Her cab reached the Savoy Hotel just as the duke climbed back into his own carriage and drove away. She followed him to his home, a very fine neoclassical structure that she despised. Perhaps if its walls were made of glass she wouldn’t mind it as much. Then she might see him moving about inside, doing whatever it was that he did when he was not making her fall head over heels in love.

But she saw nothing. The governesses in the park were becoming very suspicious about the hansom cab. And it wouldn’t be long now before a bobby came around and asked the cabbie what he thought he was doing loitering about outside the homes of dukes and earls.

She could not sit here indefinitely.

One more glimpse. She just wanted one more glimpse of him.

The gods were listening. A carriage emblazoned with the Lexington coat of arms drew up at the curb. A minute later, he walked out of the front door and entered the carriage.

She had her “one more glimpse.” But it was like receiving a single grain of rice when she’d starved for a week.

“Follow that carriage,” she instructed her cabbie. “And don’t lose sight of it.”

One more glimpse. Just one more when he alighted at his destination.

“Mum, you’d ’ave ’im sooner if you’d let ’im ’ave a good look at you,” said the cabbie.

How she wished that were the case. “Hurry.”

His carriage turned west. She thought he was headed for his club on St. James’s Street, but the carriage didn’t stop until it had reached Cromwell Road, right before that magnificent cathedral to the animal kingdom, the British Museum of Natural History.

Where her dinosaur was housed!

She threw a handful of coins at the cabbie, leaped off the hansom, and cursed her dress with its narrow skirts, which made it impossible to attempt anything remotely athletic.

He ascended the front steps and passed under the beautiful Romanesque arches into the museum. The main display in the central hall was the nearly complete skeleton—missing only three vertebrae—of a fifty-foot sperm whale. She’d never before visited the museum without stopping to admire the skeleton, but now she only looked about wildly for him.

Let him go to the west wing to amble among the birds and the fish. Or let him go upstairs. But no, presently he peeled away from the cluster of visitors gathered before the whale skeleton and headed to the east wing, where the paleontological collection was housed.

Thankfully, the gallery that greeted visitors upon first entering the east wing dealt with mammals: the great American mastodon, the perfectly preserved mammoth unearthed in Essex, the rhinoceros-like Uintatherium, the northern manatee, hunted to extinction toward the end of the previous century. Perhaps they were all he intended to inspect this afternoon. Or the human and primate fossils in exhibit cases that lined the southern wall. Or the extinct birds in the pavilion toward the end of the gallery—the moas were very interesting, as were the eggs of the aepyornis, a bird said to have weighed half a ton.

But he paid only cursory attention to these wonders collected from all over the world for his enjoyment and edification and made for the gallery that ran parallel to the mammalian saloon, where the reptilian remains were kept.

She still hadn’t lost all hope. Several perpendicular galleries, full of marine curiosities, branched out from the Reptilia gallery. Perhaps—perhaps—

Perhaps not. He slowed, stopped before the Pareiasaurus skeleton from the Karoo formation of South Africa, and then leaned in to read the small plaque that gave the names of the discoverers and the donors.

Her heart thudded. Her name was on a plaque barely fifty feet away from where he stood. Although he wouldn’t immediately be able to make the connection, should he find out, subsequently, that she had crossed the Atlantic at approximately the same time as he, then the coincidence would strike even him as too great, no matter how unwilling he was to think of Baroness von Seidlitz-Hardenberg and Mrs. Easterbrook as the same person.

He turned from the Pareiasaurus. Along the south wall of the gallery were the great sea lizards: the Plesiosaurus and the ichthyosaurs. Against the north wall were the cases that held the land monsters.

As if pulled by a compass, he strode toward the north wall.


Why he was puttering about the premier British natural history museum Christian had no idea—there wasn’t even a Swabian dragon on display, as far as he could recall. If anything he ought to be checking the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin or the Institute of Paleontology and Historical Geology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.

