How to Master Your Marquis (A Princess in Hiding Romance), page 1
Rave Reviews for the Princess in Hiding Romances
HOW TO TAME YOUR DUKE
“Gray’s lyrical writing, intense emotion, and spirited characters carry the sophisticated plot to satisfying fruition and keep readers invested every step of the way . . . A delightful romance treat.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Featuring astute writing and charm, this work from Gray sets off a new series with some serious heat.”
—Library Journal
“Crackles with chemistry and romantic tension . . . Emotionally electric scenes between strong characters make this one a winner.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Gray’s witty writing, flawless characterization, and fanciful plotting make this Victorian-set historical romance an absolute treasure.”
—Booklist (starred review)
Praise for the novels of Juliana Gray
A DUKE NEVER YIELDS
“Gray makes one of the best trilogy debuts in years, proving she is a literary force to be reckoned with.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“A mesmerizing, enthralling romance . . . Bright, witty dialogue and superb characterization are the backbones of a fun, intricate historical storyline.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“[Gray] demonstrates a knack for writing a sexy story, a battle-of-wits romance, and now a funny tale tinged with paranormal elements . . . Gray has a bright future.”
—RT Book Reviews
A GENTLEMAN NEVER TELLS
“Scintillating wit, lusciously layered characters, and sizzling, sensual romance . . . [Gray] truly is the newest incandescent star in the romance firmament.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“The dialogue is witty, the descriptions incredibly vivid, and the emotion evident in every scene.”
—The Season for Romance
A LADY NEVER LIES
“Exquisite characterizations, clever dialogue, and addictive prose . . . make this exceptional debut stand apart.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“Buoyed by an abundance of deliciously tart wit, spiced with a generous amount of incendiary sexual chemistry . . . and graced with a cast of captivating characters, Gray’s impeccably crafted debut romance . . . is a complete triumph.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Charming, original characters, a large dose of humor, and a plot that’s fantastic fun . . . Prepare to be captivated by Finn and Alexandra!”
—Jennifer Ashley, USA Today bestselling author
“Fresh, clever, and supremely witty. A true delight.”
—Suzanne Enoch, New York Times bestselling author
“Shakespeare meets Enchanted April in this dazzling debut . . . The best new book of the year!”
—Lauren Willig, national bestselling author
“Extraordinary! In turns charming, passionate, and thrilling—and sometimes all three at once . . . Juliana Gray is on my autobuy list.”
—Elizabeth Hoyt, New York Times bestselling author
“A delightful confection of prose and desire that leaps off the page. This romance will stay with you long after you have turned the final page.”
—Julia London, New York Times bestselling author
“Juliana Gray has a stupendously lyrical voice . . . The story feels tremendously sophisticated, but also fresh, deliciously witty, and devastatingly romantic.”
—Meredith Duran, New York Times bestselling author
Berkley Sensation titles by Juliana Gray
A LADY NEVER LIES
A GENTLEMAN NEVER TELLS
A DUKE NEVER YIELDS
The Princess in Hiding Romances
HOW TO TAME YOUR DUKE
HOW TO MASTER YOUR MARQUIS
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China
penguin.com
A Penguin Random House Company
HOW TO MASTER YOUR MARQUIS
A Berkley Sensation Book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright © 2014 by Juliana Gray.
Excerpt from How to School Your Scoundrel by Juliana Gray
copyright © 2014 by Juliana Gray.
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Berkley Sensation Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.
BERKLEY SENSATION® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.
The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
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375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN: 978-0-425-26567-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-61301-6
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley Sensation mass-market edition / January 2014
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Cover art by Alan Ayers.
Cover design by George Long
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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CONTENTS
Praise for Juliana Gray
Titles by Juliana Gray
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
EPILOGUE
NOTE
Excerpt from How to School Your Scoundrel
To Mr. Gray,
who also rows.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks are due, as always, to my agent, Alexandra Machinist, at Janklow & Nesbit, who keeps finding new ways to amaze me, and to the marvelous team at Berkley who transforms the words on the screen into books in bookstores: my editor, Kate Seaver; her assistant, Katherine Pelz; the heroic art, marketing, publicity, and sales departments; and a copyeditor who sees all, knows all, and tactfully conveys all.
PROLOGUE
Old Bailey, London
July 1890
The courtroom was packed and smelled of sweat.
