Unfettered freedom! He'd escaped.

With an arrogant smile, Harold Henry Cynster -- Demon to everyone, even to his mother in her weaker moments -- drew his curricle to a flourishing halt in the yard behind his Newmarket stable. Tossing the reins to his groom, Gillies, who leaped from the back of the elegant equipage to catch them, Demon stepped down to the cobbles. In a buoyant mood, he ran a loving hand over the glossy bay hide of his leader and scanned the yard with a proprietorial eye.

There was not a scheming mama or disapproving, gimlet-eyed dowager in sight.

Bestowing a last fond pat on his horse's shoulder, Demon headed for the open rear door of the stable. He'd left London at midday, unexpectedly content to have the breeze blow the cloying perfume of a certain lascivious countess from his brain. More than content to leave behind the ballrooms, the parties, and the myriad traps the matchmaking mamas laid for gentlemen such as he. Not that he'd found any difficulty in evading such snares, but, these days, there was a certain scent on the breeze, a presentiment of danger he was too experienced to ignore.

First his cousin Devil, then his own brother Vane, and now his closest cousin, Richard-who next of their select band of six, the Bar Cynster as they were called, would fate cause to trip into the arms of a loving wife?

Whoever it was, it wouldn't be him.

Pausing before the open doors of the stable, he swung around, eyes squinting in the slanting sunlight. Some of his horses were ambling in the paddocks with their lads in close attendance. On the Heath beyond, other stables' strings were exercising under the eyes of owners and trainers.

The scene was an exclusively male one. The fact that he felt entirely at home -- indeed, could feel himself relaxing -- was ironic. He could hardly claim he didn't like women, didn't enjoy their company. Hadn't -- didn't -- devote considerable time to their conquest.

He couldn't deny he took pleasure in, and derived considerable satisfaction from, those conquests. He was, after all, a Cynster.

He smiled. All that was true. However...

Whereas the other members of the Bar Cynster, as wealthy, well-born gentlemen, had accepted the fact that they would marry and establish families in the timehonored tradition, he had vowed to be different. He'd vowed never to marry, never to tempt the fate with which his brother and cousins had fenced and lost. Marriage to fulfill society's obligations was all very well, but to marry a lady one loved had been the baneful fate of all male Cynsters to date.

A baneful fate indeed for a warrior breed -- to be forever at the mercy of a woman. A woman who held one's heart, soul and future in her small, delicate hands.

It was enough to make the strongest warrior blanch.

He was having none of it.

Casting a last glance around the neat yard, approving the swept cobbles, the fences in good repair, Demon turned and entered the main stable housing his racing string. Afternoon stables had already commenced -- he would view his exercising horses alongside his very capable trainer, Carruthers.

Demon was on his way to his stud farm, located three miles farther south of the racecourse in the gently undulating countryside bordering the Heath. As he had every intention of avoiding marriage for the term of his natural life, and the current atmosphere in London had turned fraught with the Season about to start, and his aunts, as well as his mother, fired with the excitement of weddings, wives and the consequent babies, so he'd elected to lie low and see out the Season from...