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       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      USA TODAY bestselling author KASEY MICHAELS is the author of more than ninety books. She has earned three starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, and has been awarded the RITA® Award from Romance Writers of America, the Romantic Times Career Achievement Award, the Waldenbooks and BookRak awards, and several other commendations for her writing excellence in both contemporary and historical novels. There are more than eight million copies of her books in print around the world. Kasey resides in Pennsylvania with her family, where she is always at work on her next book.

       Available from Kasey Michaels and Mills & Boon

      THE BUTLER DID IT

      IN HIS LORDSHIP’S BED

      (short story in The Wedding Chase)

      SHALL WE DANCE?

      IMPETUOUS MISSES

      MARRIAGEABLE MISSES

      A RECKLESS BEAUTY

      LORDS OF NOTORIETY

      LORDS OF SCANDAL

      HOW TO TEMPT A DUKE

      HOW TO TAME A LADY

      and in the Beckets of Romney Marsh series

      A GENTLEMAN BY ANY OTHER NAME

      THE DANGEROUS DEBUTANTE

      BEWARE OF VIRTUOUS WOMEN

      A MOST UNSUITABLE GROOM

      THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL

      BECKET’S LAST STAND

      To Jacob Edward Seidick

      Welcome to the world, Jacob!

      Chapter One

      THE SUN SHONE BRIGHTLY as the traveling coach with the gold Basingstoke crest discreetly painted on its doors moved away from the flagway and out into Grosvenor Square. The magnificently liveried driver, a pair of similarly clad grooms hanging on to the rear rails for dear life, deftly swung the equipage about, and the team of fine black horses and the four accompanying outriders pranced their way toward the end of the Square, to the streets of London, and off to a great wide world of excitement and newfound love.

      Harnesses jingled. The sharp sounds of iron-clad shoes striking the cobblestones sent up the message, Farewell—fare thee well.

      The moment was a picture, really, a fine portrait set into motion. Adventure Awaits would make a fine title. Especially if the artist could capture the laughing Lady Nicole Daughtry, her bonnet discarded so that the sun fell fully on her face, as if the gods themselves had wished a closer look at her fresh, young beauty. Leaning rather precariously out the off-window, she continued to wave and blow exuberant kisses back toward the mansion until the coach reached the end of the Square and disappeared from sight.

      And that was that. There was nothing more to see. Even the sun, which had deigned to appear amidst a Season noted most for damp and rain, withdrew behind a cloud, and the world turned grey once more.

      Lady Lydia Daughtry pushed down the sash and backed away from the window on the second floor of Ashurst House to seat herself on the tufted light blue velvet padded bench in front of her bed. She sat with her back ramrod straight, her hands, else they tremble and betray her, neatly folded in her lap. Another portrait, yes, but one entirely without the fire and light she had just witnessed. After a few minutes of thus imitating a statue, she quietly sighed, her bosom rising and falling almost dramatically, before she resumed her quiet, even breathing.

      To the casual observer, she was, as always, an island of calm. No one would think that her heart was pounding furiously, or that she felt perilously close to indulging in what her former governess would have condemned as a tantrum.

      Not that the Lady Lydia ever had tantrums (if you threw something fragile against, for instance, a nearby wall, and it broke, you’d only have to clean up the pieces. So, really, what was the point?).

      Her twin, however, the newly absent Lady Nicole, had manufactured any number of tantrums as a young child. The most memorable remained the last, the day their mother had wed her third husband and then immediately shuffled off her three children once more to Ashurst Hall. Children were not, it seemed, important once there was a new man in Helen Daughtry’s life. But if Nicole wasn’t to be deemed important, she would at least be noticed, most especially when she’d loosed a heavy silver vase at her new stepfather’s head.

      The man really should have ducked.

      Lydia smiled at the memory. Nicole did, with such marvelously dramatic flair, all the things the stick-in-the-mud, cautious Lydia only dreamt of doing.

      And now Nicole was gone. Her sister, her twin, her heart-mate, was off on her way to meet the mother of her fiancé, Lucas Paine, the Marquess of Basingstoke. And life for neither Lydia nor Nicole would ever be the same.

      Lydia had never in her eighteen years known a day without Nicole by her side. The laughing Nicole. The adventurous

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