LITMIR.BIZ

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and with all the ripping retorts that have come rushing into my head reluctantly pushed to one side, this isn’t good. Anyone with a drop of imagination would think you took advantage of her virtue, and Lord knows what the ton lacks in intelligence it more than makes up for in lurid imagination.”

      “I’m aware of that, yes, thank you.” Coop stripped off the abused neck cloth and tossed it to Sergeant Major Ames, who had been his aide-de-camp during the final defeat of Bonaparte at Waterloo, and who could now lay claim to being the most burly, most foulmouthed and most sartorially bankrupt valet in all of England.

      “Man needs his digits hacked off, that’s what he needs,” Ames said, tossing a new neck cloth Coop’s way. “And then stuffed up his arse.”

      “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far, Ames,” Darby drawled as he stepped forward and snatched the fresh linen out of midair. “He’s usually bearably adequate, but clearly he’s overset at the moment. Here, Coop, let me do it for you, or else we’ll be spending the remainder of our lives here in your dressing room.”

      Two tall, handsome but very different men were now reflected in the mirror. Coop could have been the angel, with his blond good looks, and Darby the dark-haired devil, somehow made even more attractive with the black satin eye patch covering his left eye.

      “Ames meant my anonymous good friend,” Coop pointed out, grinning as he raised his chin and allowed Darby to position the neck cloth around his raised shirt points. “And he was being kind, if not civil. It’s quite another part of the scribbler’s anatomy Ames truly has designs on, don’t you, Ames?”

      “First have to find them, my lord, and I doubt the rascal has the least trouble fitting into his breeches, if you take my meaning.”

      “Give me that before you choke me,” Coop said, grabbing one end of the linen strip as Darby’s bark of laughter blasted in his ear. “I returned to the city for assistance from my friends, and not only is Gabe gone to his estate, but he left you behind, which is less than helpful in any circumstance. I’ve got enough going upside down in my life as it is, and you have all the makings of a menace.”

      “I’d be bereft, did I not choose to take that as a compliment. But please, a menace that can tie the Waterfall with his eyes—pardon me, eye—closed. Very well, make your own mess. We’ll even name it. The Hero’s Knot. Good choice, Sergeant Major, wouldn’t you say, because I think he’s fashioned a noose.”

      “You’re quite the wit, Darby,” Cooper said as Ames helped him into his jacket. “I don’t know how you ever stop laughing. You really think this whole thing is hilariously funny, don’t you?” he asked as Darby replaced his handkerchief after lifting the black patch over his left eye and dabbing at a nonexistent tear of amusement.

      “In most cases, no, I suppose not, but to see the calm, never-ruffled Cooper so flummoxed? Yes, I admit to enjoying myself. Really, is it so very terrible, Sobersides, being cast in the role of a hero? Damsels must be sighing and swooning over their hot chocolate all over Mayfair right now, their tiny pink toes curling in delight. I repeat, you lucky dog.”

      Coop and Ames exchanged glances, and the valet retrieved a folded sheet of paper from the desk in the bedchamber Coop occupied at the Pulteney Hotel. “This arrived earlier, shoved under the door just as messages are in all inferior novels. Take it down to the lobby with you, read it and decide for yourself. I’ll just say a quick good-morning to my mother and join you there shortly.”

      “Am I going to be amused?” Darby asked, sliding the paper inside his jacket. “Never mind, I can see I’m not. And does it explain the neck cloth, and your jolly good humor? I suppose so. Very well, ten minutes, or else I’ll be back.”

      With Darby out of the room, Coop picked up his silver-backed brushes and concentrated on taming his thick thatch of annoyingly unruly dark blond hair, or

      ...his Glorious Crown of sun-Kissed locks reminiscent of a Veritable Halo of Goodness even while he ran his long, straight fingers through the Mass as he stepped over the Broken Body of the Wretched Attacker and shyly smiled at the Unknown Damsel he’d Rescued from a Fate Worse Than Death.

      Fate worse than death. Just what Darby had said in jest. It only went to prove anyone could write a chapbook—as long as one didn’t bother stretching his imagination beyond the trite and prurient. “Oh, God, now I’m poking sticks at one of my best friends.” Cooper sighed as he put down the brushes and spoke to the air. “‘Is it so terrible being cast in the role of a hero?’ Darby, my friend, you have no idea.”

      Admittedly, at first it hadn’t been that awful. He’d served his country not once, but twice, donning the colors again after being invalided back to England in 1814 with his friends Darby, Gabriel and Jeremiah Rigby, baronet. He’d gone on to become quite the celebrity after a small yet fierce battle just outside Quatre Bras, just before Wellington’s final victory at Waterloo.

      The world would never know the full truth of what had transpired that day, which was pointed out to Cooper quite forcefully by His Royal Highness, the Prince Regent himself, before he presented the hero with a small estate, a comfortably heavy purse and the title of baron. It was a magnificent reward...although some might call it a bribe, or even the hint of a threat. In any event, Cooper quickly realized he would be wise, and perhaps safer, to accept it.

      But the world didn’t know any of that.

      Of most interest to the average John Bull and the newspapers had been Cooper’s daring rescue of several towheaded tots (the number varied from three to a full dozen, depending on who told the story), who had wandered into the midst of what was soon to be a battlefield. Some versions included a beauteous older cousin who had been most grateful for their rescue...but then, there were romantics everywhere, weren’t there?

      Three or twelve, lovely and anonymous, profoundly grateful blonde beauty or not, on his return to London Cooper found himself more popular than Christmas pudding. In the months since Waterloo he had not been able to take more than a few steps in any direction without someone calling out, “It’s him—Townsend! There he is!”

      Everyone clapped him on the back. Everyone stood him up for a bottle or two. Everyone treated this son of a genteel but never more than comfortably well-off family as if he was the best of good fellows, and he’d been invited to so many house parties and boxing matches and the like that it would have taken a squadron of heroes to accept all of the invitations.

      Still, the whole thing was fairly enjoyable.

      But then Volume One was handed out free on the street corners, and everything changed.

      Coop remembered waking one morning to have Ames present him with it. There he was on the cover of the cheap chapbook, or at least Ames told him the garish print was supposed to represent him. He was pictured as tall and lean, which he was, but with a highly exaggerated shock of unruly blond hair and vividly green eyes that had him peeking into a pier glass to check on the intensity of his own. They were green—he’d give the artist that—but certainly not that green.

      The streets were flooded with the damned book that was complete with a notice on its back cover that the next in the series would reveal

      The Further Adventures of Our Glorious Baron Returned from the War, Secretly Performing Heroic Acts in England, Champion of the People and Rescuer of Delicate Females in Dire Straits and Needful of His Valiant Assistance.

      Now mamas wanted him for their daughters. Fathers wanted him because he was a hero, and wouldn’t “M’son-in-law the hero, yes, indeed” sound all the crack in the clubs? Married women wanted him because—good Lord, who knew why married women wanted anything...and sweet young damsels considered Coop the catch of the year.

      “And now this. So much for my plan of throwing myself into the Little Season and finding a wife in order to put an end to the nonsense.”

      “My lord? I didn’t quite catch all of that?”

      “Never mind, Ames. I was thinking about that damn note again.”

      He had already committed

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