The Disgraceful Lord Gray. Virginia Heath

       Chapter One

       July 1820

      There was no doubt about it. Lord Fennimore was going to have his guts for garters. Especially after the unfortunate shredded underwear incident of last night. The commander of the King’s Elite had no discernible sense of humour which didn’t bode well for Gray’s newly discovered, but no less coveted ambition.

      ‘Trefor! Give it back. Now!’

      There was no point in chasing him. The blasted dog saw everything as a game and had been in a state of playful overexcitement ever since they arrived in Suffolk yesterday—and who could blame him, really? Aside from a few brief weeks after his birth, Trefor had always been a city dog. If one ignored Hyde Park and St James’s, vast open spaces of green were completely alien to him. But the green here was never ending, filled with flat fields to dash across, abundant trees to relieve himself against and sticks aplenty to chase with impunity. Doggy paradise. And Gray’s mischievous mutt seemed determined to reach this strange, alluring new horizon at lightning speed with curmudgeonly old Fennimore’s slipper clamped firmly between his jaws.

      To tease Gray, the dog dropped the stolen booty at the boundary to their rented property and eyed him mischievously, his powerful tail wagging nineteen to the dozen, his floppy ears pricked and his enormous pink tongue lolling out of one side of his mouth like a juicy slice of ham.

      Gray examined his cuffs, looked at the sky, some trees, anything but his dratted hound while he slowly edged his way forward, hoping to convince the animal he wasn’t fixated on his superior’s now slobbery shoe at all. Mere inches away he lunged like a panther, only to growl as the dog snatched up the blasted slipper again before he could reach it and raced towards the tree-lined horizon once more.

       ‘Trefor!’

      This time Gray did give chase, not only because of his dour superior’s footwear, or because the animal had disappeared into a small wooded copse, but because a couple of sheep had also appeared in the distance and his dog had even less experience of sheep than he did wide open spaces. He needed to make a good first impression on the Viscount Gislingham. He needed to befriend him. Ingratiate himself. Be the perfect neighbour and work his way into his small, intimate social circle. More than anything, he needed to impress Lord Fennimore if he was ever going to stand a cat in hell’s chance of getting that coveted promotion. Something unlikely to happen if his out-of-control canine injured one of the flock and the Viscount banned him from entering the grounds; the mission shot in the paddock before it had even started.

      Not that Trefor was violent; he was a licker, not a biter. He adored everyone and everything and loved them enthusiastically. Something the dim-witted sheep would not know as he came bounding towards them intent on saying hello. Why had he insisted on bringing his dog along? All his lofty claims that a proper country gentleman would have at least one loyal hound at his side seemed to be doomed to be ruined by the said hound from the outset because, while Trefor was exceedingly loyal, he was also completely untrainable.

      The dog failed to materialise out of the clump of trees, their trunks so densely packed Gray had to skirt around them before he encountered the unexpected steep bank of a deep yet narrow stretch of water which cut through the flat pasture.

      Marvellous.

      There had to be water.

      Trefor’s absolute favourite thing in the world bar footwear, sticks, balls and sausages. There was no point hoping he hadn’t found it or wasn’t fully immersed in it. Some things were as inevitable as day following night or another carpeting from his furious superior about his unruly, destructive pet mere hours since the last. This morning, more than Lord Fennimore’s slipper would be going home soggy—not that Gray blamed Trefor for that either. The summer sun was already blazing in the sky and it was only eight o’clock.

      Last night, thanks to the sticky heat, the huge weight of the new responsibility on his shoulders, his overwhelming desire to show old Fennimore that he was exactly the right man for the job and the strange bed, he had slept so fitfully he would have dunked himself in this convenient stream in the small hours had he known of its existence. Because of his unexpected morning sprint, the cold wash he had revelled in a scant few minutes ago in his new bedchamber was now wasted and his meticulously ironed shirt was clinging to his hot skin in a manner no gentleman would allow to be seen in public.

      Not that he was much of a gentleman. Not any more at any rate, although that was all of his own making so there was no point being angry about it. He was over it now. Nearly a decade after his life had imploded, he was actually rather philosophical about the experience. Life was too short for regrets, especially when he had racked up so many.

      Gray had come a long way since those dark days of his youth. He shared little in common with the reckless, needy adolescent he had been that fateful summer. Or the aristocratic brother he hadn’t seen since his heart had been ripped in two by betrayal. Betrayal that had come courtesy of the cold, unfeeling father who had instigated it behind Gray’s back and the woman who hadn’t truly loved him at all. Nor did he have any regrets about what might have been. The wife and immature, romantic and ultimately futile dreams of the future he had once believed should have been his now rarely crossed his mind. It was what it was. Done and dusted. And fate had sent him hurtling down a very different path, one he was pleasantly surprised had led to adventure instead of matrimony.

      He was now older, much wiser and was clearly what he had been born to be. A spy tasked with bringing the enemies of the Crown to justice. A man who had seen and done more than most. Experiences that had made him hardy, resourceful and tenacious. Aside from having his childish heart shredded and creating the mother of all scandals, he’d had an