James Lambert, the Marquess of Hatherfield—heir to that colossal monument of British prestige, the Duke of Southam—was accustomed to the stench of jammed-in human perspiration and did not mind in the slightest. He feared, however, for the young woman who sat before him.
Hatherfield couldn’t watch her face directly, of course, but he could sense the tension humming away in her body, like the telephone wire his stepmother had had installed into her private study last year, in order to better command her army of Belgravian sycophants. He knew that her back was as straight as a razor’s edge; he knew that her eyes would appear more green than blue in the sulfurous light waxing from the gas sconces of the courtroom, and that those same eyes were undoubtedly trained upon the presiding judge with a fierceness that might have done her conquering Germanic ancestors proud.
He knew his Stefanie as he knew his own hands, and he knew she would rather be boiled in oil than sniff a human armpit. His darling Stefanie, who thought herself so adventurous, who had proved herself equal to any number of challenges, had nonetheless been raised a princess, with a princess’s delicate nose.
The judge was droning on, precedents this and brutal nature of the crime that, and Latin tags strewn about with reckless enthusiasm. He was a man of narrow forehead and prodigious jowl; the rolls about his neck wobbled visibly as he spoke. A large black fly had discovered the interesting composition of the curling white wig atop his pear-shaped head and was presently buzzing about the apex in lazily ecstatic loops. Hatherfield watched its progress in fascination. It landed atop the fourth roll of wiry white hair with a contented bzzz-bzzz, just as Her Majesty’s judicial representative informed the mass of perspiring humanity assembled before him that they were required to maintain an open mind as to the prisoner’s guilt ad captandum et ad timorem sine qua non sic transit gloria mundi et cetera et cetera et cetera.
Hansel, that was it.
A flash of movement caught his eye. Something was going on with Stefanie’s fingers: She was scribbling furiously on the paper before her, biting her tender lower lip as she went. She looked up, locked eyes with him, and flashed the paper up and down again, the work of an instant. He saw the words, nonetheless. They were written in large capital letters, underlined twice for emphasis:
PAY ATTENTION!!
Ah, Stefanie. He tapped his fingers against the rail before him and composed his reply in Morse code:
I AM PAYING ATTENTION. TO YOU. YOU LOOK EXCEPTIONALLY HANDSOME IN THAT WAISTCOAT. I SHOULD VERY MUCH LIKE TO KISS YOU.
He watched as her eyes dropped down to his fingers. He tapped the message again.
She changed color. Well, he couldn’t see her well enough to verify, but he knew anyway. The flush would be mounting up above her stiff white collar, spreading along the curving wedge of her regal cheekbones and beneath her mustache. The tip of her nose would be turning quite pink right about . . . now. Yes, there it was: a little red glow. Just like when he . . .
With her elegant and agile fingers, Stefanie tore the paper in half, and in half again; she assembled the quarters together and tore them rather impressively once more. She hid the pieces under a leather portfolio and locked her hands together. Her knuckles were bone white; Hatherfield could see that from here.
Familiar words struck his ear, jolting him out of his pleasant interlude: his stepmother’s name. “. . . the Duchess of Southam, who was found murdered in her bed in the most gruesome manner, the details of which will become clear . . .”
The Duchess of Southam. Trust her to toss her bucket of icy water over his every moment of happiness, even from the grave, merely by the sound of her name in a room full of witnesses. He had tried by every means to deny her that power over him, and still she laid her cold hands on his body.
Hatherfield found he couldn’t quite bear to look at Stefanie now. He trained his gaze instead on the judge. The fly had disappeared, frightened away perhaps by the thunderous vibration of those tempting white curls, as the speaker worked himself up to an indignant climax—a theatrical chap, this judge, for all his comical jowls—and asked the prisoner how he pleaded.
Hatherfield’s hands gripped the rail before him. He straightened his long back, looked the judge squarely in the eye, and replied in a loud, clear voice.
“Not guilty, my lord.”
Devon, England
Eight months earlier
Princess Stefanie Victoria Augusta, a young woman not ordinarily subject to attacks of nerves, found to her horror that her fingers were twitching so violently she could scarcely fold her necktie.
