Page 156 of The Boxing Baroness

“Marianne will see you now, Your Grace,” Cecile said to Sin, as if he’d not been standing right behind her.

He didn’t appear to hear her—or maybe not even see her—his eyes were flickering over Marianne’s face and person.

As were hers over him.

He looked glorious.

Magnificent.

Godlike.

He was dressed in black and white evening garb; the only thing she’d seen that suited him more was nothing at all.

He was thinner, and she’d forgotten just how fair his hair was naturally.

His eyes, however, were exactly the same, and they cut right through her.

“Thank you for seeing me,” he said, hovering in the doorway.

“Of course. Have a seat. What can I do for you?” she asked once he was seated on a rickety chair in her shabby little room, as conspicuous as a diamond on a dung heap.

“How have you been?” he asked. She could tell by the look in his eyes that the question was not the same one that thousands of people asked each other every day in Britain. She knew he meant: Isn’t this awful? When will it stop hurting? Have you missed me? Do you think of me at least five times an hour?

At least those were the questions she would have asked.

“I have been well,” she lied. “And you?”

“I have been miserable.”

Marianne groaned. “Why are you here, Your Grace? Why?”

He reached into his elegantly cut, perfectly fitting evening coat and pulled out a rather large envelope. “This is for you.” He handed it to her. When she didn’t take it, he said, “I really hope you’ll take it. My valet will be most displeased if I show up at home with it distorting the cut of my coat.”

She snorted. “Well, we wouldn’t want that, would we?” She snatched the missive from his hand, glanced at the front, and her head whipped up. “This is addressed to me.”

He gave her a sheepish look. “Is it?”

She turned it over. “And the seal has been broken.”

“Has it?”

Her hands shook. “What is this?” she asked weakly, too afraid to open it. “Did something happen to my—my mother?” She swallowed several times and then grimaced. “My father?”

“No, they are both fine, as far as I know. Open it.”

She unfolded the heavy paper and her eyes immediately lowered to the bottom of the page and she gasped.

“The Prince of Wales has sent me a letter!”

“I’m afraid he didn’t really write it, darling. If he had, you’d not be able to read it. His handwriting is execrable.” An anxious look passed over his face. “Did you read it?”

She started at the top of the page this time.

She was three paragraphs in when her head shot up. “A viscountess!”

“I thought it was rather paltry, myself. Lord knows you’d look lovely in strawberry leaves. But perhaps I can do something about that.”

“What—who—how—”