Dukes to the Left of Me, Princes to the Right

Nicholas Staunton had always been a light sleeper—growing up in a drafty castle that took the brunt of howling North Sea storms had seen to that—so when he felt someone shaking him, saying, “Wake up, Nicholas,” he knew, wherever he was in the ether of his mind, that something was wrong. No one should have to shake him to wake him up.

Especially when he knew he had something to do. He couldn’t remember what, but it was something rather urgent and distasteful.

He opened an eye. A shaft of morning sunlight pierced the edge of his vision, blinding him.

And then he smelled something.

Lilies.

God, he hated lilies. They reminded him of his parents’ funerals. But someone he knew—someone he’d bedded—wore a lily scent. And he seemed to recall that he endured the cloying odor because she was very good at—

Yes. At that. What she was doing now.

He closed his eye again and sank back into that hazy, sublime world, where he basked in hot, carnal sensation and forgot all about the distasteful, urgent thing.

But then the hot, carnal sensation suddenly stopped. He groaned and wished with all his might for it to come back.

“Nicky, wake up,” a feminine voice insisted.

He winced and ignored it.

“I don’t do things like this in the daylight,” the heavily accented voice went on, “and I have no intention of going further. I’m only trying to wake you up. So wake up.”

He felt a light slap on his right cheek, and with a great deal of will and a tremendous amount of reluctance, he managed to open his right eye and confront the pest jarring him awake.

Good God. Now he remembered who wore the lily scent. She lay a mere inch from his face, her hard brown eyes glinting with impatience and her ebony curls falling around her face.

The way a witch’s would, he had the incongruous thought.

“Natasha,” he muttered.

The Russian princess.

She rested her cheek on her hands and smiled at him—a slow, heated smile. He’d a vague recollection of sipping brandy from her navel sometime after midnight, but he couldn’t remember anything after that.

His limbs were sore and he had a pounding head and he’d really like to go back to sleep, to tell the truth.

Back to a deep sleep.

“Nicky,” she hissed in his ear, “the Howells come back from Sussex this afternoon.” She placed the flat of her palm on his bare chest. “If they find you here, they’ll make me pack my bags and return to St. Petersburg. Don’t doze off again! It’s almost eleven.”

Eleven?

Eleven wasn’t good. Eleven was bad, in fact.

He felt confused. Why had he stayed?

He never stayed.

Morning sunlight, he’d come to discover, was like a splash of cold water on a man and an excuse for clinging in a woman. “You’re right,” he muttered as he rolled out of bed. “I’ve got to go.”

Natasha’s eyebrows lowered over her small, elegant nose. “You don’t have to agree so readily. Many men crave to wake up in my bed.”

Nicholas didn’t mind annoyed females—their pique gave him an opportunity to appease them with his special “I-know-you’re-angry-but-you’ll-forget-after-I-do-this-to-you” restorative (something he’d picked up from an Indian text), but today he didn’t have time.

Today—

Ah. Now he remembered. Today was the day he was to find Frank before the big cockfight to be held at noon in Cheapside, which he was sure his brother would attend, and remind him (last time it was by holding him upside down out a second-floor window) that he really mustn’t gamble away his allowance anymore, nor steal spoons from White’s.

Yes, that was Nicholas’s plan, to reform his recalcitrant brother.

And snow would fall in London in July—

But it was still his plan. He wasn’t allowed to give up hope on Frank. It was one of the self-imposed rules he’d established for himself after their father had died.

“Nicholas.” The princess slapped the coverlet. “Are you even listening to me?”

He found his dove-colored breeches and pulled them on. “Yes, and it’s a good thing you woke me,” he soothed her. “I’ve got a meeting with my lead attorney. He tells me it’s important.”

It was his standard line, but come to think of it, Groop had called him into his office last week. Nicholas had been too involved, however, to bother showing up. Young widowed Russian princesses with voluptuous figures, bewitching accents, and superior connections made for quite a good reason for ignoring obligations. He’d go see Groop straight after he’d rattled Frank’s teeth.

That is—he amended, and pulled his shirt over his head—after he’d calmly talked sense into his brother.

He strode to a small mirror above Natasha’s bureau, willed his own dissolute reflection to be noble, and made quick work of his cravat, ignoring the fact that he needed to shave. Then ran his fingers through his hair once, and gave his head a shake, like a dog.

There. The look served him well enough, judging by the number of women who batted their lashes at him in the street and the number of men who crossed to the other side to avoid him.

“Prinny was right.” Natasha compressed her lips. “You are an Impossible Bachelor, and I’m a fool to share my bed with you.”

He wouldn’t deny it. Being selected an Impossible Bachelor last year with his good friends Harry, Lumley, and Arrow had only given him more reason to kick up his heels while he could. While the weeklong wager had been vastly amusing—who wouldn’t love entering one’s mistress in the Most Delectable Companion contest?—he’d come this close to legshackles. One of the losing mistresses’ consorts had been forced to marry. Luckily, that sad fate hadn’t fallen to him or any of his friends but to a weasel who’d been seducing young virgins for years and getting away with it—until Prinny’s scandalous bet, that is.

Which reminded Nicholas—he was a Bachelor, known for his skill at evading the parson’s mousetrap—so what was he still doing here? And where was his damned coat?

He bent low, sending a crashing pain through his head. But there the rumpled garment lay, under the bed, a comfortable nest for two snoozing corgis.

Natasha lifted her feet, and he nudged the dogs awake long enough to pull the coat from under them with the least amount of disturbance to their slumber.

When he stood, a slant of that dreaded morning sunlight hit him square in the eye.

As if on cue, Natasha bounded from the bed and took his arm. “Imagine the children we could have if we married.” Her expression was more determined than dreamy. “My hair. Your blue eyes. And the boys with that sweet cleft in their chins, like you.”

She pulled him closer, and he paused in his dressing, one arm inside his coat sleeve. “I’m sure I mentioned I’ve no intention of marrying and having children of whom I’m aware for at least another decade, possibly two.”

He was an expert at seduction and was damned sure she wasn’t in danger of producing any ebony-haired, blue-eyed children any time soon—ones fathered by him, that is. The women he bedded never seemed to notice how disciplined he was, how carefully he kept a wall up between them, even in the throes of passion—

Especially in the throes of passion.

He looked around the room for his hat and found it next to another corgi—Boris, the one with the missing eye—and a small, empty bottle of brandy on the floor by the bed. Of the two glasses nearby, one had a golden puddle in the bottom. The other—he picked it up and sniffed it—had never been used.

Natasha laughed, but he caught an uneasiness in her tone. “Men and their brandy. It turns them into—” She