LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter One

      Kilcreggan House, London, 1816

      Richard, the third Earl of Kilcreggan, picked up his newly delivered package of books, crossed his legs, clad in tight-fitting pantaloons and polished leather boots, and settled into his favourite wingback chair. Amongst the bundle was a new German edition of Gauss, but as he idly flicked through the uncut pages, the book he had been so eagerly awaiting failed to hold his attention.

      The library, his favourite room, was located at the back of Kilcreggan House, which itself stood on the south corner of Cavendish Square. Sash windows looked out onto the garden where Richard kept his treasured telescope, made to one of Mr Herschel’s designs. Much of the library’s wall space was taken up by glass-fronted bookcases, but a large mahogany cabinet with a rosewood veneer stood in the corner by the fireplace, its innumerable drawers containing the most prized of Richard’s specimens—butterflies and insects, semi-precious stones, fossils, and a plethora of other curios he had amassed on his extensive travels. His famed exotic botanical specimens, also collected abroad, were cultivated at his country seat in a number of expensively heated custom-built succession houses. These featured in the background of the painting that hung above the mantel.

      Richard’s portrait, by the renowned Scottish artist Henry Raeburn, was, even he conceded, a good likeness. It depicted a tall man with a darkly brooding face, too forbidding to be considered classically handsome, but arresting enough to be unsettling. Mr Raeburn had captured the earl’s air of amused detachment, as if the sitter took neither the portrait nor himself too seriously. A volume of Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia was held open in his hands but his golden-brown eyes gazed out intently at the viewer, something that Richard’s friends and family found so disconcerting that he had been forced to move the portrait from the dining room, in which it had originally been hung. ‘Can’t eat with you staring over my shoulder like that, my dear fellow,’ his friend Nick Lytton had joked.

      Richard drummed his fingers on the frontispiece of a volume of poems. He was bored. No, not just bored, he was malcontent, though it pained him to admit it, for there was no logical reason to be so, and he was a man who valued logic above all else. Getting to his feet, he strode over to gaze out of the window. He was in no mood to be convivial, he had no urge for intellectual debate, and even the thought of whiling away an afternoon making love to a beautiful woman roused in him little more than mild ennui. Despite the endless opportunities with which his acknowledged charm and considerable wealth presented him, the pleasure he derived from lovemaking was becoming ever more unsatisfactory, leaving him spent but not sated. The sense that there was something vital missing from his life nagged at him.

      He sighed heavily. Nick Lytton insisted that what he needed was a wife. Nick, who had for years forsworn matrimony, had recently been felled by a beautiful French heiress and had now become a staunch advocate of the married state. Richard was not persuaded. Love was a transient illusion, a trick of nature designed to ensure the continuation of the species, nothing more. There was no such thing as eternal love, nor such a woman as the perfect mate. Richard had never even come close to being mildly infatuated, never mind beguiled. Now, at six-and-thirty, he considered himself pretty much immune to emotions of that sort. As a man of science, he held that to be an entirely appropriate state of affairs.

      Outside, the rain started to fall, the kind of soft grey drizzle that enveloped one like a damp blanket. It matched Richard’s mood perfectly. He pressed his forehead against the windowpane and closed his eyes. There was much to be said for the reassuring predictability of science, but sometimes, just occasionally, it would be nice to experience the thrill of the unexpected.

      London, the present.

      Errin McGill pushed open the door of the small junk shop in Camberwell and paused, as she always did, to drink in the familiar evocative smell of old wood, mildewed books and damp upholstery. She loved this place, so much so that she always made it her first port of call on her regular buying trips from New York, though she rarely purchased anything here. Errin’s wealthy Manhattan clients demanded the very best, which meant genuine antiques in mint condition, without any of the scratches and signs of wear and tear that Errin herself preferred, for they gave each piece a provenance, a personality. But her rich clients weren’t really interested in history. They wanted ‘authentic’ period rooms, unsullied by evidence of real age. If antiques could somehow be injected with botox serum, that’s what her clients would have her do to them.

      She’d come straight here after dumping her bags at the hotel, having only two weeks in which to acquire a frighteningly long list of commissioned items. The flight from JFK had been delayed by three hours, and she hadn’t eaten since that fateful dinner with Mark the night before. Not that she’d eaten much then, not after Mark dropped his bombshell and produced, with a flourish, the small designer ring box. She had been too shocked to do anything other than stare, and Mark, expecting delighted exclamations, had taken immediate offence. The ring, a diamond solitaire, winked up at her smugly. She hated it. Too big, way too showy, it would brand her indisputably as Mark’s property, another one of his expensively acquired possessions.

      Suddenly and with embarrassing clarity, Errin had realised that she didn’t love Mark. She would never love him, not in the crash, bang, dizzy, breathless way that true love should manifest itself. Nor experience that heart-stopping desperate-to-be-with-him, can’t-bear-to-be-without-him feeling. He was rich and gorgeous but that wasn’t enough. Despite her pragmatic sister Megan forever reminding her about biological clocks and career women, Errin wanted something she’d only read about in romance novels. What was wrong with shooting for the stars? She was only twenty-eight. Surely, out of the millions of men out there, her Mr Absolutely Perfect existed and was waiting for her?

      Mark had been more angry than upset, stung by her refusal. He was, as he himself pointed out, an excellent catch. They’d been dating exclusively for over a year, so marriage was the next logical step, except now it made no sense whatsoever to Errin. ‘Your loss, Errin. There’s plenty more fish in the sea,’ he’d sneered before storming off, sending their champagne flutes flying and drawing shocked stares from their fellow diners at the exclusive restaurant.

      Cringing now at the memory, Errin stooped to examine a companion set of brass fire irons, but although they were prettily made, they had been over-polished, the patina destroyed, so she put them back. Her head ached. Reaching up, she removed the clip that held her auburn hair back and shook it out, sighing with relief and rolling her shoulders in an effort to ease the tension in them.

      She’d wanted to explain properly but Mark had refused to take her calls. She couldn’t really blame him, but nor was she sorry. When

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