Educating Caroline

“It is a true joy to listen to Patricia Cabot’s unique voice.”
—Romantic Times

Praise for
PATRICIA CABOT
and her exquisite Highlands romance
Lady of Skye

“Brims with humor, deft characterization, and an intriguing plot. . . . Cabot writes romance almost without peer, creating passionate love scenes readers will swoon over, delivered with poetry and beauty, and memorable secondary characters.”

—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

“
Lady of Skye
is an entertaining Victorian romance that readers of historicals will fully enjoy. The story line is crisp, tense, and often amusing. . . . Patricia Cabot provides her audience with a delightful novel that brings the mid-nineteenth century vividly alive.”

—Harriet Klausner, Barnesandnoble.com

Read what critics have said about Patricia Cabot and her very special brand of romantic fiction . . .

“Wildly sexy. . . . Witty dialogue abounds from the first page, but what sets this romance apart are the hero’s charm and keen sense of humor, which immediately endear him to readers. . . . A jewel of a romance.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Patricia Cabot delivers a warm, sweet, and delightfully charming tale [that] . . . showcases [her] talents for penning witty, lively romances.”

—
Romantic Times

“Passion, wit, warmth . . . thoroughly charming.”

—Stella Cameron, author of
Glass Houses

“Sexy, romantic . . . delightful.”

—Jill Jones, author of
Bloodline

“A charming and delightful read from beginning to end. The story flows freely and the characters will capture and entertain you.”

—
Rendezvous

“Cabot is a delightful read with her humor and verbal sparring. . . . Splendid!”

—
Bell, Book and Candle

“An entertaining tale that will bring much deserved acclaim to the author. . . . Charming!”

—Harriet Klausner, Amazon.com

Also by Patricia Cabot
Lady of Skye
Available from Pocket Books

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An
Original
Publication of POCKET BOOKS
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Copyright © 2001 by Meggin Cabot
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For Benjamin

Prologue
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Epilogue

Prologue

Oxford, England
December 1869

A
full moon hung in the air over the high college walls, lighting the young man’s way as clearly as any gas lamp.

Not that there weren’t gas lamps, of course. There were. But the glow from that round white moon rendered the amber flicker of the gaslights quite superfluous. Had all the gas lamps in England gone out persons with business after hours—like himself—might still move about with relative ease by the light of this remarkable moon.

Or maybe it was simply that he was so drunk. Yes, it was quite likely that this moon was in no way different from any other moon, and that he was still excessively intoxicated from all the whiskey he’d drunk during the game, and that the reason he was able to find his way so easily through the midnight dark had nothing to do with the light from the moon, but everything to do with the simple fact that he had come this way so many times before.

He did not even have to look, really, where he was going. His feet took him in the correct direction. He was able, as he walked, to concentrate on other things—as fully as he was able to concentrate on anything, drunk as he was—and one of the things he was concentrating upon—besides the cold, which was considerable—was just where in hell he was going to get the money.

Not that he felt truly obligated to pay it back. The cards had been marked, of course. How else had he lost so much, in so little time? He was an excellent cardplayer. Really excellent. The cards had certainly been marked.

Which was odd, considering that Slater had been so convinced that the game was all right. Slater knew all the best games in town. Thomas had been lucky, he knew, even to have been admitted to this one, seeing as how he was, after all, only an earl—and a brand new one, at that. Why, that fellow with the mustache. He’d been a duke. A bloody duke!

Of course, he hadn’t acted much like one. Particularly when, after losing yet another round, Tommy had declared the game fixed. Instead of laughing off the accusation, the way a real duke might have done, this one pulled a pistol on him. Really, a pistol! Tommy had heard of such things, of course, but he had never expected it actually to happen to him.

Thank God Slater had been there. He’d calmed the fellow down, and assured him that Tommy hadn’t meant it—though, in fact, Tommy bloody well had. But you could not, Slater explained later, when they’d been alone, accuse a man of cheating without proof. And Tommy’s only proof—that the design on the back of the cards looked strange, and that he’d never lost so badly before— was not particularly convincing.

He was lucky, he supposed, to have escaped with his life. That duke had looked as if putting a bullet through the brain of a fellow player was something he did every day.

