All for You by Lynn Kurland

definitely replace his chef—and negotiate the minefield that was his complicated social life. Peaches hadn’t arrived yet, which worried him, but perhaps she had decided to take supper in her room. He wished he could have joined her.
    He wasn’t sure he was equal to identifying all the players gathered there, but he supposed he might as well identify the hazards—especially the trio of girlfriends he was going to have to manage. He decided to dispense with reminding himself of their familial connections simply because those connections didn’t matter. The women were daughters of dukes, uniformly well-heeled, and all very much enamored of the trappings of his title and the glittering guests at his grandmother’s regular soirees.
    In him personally, he supposed, they were rather less interested, unless his Rolls and a few paparazzi were involved.
    He considered the least dangerous of the lot first. Her name was Zoe, and she was dim enough that he suspected she had been at the dye bottle once too often and bleached not only her locks, but her brain as well. She loved his grandmother’s parties and only pouted when he had other commitments. He wasn’t sure she could even spell medieval, much less give any details about the time period.
    Brittani, who sported stunning dark hair and an absolutely flawless face, possessed a personality that would have made vampires hike up their cloaks and tiptoe away whilst she remained peacefully and safely asleep. She especially loved his Rolls, trendy eateries in London, and his excellent seats in Drury Lane. She had read English Literature in college and could carry on a very interesting conversation when it suited her, which it rarely did. Stephen suspected that she would have agreed to marry him if he’d asked, but that would have required her to tell her Italian lover to set sail for other shores. Stephen had no fear that he would ever be standing before a priest with her.
    The final woman in that trio of harpies was Victoria, who would have done her namesake proud. She didn’t merely enjoy his preferred seating or taste in music or tickets to the opera, she carried on as if his lifestyle and the luxuries associated with it were her due. She was a dark blonde, he suspected, but he wasn’t about to ask her the truth of it. He couldn’t say any of his outings with her were enjoyable, but of the three, her pedigree pleased his grandmother the most so he endured her company to buy familial peace.
    Really, he was going to have to put his foot down with the old woman at some point—and he wasn’t talking about Victoria.
    Things became quite a bit more dangerous when Irene spotted him and came to see how he fared. She was obviously a woman with a steel spine because she ignored Zoe and Brittani and simply smiled pleasantly at Victoria. If Stephen hadn’t been more frightened of her than the other three combined, he might have admired her pluck.
    She was very lovely in a pale-haired, fair-skinned, conservatively dressed way that he would have admired had it not been for the fact that he was rather too acquainted with a reputation that rather ruined the whole picture. She was, he had heard, particularly vicious to those whom she felt had slighted her andvery vocal about ruining their reputations. Stephen didn’t care for how often she seemed to find herself in the paper for this or that, but it wasn’t for him to say how she conducted her affairs.
    It was for him, however, to say how he conducted his own. Despite her numerous and not-very-subtle advances, he was not about to be entangled in her elegant and sophisticated tendrils.
    “Enjoying yourself, Haulton?” she asked, gliding to a stop next to him.
    “Immensely,” he said politely. “It is a pleasure to see you in a setting that befits your beauty.”
    “Aren’t you droll,” she said with a bit of bite to her tone that made him unaccountably uneasy. “I don’t see your bedraggled chauffeur here. Perhaps she’s still