Wherever Alaric looked, he found the hellish prints. The escutcheon on the dining room side table boasted two, the candelabra in the drawing room was doing duty as a picture hanger, and the fireplace in the morning room was adorned with three versions of himself with Empress Catherine.

He tore them all down as he went. When he reached the breakfast room—hearing giggles floating from just outside the door—and found two more images of himself (entitled Wilde Revealed), he gave up.

It wasn’t the prints making emotions rampage around his chest. It was the look in Willa’s eyes.

For a moment she had looked stricken, and then her eyes had gone utterly blank. Courteous, but blank. The empty face that she presented to the world: that of the governed, perfect lady.

His kiss had only momentarily shattered her façade.

But he was coming to realize that he had shattered more than her reserve. Something inside himself had changed, too. He felt a sudden, desperate need to turn back the clock. Push her, force her, into acknowledging Alaric, rather than Lord Wilde.

She disliked Lord Wilde. No, stubble it: Willa didn’t dislike anyone. She observed them, with the same friendly curiosity with which he observed people in other countries.

She was curious about her fellow Englishmen.

But … and this was a huge but … he thought she showed only her friend Lavinia her dizzy sense of humor. Remembering the way she looked at the little skunk—a stinky animal bred to be a fur scarf—made his chest tighten with crushing weight.

Willa deserved a peaceful life with a man who would keep her safe from vulgar eyes and gossiping tongues. A man whose face was plastered across half of England was ineligible. His notoriety meant that whoever married him would always be in the public eye.

Most of the guests were upstairs in their chambers, engaged in the elaborate process of dressing for dinner, the same process that would spit forth his brother as varnished and polished as a seashell. If he encountered one of those guests right now, especially a lady, the odds were that he would be greeted with a mixture of vulgar curiosity and awe.

Looking down at the prints in his hand, he went in search of his younger siblings. They’d been giggling outside the door only moments before, but now they’d vanished.

He found his sister Betsy alone in the nursery, where she seemed to be working on a large drawing.

“Where are they?” he demanded, tossing the prints to the side.

“The boys? I have no idea.” She bit her bottom lip as she concentrated.

Alaric felt a wave of affection. Betsy had been a mere girl when he’d left England, and now, at sixteen, she was nearly grown.

“What are you drawing?” he asked, coming closer.

She scowled at him and covered it with her arm. “Don’t!”

“No wonder there are so many of these things around the house,” he groaned, catching sight of her subject. “You’re creating them.”

Betsy grinned with all the evil mischief that his siblings had in force. “It’s only fair!” she cried. “Do you have any idea how much teasing I’ve endured because of you?”

Alaric frowned. “You have been teased?”

“You do know that I’ve been attending a seminary, don’t you?”

He shook his head. “When I left, you were here, with a governess.” He looked around. “Tall, gaunt woman?”

“Mr. Calico kept bringing her letters from a gentleman whom she knew in Kent,” Betsy said. “One day she climbed on the back of his wagon and left, without a word of warning. Papa was most displeased.”

“I imagine so.”

“But it turned out for the best, because Joan, Viola, and I were sent to school, which we love, except that all the girls have prints of you on their bedchamber walls.” She wrinkled her nose.

“I apologize,” Alaric said.

“So you should!” she cried, eyes sparkling. “I can’t tell you how many girls befriended me merely because they thought I would invite them home to meet you. Or introduce you later, once we debut.”

“That is unpleasant.”

“I agree,” Betsy said, turning back to her drawing. She moved her arm, enabling Alaric to get a good look. It wasn’t the nose he saw in the glass every morning, but the likeness wasn’t bad.

“What am I doing with that sword over my head?” he asked.

“You’re fighting a polar bear,” she said. “I shall put him in this blank space once I find a picture to copy, because I can’t remember what they look like. Right now I’m just trying to get your nose right. It keeps going overly long, if you see what I mean.”

“I do,” Alaric said, nodding. “If I actually resembled your portrait, I would lose the greater part of my female admirers, which would be a blessing.”

Betsy sighed. “I tried telling the girls scurrilous things about you, but it had no effect.”

“What scurrilous things?” Alaric inquired.

“Oh, that your lover had been cooked for a cannibal breakfast, and things like that.”

“Don’t tell me you were allowed to attend that blasted play?”

“Not yet, but I’ve heard all about it. Papa says that I will be able to see it, the next time we go to London. You might as well stop taking them down,” she said, almost kindly, as she gestured at the crumpled prints he’d brought with him. “Leonidas has lots more. He bought every copy he could find. He’s adding some embellishments and then he means to put his up tomorrow.”

“Embellishments,” Alaric said hollowly. “Such as?”

“Oh, whiskers and so on,” Betsy said. “Demon horns. He has some red ink so he can make a pretty devil’s tail …”

This was all going to be marvelously helpful when it came to courting Miss Wilhelmina Everett Ffynche.

“Do you suppose there’s anything I might do to dissuade him?”

“I do not,” Betsy stated. She was sketching rapidly now. The Alaric on the page held his sword above his head in such a position that he wouldn’t be able to fight off a sparrow, let alone a bear.

“The flat of the sword does nothing in a fight,” he observed.

She glanced up at him. “Do you think I care?”

“I suppose not,” Alaric said. Truth was relative; he knew it as well as his sister did. But he had the strange feeling that Willa saw things in a less ambiguous fashion.

For her, the stream of tawdry portraits that multiplied by the day would be evidence of his ineligibility, no matter his dislike of his own fame.

He left the nursery, trying to think how to rein in the maelstrom of public attention so it was acceptable to a reserved virgin with a dislike of celebrity. Nothing came to mind.

In fact, he would say that he was the antithesis of everything Willa wanted in a spouse.

A reluctant grin curled his mouth. One thing could be said for him—for all the Wildes, it seemed.

When they went down, they really went down.