True, it was a drab necktie. She had longed for one in spangled purple silk, or that delicious tangerine she had spotted through a carriage window on a dapper young chap in London, before she and her sisters had been hustled away by their uncle to this ramshackle Jacobin pile perched on a sea cliff in remotest Devon. (For the record, she adored the place.) But the array of neckties laid out before her on the first morning of her training had offered three choices: black, black, and black.
“Haven’t you any interesting neckties?” she had asked, letting one dangle from the extreme tips of her fingers, as if it were an infant’s soiled napkin.
“My dear niece,” said the Duke of Olympia, as he might say my dear incontinent puppy, “you are not supposed to be interesting. You are supposed to be the dullest, most commonplace, most unremarkable law clerk in London. You are hiding, if you’ll recall.”
“Yes, but must one hide oneself in such unspeakable drab neckties? Can’t they at least be made of silk damask?” Stefanie let the necktie wither from her fingers to the tray below.
“Law clerks do not wear silk damask neckties,” said her sister Emilie. She was standing before the mirror with great concentration, attempting a knot under the anxious supervision of His Grace’s valet.
“How do you know they don’t?” asked Stefanie, but Olympia laid a hand on her arm.
“Stefanie, my dear,” he said affectionately, for she was his favorite niece, though it was a close secret between them, “perhaps you don’t recall what’s at stake here. You are not playing parlor games with your courtiers in charming Hogwash-whateveritis . . .”
“Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof,” said Stefanie, straightening proudly. “The most charming principality in Germany, over which your own sister once reigned, if you’ll recall.”
Olympia waved his hand. “Yes, yes. Charming, to say nothing of fragrant. But as I said, this is not a friendly game of hide-and-seek. The three of you are being hunted by a team of damned anarchist assassins, the same ones who killed your own father and kidnapped your sister . . .”
“Attempted to kidnap,” said Princess Luisa, smoothing her skirts, except that her hands found a pair of wool checked trousers instead and stopped in mid-stroke.
“Regardless. No one is to suspect that you’re being scattered about England, dressed as young men, employed in the most invisible capacities . . .”
“While you and Miss Dingleby have all the fun of tracking down our father’s murderers and slicing their tender white throats from end to end.” Stefanie heaved a deep and bloodthirsty sigh.
Miss Dingleby had appeared at her other elbow. “My dear,” she’d said quietly, “your sentiments do you credit. But speaking as your governess, and therefore obliged to focus you on the task at hand, I urge you to consider your own throat instead, and the necktie that must, I’m afraid, go around it.”
Four weeks later, the neckties had not improved, though Stefanie had become a dab hand at a stylish knot. (Too stylish, Miss Dingleby would sigh, and make her tie it again along more conservative lines.)
If only she could make her silly fingers work.
The door opened with an impatient creak, allowing through Miss Dingleby, who was crackling with impatience. “Stefanie, what on earth is keeping you? Olympia has been downstairs with Sir John this past half hour, and we’re running out of sherry.”
“Nonsense. There are dozens of bottles in the dungeon.”
“It is not a dungeon. It’s merely a cellar.” Miss Dingleby paused and narrowed her eyes at Stefanie’s reflection in the mirror. “You’re not nervous, are you, my dear? I might expect it of Emilie and Luisa, straightforward as they are and unaccustomed to subterfuge, but you?”
“Of course I’m not nervous.” Stefanie stared sternly at her hands and ordered them to their duty. “Only reluctant. I don’t see why I should be the law clerk. I’m by far the shadiest character among the three of us. You should have made me the tutor instead. Emilie will bore her pupil to tears, I’m sure, whereas I would . . .”
Miss Dingleby made an exasperated noise and moved behind her. “Take your hands away,” she said, and tied Stefanie’s black neckcloth with blinding jerks of her own competent hands, to a constriction so exquisitely snug that Stefanie gasped for breath. “The decision was Olympia’s, and I’m quite sure he knew what he was doing. Your Latin is excellent, your mind quick and retentive when you allow it to concentrate . . .”
“Yes, but the law is so very dull, Miss Dingleby . . .”
“. . . and what’s more,” Miss Dingleby said, standing back to admire her handiwork, “we shall all be a great deal reassured by the knowledge that you’re lodged with the most reputable, learned, formidable, and upstanding member of the entire English bar.”
Stefanie allowed herself to be taken by the hand and led out the door to the great and rather architecturally suspect staircase that swept its crumbling way to the hall below. “That,” she said mournfully, “is exactly what I’m afraid of.”
