Mastered By Love

Stephanie Laurens Mastered By Love

The ninth book in the Bastion Club series, 2009

“a last bastion against the matchmakers of the ton”

MEMBERS

Lady Letitia Randall

#7 Christian Allardyee,

Marquess of Dearne

Alicia “Carrington” Pevensey

#2 Anthony Blake,

Viscount Torrington

Phoebe Malleson

#5 Jocelyn Deverell,

Viscount Paignton

#1 THE LADY CHOSEN

#2 A GENTLEMAN’S HONOR

#3 A LADY OF HIS OWN

#4 A FINE PASSION

Lady Penelope Selborne

#3 Charles St. Austell,

Earl of Lostwithiel

Madeline Gascoigne

#6 Gervase Tregarth,

Earl of Crowhurst

Lady Clarice Attwood

#4 Jack Warnefleet,

Baron Warnefleet of Minchinbury

Leonora Carling

#1 Tristan Wemyss,

Earl of Trentham

And so it ends. DL

#5 TO DISTRACTION

#6 BEYOND SEDUCTION

#7 THE EDGE OF DESIRE

One

September 1816

Coquetdale, Northumbria

I t wasn’t supposed to have been like this.

Wrapped in his greatcoat, alone on the box seat of his excellently sprung curricle, Royce Henry Varisey, tenth Duke of Wolverstone, turned the latest in the succession of post-horses he’d raced up the highway from London onto the minor road leading to Sharperton and Harbottle. The gently rounded foothills of the Cheviot Hills gathered him in like a mother’s arms; Wolverstone Castle, his childhood home and newly inherited principal estate, lay close by the village of Alwinton, beyond Harbottle.

One of the horses broke stride; Royce checked it, held the pair back until they were in step, then urged them on. They were flagging. His own high-bred blacks had carried him as far as St. Neots on Monday; thereafter he’d had a fresh pair put to every fifty or so miles.

It was now Wednesday morning, and he was a long way from London, once again-after sixteen long years-entering home territory. Ancestral territory. Rothbury and the dark glades of its forest lay behind him; ahead the rolling, largely treeless skirts of the Cheviots, dotted here and there with the inevitable sheep, spread around the even more barren hills themselves, their backbone the border with Scotland beyond.

The hills, and that border, had played a vital role in the evolution of the dukedom. Wolverstone had been created after the Conquest as a marcher lordship to protect England from the depredations of marauding Scots. Successive dukes, popularly known as the Wolves of the North, had for centuries enjoyed the privileges of royalty within their domains.

Many would argue they still did.

Certainly they’d remained a supremely powerful clan, their wealth augmented by their battlefield prowess, and protected by their success in convincing successive sovereigns that such wily, politically powerful ex-kingmakers were best left alone, left to hold the Middle March as they had since first setting their elegantly shod Norman feet on English soil.

Royce studied the terrain with an eye honed by absence. Reminded of his ancestry, he wondered anew if their traditional marcher independence-originally fought for and won, recognized by custom and granted by royal charter, then legally rescinded but never truly taken away, and even less truly given up-hadn’t underpinned the rift between his father and him.

His father had belonged to the old school of lordship, one that had included the majority of his peers. According to their creed, loyalty to either country or sovereign was a commodity to be traded and bought, something both Crown and country had to place a suitable price upon before it was granted. More, to dukes and earls of his father’s ilk, “country” had an ambiguous meaning; as kings in their own domains, those domains were their primary concern while the realm possessed a more nebulous and distant existence, certainly a lesser claim on their honor.

While Royce would allow that swearing fealty to the pres ent monarchy-mad King George and his dissolute son, the Prince Regent-wasn’t an attractive proposition, he held no equivocation over swearing allegiance, and service, to his country-to England.