Chapter One
The trouble with Darius Carsington was, he had no heart.
Everyone in his family agreed that the Earl of Hargate's youngest son had started out with one. Everyone agreed that he had not, at the outset, seemed destined to be the most aggravating of Lord Hargate's five sons.
Certainly he was not so very different from the others in appearance.
Two of his brothers, Benedict and Rupert, had inherited Lady Hargate's dark good looks. Darius, like Alistair and Geoffrey, had Lord Hargate's golden brown hair and amber eyes. Like all of his brothers, Darius was tall and strong. Like the others, he was handsome.
Unlike the others, he was scholarly, and always had been. He'd commenced aggravating his father by insisting on going to Cambridge, though all the males of the family had always attended Oxford. Cambridge was more intellectually rigorous, he said. One might study botany there, and iron smelting, and other subjects of natural and practical philosophy.
True, he'd done well at Cambridge. Unfortunately, ever since he completed his studies, he seemed to have let his intellect gain the upper hand of his affections as well as his morals.
To put it simply, Darius divided his life into two parts: (1) studying animal behavior, especially breeding and mating behavior, and (2) devoting his leisure hours to emulating this behavior.
Item Two was the problem.
Lord Hargate's other four sons had not been saints when it came to women—except for Geoffrey, that is, who was monogamous from the day he was born. When it came to quantity, however, none of the others matched Darius.
Still, his being a rake was a minor issue, for his father, mother, and the rest of his family were far from puritanical. Since he drew the line at seducing innocents, they could not complain that he was a cad. Since he was astute enough to confine himself to the demimonde or the very fringes of the Beau Monde, they could not complain of scandals. Morals among those groups were lax anyway, and their doings seldom raised eyebrows, let alone appeared in the scandal sheets.
What infuriated the family was the methodical and impersonal way he carried on his raking.
The creatures he studied meant more to him than any of the women he bedded. He could list all the differences, major and minor, between one breed of sheep and another. He could not remember his last paramour's name, let alone the color of her eyes.
Having waited in vain for his twenty-eight-year-old son to finish sowing his wild oats or at least show a sign of being human, Lord Hargate decided it was time to intervene.
He summoned Darius to his study.
All of Lord Hargate's sons knew what a summons to his study signified: He meant to come down on them, as Rupert would put it, "like a ton of bricks."
Yet Darius strode into what Alistair called the Inquisition Chamber as he might stride to the lectern to present a paper: shoulders back, head high, the fierce intelligence burning in his golden eyes.
All arrogant certainty, he stood in front of his father's desk and met his gaze straight on. To do otherwise was fatal. Even a man of lesser intelligence would have learned this, growing up with four strong-willed brothers.
He made sure to give the impression, too, that he'd taken no special pains with his appearance, since that would look like an attempt to appease the monster.
The fact was, Darius always knew exactly what he was doing and the impression he created.
Perhaps he'd merely swiped a brush through his thick brown hair. But the observant eye would note how the cut emphasized the natural golden lights, which his time out of doors—too often hatless—had bleached to tawny streaks. The sun had burnished his chiseled countenance as well. Likewise, the deceptively simple suit of clothes drew attention to his powerful frame.
He did not look scholarly at all. He didn't even look civilized. It wasn't simply the brawny physique and golden glow of strength and health but the animal energy he exuded, the sense of something untamed lurking beneath the surface.
What many observers, especially female observers, saw was not a wellborn gentleman but a force of nature.
Women were either swept away or wanted to tame him. They might as well try to tame the wind or the rain or the North Sea. He took what they offered, caring no more about them than the wind or the rain or the North Sea cared.
He saw no reason to behave otherwise. These dealings with women were, after all, transient by definition. They would have no impact on society, on agriculture, on anything of significance.
His father saw it differently, as he made plain. He said that raking was common and a sign of vulgarity, and the quantity of paramours made Darius appear to be in competition with other idle, thoughtless men incapable of doing anything more meaningful with their lives.
The lecture went on at some length, in the pithily devastating style that had made Lord Hargate one of the most feared men in Parliament.
Reason told Darius the speech was an illogical diatribe. All the same, it stung, as he knew it was intended to do. However, the rational man did not let emotion rule his actions, even under extreme provocation. If refusing to let his emotions rule him was Darius's great crime, so be it. He had learned long ago that logic and a cool detachment were powerful weapons. They kept overbearing family members from crushing one with the force of their personalities, prevented manipulation—by women, especially—and won respect—from fellow intellectuals, at least.
Thus Darius retaliated by giving the most aggravating reply he could think of on short notice: "With respect, sir, I fail to understand what emotion has to do with such matters. It is the natural instinct of the male to copulate with the opposite sex."
Excerpted from Not Quite A Lady by Loretta Chase Copyright © 2007 by Loretta Chase. Excerpted by permission.
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