Page 3 of The Wolf of Mayfair
“Not that I’m aware of. That is ... I’m certain she does have a name, just not one—”
Wingrave’s low growl cut off the remainder of that damning admission. “Let me see if I have this correct.”
He stopped quickly and his slow-witted servant caught himself just before he would have stumbled into Wingrave. “You allowed some stranger, whose name you did not collect and whose identity is unknown, into the ducal residence on the basis of her claims that she has some connection to the duke and duchess?”
The man’s pallor turned a deathly shade of white. “I ...”
“What proof did she give you? What official papers did she provide?”
“None,” the nervous servant whispered.
“None,” Wingrave repeated flatly. For centuries, the legacy, power, wealth, and influence that came with a dukedom dating back to William the Conqueror had ushered in all manner of graspers who sought whatever scraps they could through the family’s benevolence.
Every last one of them had learned the Blofields didn’t possess a shred of munificence in their cold-blooded bodies.
This latest parasite would be no exception.
Wingrave approached the foyer. He found her in an instant.
Diminutive and swallowed up by a too-big, tattered cloak, the lady stood in the middle of the black-and-white checkered floor. She’d tilted her neck so far back to view the fresco overhead, she’d knocked her hood loose, which left Wingrave an unhindered view of hisvisitor.
He did a cursory examination.
The young woman’s titian hair hung in a messy tangle down her back. What must be a thousand freckles or more smattered naturally plump cheeks, a dimpled chin, and a straight nose.
Yes, she was certainly no woman he’d ever kept company with, nor ever would. Furthermore, a bedraggled waif such as she certainly held no connection to the selective duke and duchess.
“Thisis the trespasser?” Wingrave drawled. His voice echoed in the cavernous three-story entryway and brought the lady whipping around.
She looked at him, and her pathetically revealing eyes flashed with recognition that quickly sapped the blood from her cheeks.
Yes, his reputation as a rake preceded him.
When his bumbling butler failed to form a response, he pinned his focus on the trembling creature before him.
Fear flashed in her eyes. “I’m nah a trespasser, my lord,” she whispered.
He leveled her with a look. “Do I know you?”
She dampened big, pillowy, soft lips made for a man’s cock. “N-nay?”
“Is that a question?” he jeered.
The long white, freckled column of her neck warbled. She drew in a breath.“Nay,”she said. “It was not a question but an answer. I do not ken ye.”
Wingrave did another assessment of the lady. She’d more courage than his servant, though that was hardly a feat for even the smallest babe.
He turned his attention away from the trembling chit. “She’s a wide-eyedmiss. You couldn’t throw a damned slip of a woman out?”
“I ... could not,” the head of the household staff said, his features as strained as his tone.
Wingrave let free a sound of disgust. “I should sack you.”
His butler appeared one utterance away from dissolving into tears.
Wingrave had opened his mouth to see it so when, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a rustle and flash of skirts.
The brave—or stupid—chit placed herself between him and his butler.
