LITMIR.BIZ

      ‘Miss! He’s coming!’

      Over the relentless pounding of her own heart, Chloe Hardwick caught the excitement in the maid’s tone. She inched a little closer to her desk, straightened her spine and settled her new spectacles more firmly on her nose.

      Clearly this was a woefully insignificant reaction.

      ‘Miss!’ How was it possible for the girl to shriek and whisper at the same time? Her shivery delight grated on Chloe’s already strained nerves.

      ‘Oh, heavens!’ From the passageway, the maid hissed again. ‘He’s nearly here!’

      Chloe swallowed an empathetic surge of panic. Her day of reckoning had come. It was time to own up to her lies, to confess her deceit to The Marauding Marquess.

      It’s only a nickname.

      None of his infamous conquests, reportedly gathered on the battlefields and in the bedrooms of Europe, would come into play here at Denning Castle. She repeated the reassurance in her head even as she pinned the girl with a stern stare. ‘Thank you, Daisy. That will be all.’

      The disappointed maid flounced away from the door. Making a small concession to her nerves, Chloe ran a finger along the row of buttons marching down the front of her jacket. The garment might be supremely unstylish, but as always she drew strength and a sense of security from her unusual attire, as if the string of tightly spaced fasteners were a line of soldiers standing firm between her and the world. Breathing deeply, she ignored the sounds of arrival, pulled a file from the neat stack at the corner of her desk and bent over it.

      ‘Hardwick!’ The shout echoed from below, followed by a set of footsteps advancing up the stairs. They paused as Chloe’s unwitting employer called to an unseen servant. ‘There is a loaded wagon coming along behind. No one is to touch it until I am available to supervise. Is that understood?’

      He didn’t wait for an answer. The footsteps were nearly upon her now. ‘Hardwick!’ he called again. ‘Did you get it, man?’

      Chloe sensed, rather than saw, the large form that erupted into her small study.

      ‘Hardwick?’

      This was it. The moment she’d been preparing for—and dreading—for nearly sixteen months. Nervous energy coursed through her. She closed her eyes and tried desperately to quell it. When she opened her eyes, however, she saw that the quill she held trembled in her hand. Deliberate and slow, she set it down and rose to her feet.

      ‘Lord Marland, welcome home,’ she said to the quill. ‘How pleased we all are to have you back.’

      She forced her gaze up, across her desk and the short expanse of carpet … and stalled at a pair of slightly dusty cavalry boots.

      Oh, my.

      Chloe did have a weakness for a man in boots—and this set had her swallowing back a sigh of admiration. Plain, black leather, climbing high at the knee and cut away in the rear, worn from use and moulded to a set of muscular calves …

      ‘Yes, yes. Thank you.’ The Marquess of Marland cleared his throat. ‘I’m looking for Hardwick.’

      She raised her eyes, then—up and up, over the tall and powerful figure that dominated the small room—and stalled again.

      He looked nothing like she expected—so much more than the portrait in the gallery downstairs. He was magnificent … and wrong. Broad of shoulder, wide of chest and sleekly muscled, Lord Marland looked as if he’d stepped from the pages of history. A Viking warrior, perhaps, or a knight of old, nothing like the few gentlemen of noble birth she’d had a glimpse of before. Even his hair bespoke of ages past: thick, chestnut locks left to grow just past his shoulders and caught up in a queue at his nape. Chloe couldn’t help herself. She ran her gaze over him, mentally stripping away the buff breeches and brown

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