“Have some respect, gents! This is my cursed future both of you are discussing with such disrespect. Hunter, regrettably, was too far away to punch. Irritated-it was on the tip of his tongue to increase the wager to five hundred pounds-Vane kicked Saint in the calf, causing him to stumble. I feel it like a damp chill in my bones.” “She is determined to ruin my stay in London this season. “No, have you not been paying attention for the past hour? I am speaking of my mother,” Vane said, scowling at Saint. “Likely his new mistress,” Saint said, the butt of his double-barreled gun nestled in the crook of his arm. It was an enviable position, to be certain, when Vane could not seem to prevent his own family from meddling in his life. Having severed his ties to his family in his youth, the twenty-nine-year-old marquess lived only for himself. Simon Wyndham Jefferes, Marquess of Sainthill, or Saint, on the other hand, did not possess the temperament or patience that his nickname implied. Now that his own mother, the Marchioness of Netherley, had decided it was time for her surviving son to marry, Vane had nothing but sympathy for his friend.
Though he rarely spoke of it unless he was deeply in his cups, his wily grandmother had betrothed her twelve-year-old grandson to a young girl barely out of her swaddling clothes to increase the family’s landholdings. Perhaps it was because his days as a free man were numbered. He excelled at sports whether they involved pursuing game on the frost-crusted low-lying meadow or more challenging quarry, the ladies of the ton. Huntsley, or simply Hunter to his friends, was aptly named. Squinting at the pack of baying harriers on the horizon, the duke spared a glance at Vane.
Cold and hungry, the earl, who was often acknowledged by the abbreviated version of his title, wished they had taken their horses on the trail hunt.
“Never has God created a more devious creature,” Christopher Avery Courtland, Earl of Vanewright, declared as he walked the vale of Blackmoor one early morning in January with his friends, the Marquess of Sainthill and the Duke of Huntsley, as they hunted hare. Martin’s Paperbacks Titles by Alexandra Hawkins Vices are often habits rather than passions.
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