Though a bullet through the brain might have been preferable to what Tommy knew he had in store for him: trying to find the thousand pounds he’d need to pay off what he now owed.

He couldn’t, of course, ask his bank for it. The fortune his father had left him after his death just a little over a year before was being held in trust for him until his twenty-first birthday, and that was still two years away. He couldn’t touch that money. But he could, he knew, borrow against it.

The trouble was, who to ask. Not the bank. They’d only inform his mother, and she’d want to know what he needed the money for, and he couldn’t possibly tell her that.

His sister was a possibility. She was already of age, and had come into her part of their inheritance just that month. Caroline might reasonably be appealed to for a loan. She would want to know what he needed the money for, but she was quite easy to lie to. A good deal easier to lie to than their mother.

And if Tommy came up with a good enough story— something involving poverty-stricken children, for instance, or cruelly abandoned animals, since she was quite tenderhearted, his sister—he was sure of at least four or five hundred pounds.

The trouble was, he didn’t like lying to Caroline. Oh, teasing her was one thing, but outright lying? That was another thing entirely. It offended his moral sensibilities, lying so outrageously to his sister, even if it meant, as in this case, saving his own hide. The fact that Caroline would surely rather pay off his debts than lose him did not ease his conscience the slightest. No, Tommy knew he would have to find someone else to loan him the thousand quid.

And as he mentally ran through a list of his friends and acquaintances, trying to remember if any of them owed him any favors, his feet, which had gone on walk ing, brought him to the gate to his college, and stopped there. He reached out, still without consciously thinking what he was doing, and was not at all surprised to find the gate securely locked. It had been so, of course, since nine o’clock, and it was now well past midnight.

His feet, again of their own accord, began moving once more, this time taking him past the gate, and along the high stone wall that circled the living quarters he shared with two hundred or so of his fellow academicians. He was still running over his list of friends, not even thinking about what he was doing. Because what he was doing had become quite habitual over the past few months. He was, of course, going over the wall. As soon as he came to the spot where there was a good enough toehold in the stone, that is.

None of his fellow students had any money, that he knew. They were all in the same position he was . . . waiting for their twenty-first birthdays, and their inheritances. A few had fathers still living, and a few of those were occasionally the recipients of gifts of cash. But no one that he knew intimately enough to ask for a loan of a thousand pounds had been given anything like that amount lately.

It was as he was dejectedly pushing back the dead ivy that covered the wall he was about to climb, and stuffing his boot toe into a gouge in the mortar, that a voice called his name. He turned his head, swearing a bit beneath his breath. All he needed now was for the proctor to be alerted to the fact that the Earl of Bartlett was once again scaling the wall—

He turned his head, and saw that it wasn’t the proctor at all, but that great ass of a duke. The fellow must have followed him from the tavern where they’d had their game. One would think that a duke had better things to do than follow penniless earls about, but apparently not.

“Look,” Tommy said, leaving his foot where it was, and resting an elbow upon his knee. “You’ll get your money, Your Grace. Didn’t I say you would? Not right away, of course, but soon—”

“This isn’t about the money,” the duke said. Really, but he looked nothing like a duke. Would a duke actually curl his mustache that way? And wasn’t that waistcoat, though velveteen, a bit, well . . . bright?

“This is about what you called me,” the duke said, and for the first time, Tommy saw that he was holding something in his hand. And in the bright white light from the moon, Tommy was also able to see precisely what it was.

“What I called you?” Quite suddenly, Tommy hoped their conversation
would
be overheard. He prayed quite fervently that that idiot proctor would overhear them and open the gate and demand an explanation. Far better— far, far better—to be sent down for being caught outside the walls after hours, than to receive a bullet through the gut—even if that bullet would likely relieve him of his debt.

“Right.” The duke kept the mouth of the pistol trained on Tommy’s chest. “A cheat. That’s what you called me. Well, The Duke don’t cheat, you know.”

Tommy became aware of two things at once. The first was that it seemed unlikely a duke—a
real
duke—would possess so erratic a grasp of grammar.

The second was that he was going to die.

“Say good night, my lord,” said the man-who-was-not-a-duke, and, still pointing the pistol in the direction of Tommy’s chest, he pulled the trigger.

And then, quite suddenly, the bright light from the moon faded, taking Tommy’s immediate troubles along with it.