Yet something had propelled him here. It was possible she had already arrived in London. And if she had, wouldn’t she wish to avail herself of the best collection of Dinosauria in all of England?

It was a sunny, crisp day out, and the gallery was not crowded: half a dozen young men who looked to be university students; a middle-aged couple, plump and expensively dressed; and a governess with two charges whom she hushed from time to time when their voices grew too excited.

Out of an utterly irrational hope, he looked several times toward the governess. It had occurred to him that the baroness was perhaps the commonest of commoners, and therefore did not consider herself worthy of an alliance with a duke. But that was the least of his worries. What was the point of being a duke with a lineage going back eight hundred years if he couldn’t marry as he wished?

The governess, a severe-looking woman in her thirties, was not amused by his attention. She gave him a hard glare and pointedly turned her attention back to her charges, pronouncing that they had better head for the fossil fish if they wanted to look at everything before it was time to go home for tea.

Her head held so high her nose pointed almost directly at the ceiling, she ushered the children out. As she did so, another woman entered the gallery from its far end. She stopped to study the flying lizards fossils on display against the wall.

His heart turned over. She wore a simple light gray jacket-and-skirt set, nothing like the romantic, softly draped dresses he’d seen on the baroness. But from the back, her height, posture, and way her clothes hung on her person—had he kept one of the baroness’s dresses, it would have fit her perfectly.

The woman turned around.

The world stopped. The years fell away. And he was again the nineteen-year-old boy on the cricket grounds of Lord’s, staring at her with an arrow in his heart.

Mrs. Easterbrook.

Francis Bacon once wrote, “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” The man must have had Mrs. Easterbrook in mind. Her nose was noticeably long. The unusual shapes of her lower lash lines made her eyes widest not at the center, but more toward the outer corners. And surely those eyes would look absolutely ridiculous were they set even a tiny fraction of an inch farther apart. And yet the effect, together with her high cheekbones and full lips, was simply stunning.

He wanted to make cast models of her. He wanted to take a set of precision calipers and measure every distance between her features. He wanted her blood and glandular fluids analyzed by the finest chemists in the world—there must be something detectibly different in her inner workings for him to respond so dramatically, as if he’d been given a drug for which science had yet to find a name.

But more than anything, he wanted to—

He yanked himself back to his senses: He was a man who had committed himself to another. The baroness might very well not reciprocate said commitment, but he expected more of himself when he gave his word.

“Nasty brutes, are they not?” said the ravishing Mrs. Easterbrook, setting her reticule down at the edge of the display case.

He glanced at the case next to him. Earlier he had been standing next to a display of giant turtles, but now he was in front of a Cetiosaurus. He must have drifted toward her, mesmerized.

“I happen to think they are very handsome specimens—this one, especially.”

She glanced at him, her gaze a caress upon his skin. “Pah,” she said. “Squat and ugly.”

She stood so close they nearly touched, but her words came to him only faintly, as if muffled by fog and distance. And when he turned his head away, so that he wasn’t looking directly at her, he became aware of a subtle yet decadent fragrance of jasmine.

“If you do not enjoy God’s creatures, madam,” he said curtly, “perhaps you ought not to visit a museum of natural history.”


With that, her lover turned on his heels and left.

For a brief minute, as they headed toward each other, the air had crackled with expectation. So familiar, this sensation of closing the distance between them. Any moment now, he would smile and offer her his arm. They would stand together and admire her wonderful discovery. And nothing, nothing, would ever pull them asunder again.

Then she’d noticed his expression: that of a man sleepwalking. A man bewitched, his will confiscated, his faculties forsaken.

He had not exaggerated.

Such reaction on the part of a man used to mortify her—it confirmed that she was a freak. But coming from him, she adored it. She wanted him to gawk at her endlessly. It didn’t change the fact that he loved her for who she was.

And maybe, just maybe, she could use her looks as a lure, reel him in, and keep him close at hand until he realized that he didn’t dislike her. That, in fact, he liked her thoroughly and ardently.