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only adds to my ruination. Everyone knows that there is nothing a highborn gentleman such as you could want with a poor widow of uncertain past. Nothing proper, at any rate.”
    Ardeth stroked his chin. “A wedding would be proper.”
    Genie stopped walking. “I beg your pardon?”
    “Your reputation would be restored if you married me.”
    “May I faint now?”

Chapter Three
    “No, you shall not faint. I have seen you under fire. You are strong.”
    Strong? Genie did not think her legs would hold her up. Her brains and her body alike were turned to blanc-mange. As if he understood, Lord Ardeth led her to a bench outside headquarters. She sank down, because she could not run. If she could not faint, perhaps she should just throw herself under a passing cart. Here she was, alone in a foreign city, and her only…friend was this tall stranger of commanding presence and unknown past. He was handsome, for certain, in a dark, brooding, serious way, far unlike Elgin with his fair boyish looks and ready laugh. Lord Ardeth appeared to be older, perhaps thirty, or perhaps forty with his weary eyes, or twenty with his smooth skin. He was a puzzle, one Genie had no interest in solving. He had shown her nothing but kindness, yet she still feared him. With just cause, it seemed, for the earl had to be a madman.
    “I must have misunderstood, my lord.”
    “No, you heard correctly. I am proposing marriage. Awkwardly, obviously, but marriage all the same.” He was pacing in front of the bench in long, athletic strides. The crow took up a perch on a nearby railing, his head cocked to one side as if the creature was as confused as Genie.
    “I realize that a maiden wishes to be wooed, but we have no time for ballads and bouquets.”
    Ballads and bouquets? Maidens? He definitely had been out of England too long, Genie decided, unless he had been locked in his family’s attics, where no one could see their demented disgrace.
    “It is the best solution,” Lord Ardeth continued. “No one shuns a countess.”
    Genie was no longer worried about being ostracized by polite society. Now she feared for her very life. Thank goodness enough officers and soldiers were entering and exiting the building that she did not have to consider herself alone with a lunatic. The men were looking at them with curiosity, but surely one would come to her aid if she cried out. “Forgive me, my lord, but you do not even know me.”
    “Nor you me.” Lord Ardeth waved one long hand in the air in dismissal. He had never met his first wife until the day of the wedding. “That does not matter.”
    He was worse than crazy. Wed a total stranger after a day or two of acquaintance? How could he think that a marriage could succeed that way? Genie had had a hard enough time accommodating herself to Elgin’s quirks, and she had known him nearly her entire life. She firmly believed that women should know what they were getting when they gave their hands and their lives into some man’s keeping. She stood up, hoping her feet were ready to carry her away. She would worry about her future later. “Thank you for the, ah, honor, my lord. But I am afraid—”
    “Do not be. I would not hurt you. No one else would, were you my wife. Think on it, lady. What other choices have you? You said your family will not take you in, nor your dead husband’s relatives. Would you seek a position, in your condition? No one would hire you, were you able to keep working. Or do you believe the British government will pay you a pension? Ha! My wife would still be waiting for six hun—”
    “You have a wife?”
    “If I had a wife, I meant. She would be long dead before the government thought to look after her. You and the babe would starve waiting for official promises to turn to gold.”
    He was right and Genie knew it. Still, marriage? She shook her head.
    Ardeth watched the sunlight flicker through the reddish curls that were not hidden by her black bonnet. “Do not say no. Sit.