockets of his pants." 'Pay her off,' " he repeated bitterly. "I wish to God I could, but I can't. She saved my life and, in return, I ruined her chances of having any sort of respectable life of her own. You heard what her mother said—her fiancé has already cried off because she's 'ruined.' As soon as she returns to the village, she'll be fair game for every lusting male. She'll have no respectability, no husband, no children. In a year or two, she'll be reduced to selling her favors at the same inn where I took her."

"Nonsense!" the dowager said stoutly. "If you pay her off, she can go somewhere else to live. Somewhere like London where the gossip won't follow her."

"In London, the most she could hope to be is some man's mistress, and that's assuming she could attract some wealthy old fool or foolish young fop to keep her. You saw her—she's hardly the sort of female to incite a man's lust."

"There is no need to be vulgar," the duchess said stiffly.

Jordan opened his eyes, his expression sardonic. "Frankly, I find it rather 'vulgar' to consider rewarding the chit for saving my life by consigning her to a life of glorified prostitution, which is what you're suggesting."

They regarded each other across the room, two fiercely indomitable wills clashing in silence. The duchess finally conceded defeat with an imperceptible inclination of her immaculately coiffed head. "As you wish, Hawthorne," she said, reluctantly yielding to his authority as the head of the family. Then another thought struck her and she sank into her chair, her face turning a grim, deathly white. "For seven hundred years, the bloodlines of this family have been unsullied. We are descendants of kings and emperors. Yet you mean for that utter nobody to produce the next heir." In supreme frustration, her grace turned her ire on her other grandson. "Don't just sit there, Anthony, say something!"

Lord Anthony Townsende leaned back in his chair, his expression wry. "Very well," he said amiably, accepting Jordan's decision with a fatalistic grin, "when am I going to be presented to my future cousin? Or do you intend to leave her in the salon until the wedding?"

The duchess shot him a killing glance, but she said nothing more. She sat quite still, her back ramrod straight, her white head high, but the bitter disappointment of the last hour had added a decade to her face.

Anthony glanced at Jordan and raised his glass in a gesture of a toast. "To your future wedded bliss, Hawk." He grinned.

Jordan shot him an ironic glance, but other than that, his features were perfectly composed. Anthony was not surprised at this lack of visible emotion. Like his grandmother, Jordan nearly always kept his emotions under rigid control, but unlike the duchess, Hawk did it effortlessly—so effortlessly that Tony and many others often wondered if he felt any really deep emotion other than anger.

In this instance, Tony was correct. Jordan was feeling nothing stronger than a certain grim, angry resignation toward his marriage. As he lifted his glass to his lips, Jordan contemplated with bitter amusement this unexpected twist of fate. After years of unrestrained wenching among England's most experienced, most sophisticated—and least virtuous—females, fortune had perversely saddled him for life with a child-bride who was the supreme, eternal ingénue. Every instinct he possessed warned him that Alexandra's lack of sophistication sprang not from mere inexperience, but rather from an ingenuous nobility of spirit and gentleness of heart.

At his hands, she would lose her physical innocence, but he doubted if she would ever lose her wide-eyed naiveté, nor would she acquire the smooth veneer of bored sophistication and droll wit that was as much a requirement for admission into the ton as were the right family connections.

It bothered him slightly that she would never be able to fit into his world, his life. It bothered him—but not much, for in truth he had no intention of spending much time with her in the years to come, nor did he intend to greatly alter his life-style. He would install her at his house in Devon and visit her there, he decided.

With a sigh, he realized that his mistress would have to be informed that she wasn't going to accompany him to Devon next week as planned. Thank God Elise was as sophisticated as she was beautiful and sensual; he would not have to endure a scene from her when he explained about the trip to Devon and his marriage.

"Well, when are we going to be properly presented to her?" Anthony repeated.

Reaching behind him, Jordan tugged on the bell cord. "Ramsey," he said, when the butler materialized in the doorway, "retrieve Miss Lawrence from the yellow salon and bring her here."

"Where are my mother and my Uncle Monty?" Alexandra asked a little frantically as soon as she entered the drawing room.

Jordan arose and came forward. "They have repaired to the local inn where they will remain in happy expectation of our forthcoming nuptials," he replied with unconcealed irony. "You, however, will remain here."

Before Alexandra could finish digesting all that, she was being introduced to the dowager duchess, who inspected her through a lorgnette. Humiliated past all endurance by the duchess' contemptuous appraisal, Alexandra lifted her chin and stared right back at the old woman.

"Do not stare at me in that rude, disrespectful fashion," the duchess snapped when she caught Alexandra's expression.

"Oh, was I being rude, ma'am?" Alexandra inquired with deceptive meekness. "I apologize, then. You see, I know it is rude to stare at someone. However, I am woefully ignorant of the etiquette involved when one is the recipient of the stare."

The duchess' lorgnette slid from her fingers and her eyes narrowed to slits. "How dare you lecture me! You are a nobody, a person without bloodlines or breeding or ancestry."