"I don't know what it is, my lord." Mrs. Upham sniffed, then dangled the smudged and tattered pale-blue envelope from between two fingers with clear disapproval. "It's very… dirty."

She had put the rest of the post on Flynn's desk in neat sorted stacks as she always did. Estate business—the biggest stack. Fan mail and book business—the midsize stack. Personal letters from his mother or brother—neither of whom seemed to believe in phones or e-mail—in the third.

All very tidy and organized—as if she could do the same to Flynn's life.

Good luck, he thought.

As his life currently consisted of Dunmorey, a dank and crumbling five-hundred-odd-year-old castle full of portraits of disapproving ancestors who looked down their noses at Flynn's efforts to literally keep a roof over their heads, its attendant farms, lands and tenants, as well as his horse-mad brother, Dev, who had great plans for reviving the Dunmorey stud but no money to accomplish it, and his mother, whose mantra since his father's death seven months ago had been, "We need to find you a bride," Flynn didn't think Mrs. Upham was likely to find any joy in it at all.

The only joy he could give her would be to tell her to throw it out.

His father certainly would have.

The late eighth earl of Dunmorey had no patience for anything that wasn't proper and traditional. He had once thrown out a letter Flynn had scrawled on a piece of a paper bag from a war zone where he'd been working on a story.

"If you can't be bothered to write a proper letter, I can't be bothered to read it," his father had informed him later.

It would have been nice if the late earl had stopped saying things like th