Lillian was tempted to sample the intriguing beverage, but ladies never drank strong spirits. Especially not alone in the library. If she were caught, it would look very bad indeed. On the other hand…all the gentlemen were at the race meeting, the ladies had gone to the village, and most of the servants had been given the day off.

She glanced at the empty doorway, and then at the tantalizing bottle. A mantel clock ticked urgently in the silence. Suddenly she heard Lord St. Vincent’s voice in her mind…I’m going to ask your father for permission to court you.

“Oh, hell,” she muttered, and bent to rummage through the lower cabinet of the sideboard for a glass.

CHAPTER 17

“My lord.” At the sound of his butler’s voice, Marcus looked up from his desk with a slight frown. He had been working for the past two hours on the amendments to a list of recommendations that would be presented to Parliament later in the year by a committee that he had agreed to serve on. If the recommendations were accepted, it would result in a substantial improvement to the house, street, and land drainage in London and its surrounding districts.

“Yes, Salter,” he said brusquely, resenting the interruption. However, the old family butler knew better than to disturb him at his work unless something was significant enough to warrant it.

“There is a…a situation, my lord, that I felt certain you would wish to be informed of.”

“What kind of situation?”

“It involves one of the guests, my lord.”

“Well?” Marcus demanded, annoyed by the butler’s diffidence. “Who is it? And what is he doing?”

“I am afraid the person is a ‘she,’ my lord. One of the footmen has just informed me that he saw Miss Bowman in the library, and she is…not well.”

Marcus stood so suddenly that his chair nearly toppled over. “Which Miss Bowman?”

“I do not know, my lord.”

“What do you mean, ‘not well’? Is anyone with her?”

“I do not believe so, my lord.”

“Is she hurt? Is she ill?”

Salter gave him a mildly harried stare. “Neither, my lord. Merely …not well.”

Declining to waste time with further questions, Marcus left the room with a low curse, heading to the library with long strides that stopped just short of an outright run. What in God’s name could have happened to Lillian or her sister? He was instantly consumed with worry.

As he hurried through the hallways, a host of irrelevant thoughts flashed through his mind. How cavernous the house seemed when it was devoid of guests, with its miles of flooring and infinite clusters of rooms. A grand, ancient house with the impersonal ambiance of a hotel. A house like this needed the happy shouts of children echoing through the halls, and toys littering the parlor floor, and the squeaky sounds of violin lessons coming from the music room. Marks on the walls, and teatime with sticky jam tarts, and toy hoops being rolled across the back terrace.

Until now Marcus had never considered the idea of marriage as anything other than a necessary duty to continue the Marsden line. But it had occurred to him lately that his future could be very different from his past. It could be a new beginning—a chance to create the kind of family he had never dared to dream of before. It startled him to realize how much he wanted that—and not with just any woman. Not with any woman he had ever met or seen or heard of…except for the one who was the complete opposite of what he should want. He was beginning not to care about that.

His hands gripped into white-knuckled balls, and his pace quickened. It seemed to take forever to reach the library. By the time he crossed the threshold, his heart was driving in sharp blows inside his chest …a rhythm that owed nothing to exertion and everything to panic. What he saw caused him to stop short in the center of the large room.

Lillian stood before a row of books, with a pile of them surrounding her on the floor. She was pulling rare volumes from the shelves one by one, examining each with a puzzled frown and then tossing it heedlessly behind her. She seemed oddly languid, as if she were moving under water. And her hair was slipping from its pins. She didn’t look ill, precisely. In fact, she looked…

Becoming aware of his presence, Lillian glanced over her shoulder with a lopsided smile. “Oh. It’s you,” she said, her voice slurred. Her attention wandered back to the shelves. “I can’t find anything. All these books are so deadly dull…”

Frowning in concern, Marcus approached her while she continued to chatter and sort through the books. “Not this one…nor this one…oh no, no, no, this one’s not even in English…”

Marcus’s panic transformed rapidly into outrage, followed swiftly by amusement. Damnation. If he had required additional proof that Lillian Bowman was utterly wrong for him, this was it. The wife of a Marsden would never sneak into the library and drink until she was, as his mother would phrase it, “a trifle disguised.” Staring into her drowsy dark eyes and flushed face, Marcus amended the phrase. Lillian was not disguised. She was foxed, staggering, tap-hackled, top-heavy, shot-in-the-neck, staggering drunk.

More books sailed through the air, one of them narrowly missing his ear.

“Perhaps I could help,” Marcus suggested pleasantly, stopping beside her. “If you would tell me what you’re looking for.”

“Something romantic. Something with a happy ending. There should always be a happy ending, shouldn’ there?”